Hear tips from: Dan Roam, Katya Balakina, Nishant Jain, Cara Holland, Ted Schachtman, Lindsay Wilson, and Andrew Park.

Sponsored by The Reflective Travel Sketchnote Workshop Video

Have you ever wanted to create travel sketchnotes from an experience you’ve had, just using the photos and memories you’ve got?

In the Reflective Travel Sketchnote Workshop Video, I’ll guide you through my process for creating travel sketchnotes and then help you reflect on your own photos and memories so that you can make travel sketchnotes of your own trips, too!

This 2-hour recorded video includes a set of downloadable, printable sketching templates and a process to kickstart your own travel sketchnoting practice.

All this for just $20.
https://rohdesign.com/travel

Buy me a coffee!

If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at https://sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee

Running Order

• Intro
• Dan Roam
• Katya Balakina
• Nishant Jain
• Cara Holland
• Ted Schachtman
• Lindsay Wilson
• Andrew Park
• Outro

Links

• Dan's website
• Katya’s LinkedIn
• Nishant's Sneaky Art newsletter
• Cara's Substack
• Ted’s LinkedIn
• Lindsay’s Ink Factory Studio Website
• Andrew’s Hairy Hand Productions

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Sponsored by The Reflective Travel Sketchnote Workshop Video

Have you ever wanted to create travel sketchnotes from an experience you’ve had, just using the photos and memories you’ve got?

In the Reflective Travel Sketchnote Workshop Video, I’ll guide you through my process for creating travel sketchnotes and then help you reflect on your own photos and memories so that you can make travel sketchnotes of your own trips, too!

This 2-hour recorded video includes a set of downloadable, printable sketching templates and a process to kickstart your own travel sketchnoting practice.

All this for just $20.
https://rohdesign.com/travel

Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Andrew Park?
• Origin Story
• Andrew's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Andrew
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Hairy Hand Productions
• The Visual Flaneur Podcast
• Andrew on Instagram
• Andrew on YouTube

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Whiteboard paint
• Red and black Office marker pens
• Staples Whiteboard
• Moleskine sketchbook
• Leuchtturm sketchbook
• Photoshop
• Wacom Cintiq tablets

Tips

1. Use thinking visual German to go through ideas or solve problems.
2. In a visual way, don't procrastinate, just draw, create.
3. Don't be too precious with stuff. Find what works for you.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Andrew Park. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming.

Andrew Park: Thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure.

MR: We were chatting probably longer than I should have chatted with Andrew before the recording 'cause I'm a huge fan. So I'm excited to have you on. I think there's lots of fans who probably are in this podcast or watching the video that—and we were talking about that a little bit. The idea of when you do something that's notable, often you're blind to the impact on other people. I know that I am. I occasionally get these emails in, like, "Your book changed my life." Like, oh, really? It was just a book to me. So welcome to the show. And I guess we'll just start off, tell us a little bit about what you do for your day job. I guess I know you as the RSA animate illustrator or animator.

AP: Yep.

MR: Or both, I guess. Obviously, you do more than that, so I'd love to hear what you do.

AP: Yeah, it's misnomer. Actually. I'm not a very good animator. I know the principles of animation, but I have a really talented team that actually bring my drawings to life. If I was gonna say anything, I probably would class myself as a cartoonist. Cartoonist illustrator. But then I'm a visual thinker as well. I know how to sort of join up concepts and, you know, build maps of things. A joined-up thinking cartoon is possibly, it's a bit of a mouthful, but that's kind.

So in my day jobs, obviously, the RSA films were quite successful and it enabled me to build a company around the methodology. So in about 2008, we developed the methodology, the process. It weirdly hadn't existed before. There were a couple of little smatterings of it out in the world. I think they did, I think a UPS commercial used a whiteboard and had a guy drawing on it as a commercial, I think, early on.

MR: Yeah, I remember that.

