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The Designer’s Desk
By Drew Crowley, XPLANE designer
This is the first in a series of tips, tricks and recipes for
designers, artists and other visual thinkers working in meetings and
other sessions where large amounts of complex information need to be
collected and visualized. It’s a peek into how XPLANE approaches
discovery and uses visual thinking to communicate key ideas.
Why we do it:
Live sketching gets people engaged in the discovery process and leads
to ideas that may not have presented themselves via normal note-taking.
The response to visuals being created before a clients’ or colleagues’
eyes is energetic, and that leads to a natural desire to fill in the
picture, completely. The result: Understanding and alignment, quickly.
Materials you’ll need:
- Whiteboard or giant stickies
- Variety of small, colorful stickies
- Markers
- Digital camera
 How to do it:
- GET STARTED | Start drawing as soon as you can. The earlier you
start drawing in a session the better. It will get the momentum going
in the room, the energy level will jump and you’ll start getting real
content.
- VISUAL NOTES | The key to live sketching is understanding that it
isn’t “drawing” in the traditional sense. It’s visual note-taking.
Instead of writing “there was a room with a couch and a lamp,” you draw
a couch and a lamp and label it with the word “room.” This simple
distinction between drawing and note-taking helps alleviate the fear of
drawing in front of people.
- MESSY IS OK | Yes, sloppy is good. The sketches don’t have to be
pristine. The sketchier they are the better. By keeping things fast and
loose you’re subconsciously telling the audience that these are just
notes and not final images. What’s drawn in session isn’t necessarily
going to show up in a final XPLANATiON or another visual communication
piece. Keeping things sketchy will help drive that point home, and
allow everyone to feel like they can add to the pictures themselves.
- ASK | Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification or detail. If things
are moving too fast, and you aren’t catching everything, let your
partner — or the group — know. If the description doesn’t make sense,
ask more questions. If you’re not sure whether you’ve captured
something correctly, ask your client or colleague. It’s better to ask
and be sure, than to assume you’ve got it and have to fix things later.
- LABEL | Remember that you’re the one that will have to make sense
of these notes after the fact, so annotate/sketch/label in a way that
makes sense to you. Label people, label scenes, label arrows, label
labels! Live sketching can be fast and sloppy, as mentioned above, and
the squiggle you draw in a session might make complete sense to you at
the time — but two days later it will just be a squiggle. Labels make
the difference between a “centralized supply chain database that
everyone has access to” and a bunch of mysterious boxes, lines and
stick figures.
When you’re done, document everything with a digital camera being
careful to avoid window and flash glare on the whiteboards. It’s a good
idea to organize and annotate all of the relevant captured info soon
after the session.
Live sketching can be done remotely too, using software like Webex or Adobe Acrobat Connect — but that’s a whole other article.
[Original Article: http://www.xplane.com/xblog/2009/07/20/5-live-sketching-tips-every-designer-should-know/] |
