Graphic Recording: Mr. Sketch Markers

There's no denying it, Mr. Sketch Markers are just plain fun to use!

Each marker smells like either a fruit or spice. They're pretty easy to get your hands on, too. Most office supply stores carry them, as well as places like Walmart or Target. And they're a lot less expensive than fancy art markers.

They have a chisel tip that lets you draw thin or think lines, depending on how you hold the marker. Bold lines are great because people can see them from across the room. Thin lines are great, too, because they let you add some details for people to see when they're closer.

Back to the bold lines for a minute...

Working with big, bold lines is a great habit to get into. Whether you're working alone or with a group, bold lines make it much easier to see things. If you're planning to send pictures of any sketches electronically, bold lines will actually let people see what you've drawn. And that's the whole point, right?

Visual Thinking & Lettering Practice: Designing Lowercase E's

Another super quick visual thinking, lettering design, and creative thinking practice - all in just 2 minutes! Just choose a letter and if it will be upper or lower case. Get some paper or whatever you're going to draw on and something to draw with ready. Set the timer for 2 minutes. Draw your letter as many different ways as you can until the timer goes off. That's it! Whatever you draw stays there - no erasing, no scribbling out. The ideas you don't like this time around may be just what you're looking for later on.

My 2 minute practice above was done on a whiteboard.

Lettering: Fill the Space!

Flowing calligraphy. Fancy script. Bouncy bubble letters. Bold block letters. They're all great but can take time to create. Sometimes you simply don't have the time.

Don't let a time crunch stop you from giving your letters some style! All you have to do is draw your letters instead of writing them. That means you really think about each line before you draw it. Also, think about how the letters fit together and look as a whole.

Your goal now is to make an eye-catching design with a message. Not to write out a word as quickly as possible. That's what computers are for!

Take a second or two to imagine how the image would look with a line in a couple of different places. Try to really see that line on the page before you draw it.

If you have a longer word, make it fill the space. Don't worry about making it all fit on one line. As long as you keep all the letters in order, people will get the message. But make it look like you broke the word up on purpose to make it look good. Not because you didn't plan ahead and ran out of room! If you have some extra spaces, fill them in with something simple related to the word. Like I used a star in mine.

Visual Thinking: Make 'em Look!

Like a green leaf on a bunch of red bricks, hand-drawn visuals are hard to ignore. There's something warm and inviting about them. They really draw you in. And make you really look.

No matter how boring and monotonous those bricks may be, that lonely leaf somehow makes them all a tad more interesting. It makes you look. When you do look, you actually see what you're looking at instead of breezing right by.

Now imagine you watched that leaf fall on the bricks. It caught your eye as it danced around in the air. You may not have been sure exactly what it was or what it was doing, but it looked interesting. You wanted to get closer. When you did, you really looked at it. And noticed things you may have otherwise missed.

Even from the back of a huge auditorium, a live graphic recorder catches people's attention. People want to get closer to see what it is. When they do, they really look. Not just at the drawing, but at your great content. They think more deeply about it. They make connections and get new insights. They're engaged. You stopped talking long ago, but they gladly keep the conversation going.

Like a green leaf on a bunch of red bricks, hand-drawn visuals are hard to ignore. They really draw you in. And make you really look.

Graphic Recording: Experiment!

Most of my work is done with markers. I thought it would be fun for a change to try something new, so I used crayons to add some color to this graphic recording. This was an experiment done with a Ted Talk, not live with a client! And I'm very glad I experimented first.

Crayons look great in person and they're easy to use, but as you can see, they don't photograph as well as markers. This image is not "cleaned up", meaning the background is evenly white. With the background evenly white, a lot of the crayon disappears. This doesn't happen so much with markers. If you just want the actual physical graphic recording and no digital images of it, then crayons might work for you.

Visual Thinking: Words and Pictures Together

Pictures often steal the show when it comes to visual thinking. But words are important, too. Images that contain both words and pictures are more far more memorable because they both reinforce each other - it's repetition without being monotonous. And teaming the two clears up ambiguity, too. So not only is the message more memorable, it's more accurate.

Another "waiting in the airport" doodle above, started in San Francisco and finished in Palm Springs.

Visual Thinking Template: Evaluation Matrix

Visual thinking helps to make things clear. It's really important to see all options clearly when it comes time to make a decision. A matrix is a great (and easy) way to make it clear how your options stack up.

To use, write the names of four books at the top (by each of the four books!). Write your criteria in the boxes on the left. For example, "Is the topic interesting to me?" "Do I understand most of the words?" Use a happy or sad face to answer each question about each of the four books. Then it's easy to see the book that best meets the criteria - it has the most happy faces.

This evaluation matrix was created for use in elementary classrooms but can easily be adapted for adult use.

Visual Thinking: Drawing Makes You Really Look

Visual thinking is most often associated with commercial, fine, or industrial arts. But visual thinking plays a big role in science, too. Before cameras and computers, scientists would draw whatever they were studying because, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Many go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it."

Drawing forces you to really look at whatever you're drawing. The more closely you look, the more likely you are to see things you or others may have missed. To become a better visual thinker, draw something!

The whisk above is another page from my high school sketchbook.

Lettering: Make it Belong!

Lettering is all about drawing letters, instead of just writing them the way you usually do - without thinking!

If you want to add some words to something you've drawn, then it's really important that you think of the letters as part of the design, because they sure are! One way is to make the words part of the central image, instead of adding them somewhere in the background. Like in the image above - there's plenty of room to fit "Merry Christmas!" in the snow below the gingerbread house, but I made it part of the smoke instead. Now the viewer has the nice surprise of discovering a cheery message somewhat hidden in the smoke.

This image is one of 31 Merry Christmas! designs I drew last December, drawn in black marker and colored in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Graphic Recording: How'd You Learn to Do That?

People often ask how I learned to take notes the way I do. I really don't know! I've been drawing all my life and I doodled in class a lot - it helped me focus. When it came time to take some real notes, it seemed quite natural to illustrate them. So, from elementary school through grad school, I doodled my notes. When I discovered graphic recording, people said I was a natural. I'm not so sure about that - after all, I'd been practicing pretty much my whole life!

The picture above is my very first attempt at graphic recording, done on an 18"x24" piece of newsprint, while listening to a TED talk by Isaac Mizrahi. It was part of my master's project on visual thinking.