AP: But the genesis of it was graphic recording or scribing. That's where I learned how to put my pictures together. And then literally had a camera over my shoulder. I think that hadn't been done before, surprisingly. And I think one of the innovations of that, and it wasn't me that came up with it, was actually RSA themselves. They sent me a video of someone taking notes in a journal for the New York Library, and they'd sped the hand up. It was really interesting actually. I thought that's the missing component, because I was trying to literally draw these things live, fast which wasn't really working. I had the missing thing in my brain that why can't I draw a hundred miles an hour? And I literally couldn't work out, oh, you can speed it up. It's video. You know?

MR: Yeah.

AP: So once I saw that, it all sort of fell into place. There's an author called Steven Johnson. Do you know him? Where Good Ideas Come From?

MR: I need to find that book now.

AP: It's really good. And he talks about ideas don't come as eureka moments. They often come as slow hunches. You know, they build, they bubble up and things percolate. And I think in terms of the RSA anime, that's kind of what happened. I've been working, scribing, capturing conversations live, graphic facilitation, graphic recording. And then when you then put a video component in that and think, well, how do I make that work?

The hand from the New York video, New Library video was the, the kind of thing as a catalyst that made me think, here's how it could work. And then if you notice from the early RSA animates, they're really ropey, really rough, really handmade, if you like. And then as we've gone through, they've become more refined and more, you know, you just start thinking, oh, how, what can I do with these things? How can I—

MR: Process, yeah.

AP: So my day job now, is trying to talk about this stuff, extend it in the community. You know, people were interested in how visual thinking can help them. I work with companies and work with businesses to tell the stories. On the back of the RSA films clients came to us and said, "Hey, we want one of those. This seems like a really good way of telling our story." So yeah, over the last, ooh, 20 years now, building a company. I'm really proud of the team I've got. I've got some really fantastic visual thinkers and illustrators, animators that have taken it in their own direction. You know it's not just—I practice it in my way, but then the company has lots of different flavors of how that—

MR: That's nice.

AP: -kind of permeates the role. So, yeah, I'm really proud of those guys. There's some fantastic visual thinkers in Cognitive.

MR: That kind of gives your clients a menu in a sense, right? So you can show them different styles. Is that something that they think about?

AP: Yeah, I mean, there's a stylistic overlay that can go across the films, but if we're gonna talk about the methodology of whiteboard animation, it has the same DNA at its foundation which is showing information in space so that you can see the relationships between things.

MR: Yes. Yeah.

AP: Taking people on a narrative or a journey. There's lots of zooming in and zooming out.

MR: Keeping the focus, holding the focus. Yeah.

AP: Keeping the focus. I mean when we do plan stuff out, we are often—you know, you build the big map and you show a client the end state, it's really overwhelming for them. And then you say, don't worry, it's not gonna do that. We're gonna take you right into the beginning. And things draw and they build up in time. So what we have to do in the way that we work, is to have that end-state in mind when we build stuff. I suppose with Sketchnoting, you know, you are building it in time live, right?

MR: Yes. Yeah. Typically, yeah.

AP: Yeah, that's what you do. Whereas we would probably plan it to end up with that end-state, and almost then erase all that, and then go back to the beginning and—

MR: Work backwards. Yeah.

AP: -work backwards. Yeah. So that's how it kind of works.

MR: I was mentioning when we first chatted before we recorded that the first thing I thought when I saw the RSA—I don't know which one I saw first. Probably Dan Pink, the first thing I thought was, wow, there was a lot of preparation that went into making this video that I don't know people necessarily realize has been going on. Because as an old print designer, like a graphic designer who did print production, everything I designed, I had to find a way to make that print on paper. And I learned the hard way when things didn't work. And I changed my process based on it. And I knew once I saw that, like, wow, okay, somebody did some serious planning, and exactly what you said, they kind of reverse engineered from state backwards.

Okay, which, here's how it looks when it's finished. How do we piece this together in a logical way that holds focus and brings people through to the end? That was pretty immediately apparent. And I thought it was just like, wow, this is really cool. And I couldn't stop watching them. So as is true for a lot of people, right, it was a huge—I don't know, came outta nowhere, I guess, for a lot of people. And suddenly there's this cool thing and you can't get enough of it, which I guess is, was good for you, I suppose.

AP: Oh, it was great. But like you say, you know, you sometimes don't know 'cause you can't see the wood for the trees. You are involved in it, you're working in it closely, and it's rare that you put your head above the parapet. I mean, obviously I knew early on the RSA when we put a first couple out, they said, these are really popular. They're more popular than the talking head videos. And we were like, oh, great, cool. Then we should make some more then.

And then we continued. It was very much organic, let's make the next one and then the next one, you know. And then we started to—I think it was like the Dan Pink or the Ken Robinson RSA animates that just went bang. And millions of people watched those, which was really surprising. That enabled us to sort of think differently about—you know, I was no longer thinking, well, I still go out and scribe. And James, you've interviewed my friend James.

MR: James Bailey, yeah.

AP: Yeah, James Bailey. He said, "Oh, you've done a Beatles. You know, you don't play live anymore. You're in the studio." Which I thought was quite funny. Subsequently, I really do still go out and do scribing still.

MR: That's good.

AP: I like it. I like meeting people. I like talking to people. I like seeing things happen in the room live. Which you don't get when you're making animations, you know? There's a bit of a delay. Obviously, you have to make this work. But like you said, with the planning, weirdly there was a bit of planning, but I tend to work very organically and it's probably really annoying for my animators when I plan stuff, because halfway through I'm like changing my mind of things.

And in a normal animation pipeline, you know, you're making something for Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network. All of this stuff's mapped out at the beginning, you know. It's rigid, you do your pencils, you do your, you know, inks, you whatever, until it's finished. And there's hardly any kind of room for maneuver, because it's all on tight deadlines and budgets and things.

Whereas because the whiteboard animation processes is quite organic, but it's also quite cheap, really. In the early days, it was just a camera over my shoulder filming on a whiteboard. So you could actually rub it out with your thumb and do it again. You know, it wasn't like, oh, there's a whole pipeline of people. It was literally at the beginning, me and an animator called Rob, and we were kind of shackled together a bit like Picasso and Brack when they were doing cubism, right? They were like egging each other on.

So I would draw pictures and say, "I wanted to do this. How can we do this, Rob?" And Rob would be like, "Let me go and think about that tape clean." Then you'd come back in about half an hour and go, we could do it this way. And it was literally, that's how those early ones were made. They were ramshackle experiments. Even the RSA team were the same. And as these things became quite popular, the RSA got approached by quite big clients, you know, big multinationals, and saying, how big's your marketing department or your creative team? It's like, well, there's just me doing the script and that was Abby. And then there's Andrew. They probably didn't even know Rob existed at that point, you know.

They were like, well, there's about four of us. And they were like, what? How can you make this thing that is a global thing with four people? I think it's just doesn't happen anymore. Things don't work like that anymore. I suppose now with TikTok and things like that and individual creators, you can do stuff on your phone, which we couldn't back then. You know, the early stuff was you had to have video cameras and they were quite big.

MR: Yeah. They had tripod. Yeah.

AP: The first film we made was with a flip cam. I dunno if you remember those.

MR: I think I that had one of those. I think I have one. Yeah.

AP: It had a red button on the back. You press it and it comes on. That was the RSA animates first film. I didn't wanna invest any money in the equipment 'cause I thought, they might not want these. So I thought Webcam. I dunno how much that was. Couple of hundred quid or something. And I thought, all right. Then the next one, we hired a camera, and then the next one we hired a better camera, and then we bought a camera. You know, it started like that.

MR: Escalated. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. So I think, you know, most things happen this way, don't they? They're very much kind of shuffling along and building as you go.

MR: Yeah, I think so too.

AP: No one has a plan.

MR: Yeah. And I think, you know, the comment that you know, "Only four of you are doing this." I think actually most innovations seem to come from small teams, because at some point, if the teams get too big, it can get really wonky. And it's hard to—suddenly people are worried about making mistakes or, you know, the impact, right? You gotta have a small team to have that agility, it seems like.

AP: Yeah. Agility's the key word, I think. You can make decisions on the fly, you can throw things away, you can change your mind. All of those sort of things are really important. And it's ironic now that I spend a lot of my working life helping large, complex teams talk about their stuff in a simple way. So it's like, you know, these multinational companies, they've got a lot of moving parts, functions, people, tires of work, you know. And they can't see their whole organization.

And the thing about what we do in the animations, we show their whole—you know, you can draw it in one ispan. You can draw a big picture of it and show how it works. And that's one of the really good benefits of—I think what I've learned over the last 20 years is being able to help people tell complex stories in a simple way.

MR: Maybe that's encouraging for people who do work, like any kind of visual work, whether it's animation like you do, or even mapping, live mapping. I've done some of that stuff.

AP: Yeah.

MR: The idea that these big companies are so big and so rigid and so conservative and worried about making mistakes that they're almost unable to do the kind of innovative, small, agile work. And so therefore they have to bring in agencies like yours and others to kind of see them because they can't, they're blind to it. Or, you know, they can't quite get their head around it. And so, they need someone to do that for them or with them.

AP: Yeah. I mean, complex—I just did a workshop with a professor of business, his name's Jonathan Trevor. And he says that "Complexity is the alignment killer." Which I thought was a really good phrase.

MR: That's interesting.

AP: Because complexity just adds all of this fog that you can't see around. And most businesses really need to align all of their functions and all their processes in order to achieve their goals, right? And I think that as a visual thinker, like, you know, if you're sketchnoting or capturing things live or making animations like we do, it's like a lighthouse. It cuts through that fog. It shows people direction. It shows the linkages, the joint, you know, the stories, the narratives. Sometimes even the process of mapping stuff out like you do, when you capture things live at an event, these things emerge. And they are aha moments for a group of people. They'd never have seen this before. It's almost like pulling a sheet off and look, it's there. And we can see it as visual thinkers, right? But they can't.

MR: Yeah.

AP: So it is a superpower.

MR: I think about this ability to make connections is really valuable. And I think many visual thinkers do it naturally because it's just the way, I guess we're processing information. And so then revealing it in this way and showing the connectivity, to us, it just feels like, well, of course, doesn't that make sense? And everybody's like, wow, this is amazing. Like, sometimes I'm confused by that.

I can tell you that my whiteboard story for you is I worked at a financial services company and we used to map out interfaces with a whiteboard. So I was pretty inspired by your work. And we had this giant wall-sized whiteboard. And every Monday it was whiteboard wire frame Monday. So we would sit the team down. It was developers, product owners, and business analyst. And the business analyst on the team was my buddy. And he assisted me. And we would queue up the feature and we would say, okay, this is the feature we're working on today.

We might look at it in the application. We had an old app that we're building as a web app. So we'd say, this is how it used to work. What can we do with this? And then we'd start the discussion, and I would go to the board, and as people talked, I would be drawing the stuff they were saying. I mean, just listening and visualizing it and annotating it.

And I remember there was one developer who, one day I was drawing something and he came up to me afterwards and says, "How are you drawing what I'm thinking?" It's like, "I don't know. I'm just listening to you. I'm making the connections. What you're saying makes sense to me, and I've got this capability 'cause I'm working with the software too." Like, oh, I see where he is going. And I would just visualize it on the whiteboard.

And it worked really well. It became sort of a unifying—and now that you say that, alignment, it was alignment really because the whole team was there. They all saw it going down. I mean, some of our most successful features were actually the ones that we had to struggle with three, four, five times in a session until we figured it out because It was complex. And we forced ourselves to work our way through that.

And a lot of times, I wasn't the one really coming up with the great ideas. It was the developers who would say something, or even better, they would say, "Hey, can I draw this?" Like, yeah, come up. And I would give them the pen and they would visualize it on the whiteboard. So they were starting to get into it. That environment was really fun. And I could see how it would be exciting for, you know, someone that you're working with who doesn't do that every day, that could be quite exciting to be participating in.

AP: Without being a bit woo woo about it, I think that I always look at what we do as in a kind of shamanistic way, right? So if we go back to the cave paintings of Lascaux you know, 30,000 years ago. You know, these paintings, they're a whiteboard on a cave wall, right? They function in exactly the same way as what we do. And we just do it on paper or whiteboard. You know, what you are essentially doing is taking a group on a journey and taking what's in everybody's brains and putting it in a group space.

So you know, I love cave painting. I think they're really, really fascinating. And I think that in a way they probably helped us evolve our thinking. I think they're very special in that way that they helped us develop as humans. Yeah, being able to show that probably. I mean, the use of psychotropic plants probably helped. But, you know, these things I was always fascinated by, by these cave paintings, because I was reading about the flickering flames that, you know, these were subterranean caves, pitch black, couldn't see anything down there, and they were actually quite dangerous to get to.

And, you know these artists, shaman, whatever you wanna call them, were responsible for taking people on those journeys. They were the ones that painted those images and they were the ones that's told those stories in order to—you know, no one knows exactly what the reasons were for those paintings, but they have some idea that they work some kind of rituals or tools, or maybe some kind of training and development. You know, they're like, training and development tools. hey, this is how they kill the animals that we want to eat. So it was almost like, you know, an onboarding course. Yeah. Come and join us on—

MR: That would make a hilarious video actually. You could have a shaman and, you know, like cavemen going down in the cave and like, "Okay, it's time for our learning and development session."

AP: "Here's how to kill the Jaguar." But the flickering frames are also really interesting. They have found evidence on some of the kind of outcrops of the cave where they've drawn different states of the animal, right? So when the flames flicker, it creates a sort of animation, like movement. So the leopards head moves when the flames flicker.

MR: Oh, interesting.

AP: And it makes it weird, right? And they've also found like little zoetrope things. So these little disks with a deer on one side and a lying down deer on the other. And they put a strap between the two and it spins.

MR: Spin it so you can see the movement.

AP: So you create a kind of deer that goes up and down. So they were experimenting with animation.

MR: Wow. All that time long ago. Wow.

AP: Yeah. And we think, oh, well, you know, these people were primitive. No, they weren't. You know, they had a limited tool set, but they were thinking exactly the same ways that we were thinking. You know, how can we get people on board with our hunting or whatever they were trying to do.

MR: Alignment. Here we are at alignment.

AP: Yeah, definitely. It was the alignment of the day.

MR: With the tools available.

AP: With the tools available. But I love all that. So I rather grandiosely say that we are kind of shamanistic than what we do. We have the abilities to take people that don't think they have those abilities. And you are doing a lot of work with that. You know, you are enabling people to think, oh, I can't draw. But you are enabling 'em to think in that way using sketchnotes. But for what we do, we take people that are just totally involved in, you know, strategy and business and say, you know, out of that ether, here's what you are thinking. And they go, oh my God. But you know, you are channeling just what they're saying. They said it. Like you said, with the app development, you know, it wasn't you doing it. You were kind of like an idiot Savon. You were like, oh.

MR: Exactly. Yeah. I was just channeling it. Yeah. Bringing it in.

AP: Yeah, channeling it.

MR: Yeah. I think it almost helped too, that me being a designer, like I knew how the materials of the software work, but these guys had to build it. So like, I could come up with crazy stuff and they might look at me and like, oh, Mike, building that, that's gonna be a challenge. So, you know, I had to rely on them. So I think a lot of it was just trying to see the opportunities. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's almost like being a facilitator, guiding people into a state of mind. Right, in a lot of ways, it's a state of mind.

That's what I always say when people, it's like the sketch noting stuff is way more mindset and listening. I could care less if you're drawing is not great. That's not the point. The point is, are you listening? Are you identifying the things that are valuable and then capturing them in a way that you can refer back to them or that someone else is inspired, right? That's where the exciting stuff happens, so.

AP: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. The ability to draw is, is kind of secondary. And you could probably do a lot with it, with the process, but, you know, just using shapes and stuff like that. You know, someone like Kelvy Bird would do something where she's doing a lot of shapes and patterns and forms to suggest emotions and things like that with her generative scribing stuff.

MR: Exactly. Yeah.

AP: It doesn't need like your—for people like me, I'm drawing like people 'cause I'm fascinated by people and anthropomorphic things. You know, it's a teacup with a face and it's doing stuff. You know, I love all that.

MR: This blend of things. Yeah.

AP: So, it's horses for courses, right. You tell your brand of storytelling or facilitation with what you like. I mean, I've come from a comic book background, you know.

MR: Right. You can see that clearly in your style.

AP: I love people like Will Eisner and all that sort of stuff. I actually went on a course with Scott McCloud up in Minnesota.

MR: Oh, wow.

AP: And he was a great guy.

MR: Yeah.

AP: And interestingly, when I was on the course with Scott—'cause I wanted to meet Scott. 'cause I love—have you read Understanding Comics?

MR: Oh yeah, definitely. I met him once. He came to Milwaukee and I think he signed my copy of the book. So that was fun to see him.

AP: I was in America at the time, I was living in Chicago. And I thought, well, let's go up there. He's running this course, 73 days or something. I went up there and I did it and he was running comic strip course, but weirdly, and this is before the RSA animates and everything like that. My way of doing stuff—I didn't want to do panels. I was just doing like mapping. And he was like, "You're not getting this." I was like, I don't want put panels around things. I'm kind of like formal around. I just like mind mapping it all. And he was like, "Well, I kind of want you to do panels, blah, blah, blah." Anyway, so I kind of did like that.

MR: You fulfilled his requirements.

AP: I fulfilled somewhat, and he was like a bit disappointed with it. And interestingly—

MR: That's funny.

AP: - when the RSA animates came in, I saw that he was using them in his slide deck and saying, this is one of the ways of the future of comics. And I was like, what? You told me to book panels here.

MR: You convinced him by delivering, right?

AP: Yeah maybe.

MR: You had to deliver the vision, and then he revised his thinking.

AP: Exactly. Well, I think the only thing that probably saved it was the fact that you could use animation with it, you know, rather than. You have to have some mechanism to drive people's attention around it.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. I just thought it was quite funny.

MR: That's kind of funny how the worm turns, right? That's funny. I'm kind of curious. You mentioned that you'd be willing to kind of broadly talk about your process. Has it changed much since the early days? Obviously, you've figured things out and now it's probably more established. What does a typical project look like at a high level?

AR: Yeah, it starts with the client, really. It starts with their story. So we do an end-to-end process. The early RSAs, were all about response. So someone like Dan Pink, looking if his talk and they chop it down to 10 minutes and then they just give me the audio, right? "Here have that." And I would give them the animate. Yeah, there was no real—weirdly, there was no like, feedback or anything. I'd be like, they gave me the audio, I have gave them an animate.

MR: Whatever you wanted, right? Yeah, you get to decide. Totally.

AR: So I've been so lucky having that creative process. My team aren't so lucky 'cause they have to do all the client stuff. But when I do work now, I tend to just make my own stuff. And I'm quite unmanageable, really. I can work with clients, but I'm very much like, "No, this is the way it goes. This is how it fits together. So you gotta trust me on this." So a typical process in our team, it starts with the client. We get to unpack all of their information. So they tell us everything. So they bring their stories, anecdotes, slides, books, whatever they bring. We have a meeting with them, and then we can then write a script. And so we've worked out over the years that the sweet spot is a probably a two and a half minute, three-minute animation.

MR: Yeah. Sounds about right. Yeah.

AR: Because you're using multimodal approach, IE words, pictures, text on screen, vignettes, symbols, speech balloons, the whole pantheon of like visual, you know, what you're dealing with, you know, boxes, arrows, all of that visual language, you can actually tell quite a complex story in a short amount of time. And so, we're kind of geared up to doing that. So once they've got a script, then we can get into what we call story mapping, which is creating a blueprint. Literally, this is the point where the visual thinkers get to translate the words on the page to the images on screen. And we kind of build that big flat end state. That's the box where everything goes in, right?

MR: Mm-hmm.

AR: The frame. And then it is just a question of just directing the flow, the animation from that point, where do we zoom in? Where do we zoom out? What bits pop on? What things get drawn on with the hand? I mean, the hand is a big part of it. You see things getting drawn. And to be honest Mike, over the years we've learned the formalities of the process. When I first developed it, it came instinctively. And, you know, sometimes, like you probably did with writing your book, you have to then think, what am I doing here? Formally, how is this working in order to teach people, right?

MR: Yes.

AP: So you build the process after you've built it, right? Understand setting up the Ikea wardrobe once you've built the Ikea wardrobe, kind that's how it rolls really. So yeah, we formalized all the processes and then it's just the questions tightening those things up over time or innovating certain areas, but the basic building blocks are there. It's telling a connected narrative in space and time using various tools. Yeah.

MR: Yeah. Interesting. So I'm kind of curious, so you talk about doing the end-state as a blueprint, and then the next step is the flow and like zooming in and out and effects.

AP: Yeah. So you kind of know what you start with, right? It's like whatever they—I dunno. Whether it's an app they're talking about, like a widget or something, or whether it's a process or whether it's like a story, you know, it could be, you start with, the hand comes on and draws the character, the main character, and then you pull out slightly and then the world builds around them and then an arrow. Do you know what I mean?

MR: Yeah.

AP: But we know what the end state's gonna be like. We know the scenes and how it fits together.

MR: How to get there. Yeah.

AP: But you start off with a kind of magical planting of that seed and it visually grow.

MR: So do you do storyboards to kind of think through those changes? Do you do an overlay on the larger story to kind of map, we start here to kind of work through like that? How do you kind of get between the pieces?

AP: When I used to work—when I first developed the RSA animate series, I had a big whiteboard. Not on the first ones. Actually, ironically did the first one on paper. Bizarre.

MR: Oh wow.

AP: But about the fourth one, I got this stuff called idea paint. Have you heard of this stuff?

MR: Mm-Hmm. No.

AP: Essentially like whiteboard paint, you paint on a big wall.

MR: Okay. Yeah, so I think I've purchased cans of that. I don't think it had that name.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Yep. I know what you mean.

AP: Yeah, it's basically whiteboard paint. So I wanted to get as much real estate as possible because when you are doing this stuff, you wanna leave it up.

MR: Yes.

AP: And then in the animation, there might be some things over here that you cut to, but they're not in the main picture. So you need lots of kind of working area. But what I used to do was, initially I'd listen to the audio probably about 30 times. So a 10-minute RSA animate, I'd listened to and when I was driving. I think I used to burn it to CD. So I'd get the thing and burn it to CD. I had CD in the car and I used to listen to it over and over and over again and over and over again. So weirdly, the first protocol when I started these was the audio.

It was really interesting because I would get to know—you know, when you listen to a record and you know the beats and you know when they breathe in and when they did the guitar, that you know exactly where things fit. That's what I kind of did with the audio for the RSA. I used to know the beats and so that would give me some indication of where to draw things slowly, the hand doesn't speed up too much or where to pop things on or where to slide the film over here. So it was starting with the input of the audio, but then I would start to build pictures in my mind as I was driving and kind of construct them. And then when I got to the studio, I'd have to like jot them down.

MR: Quick draw them. Yeah.

AP: You know, I'd make really, really rough pencil sketches, block shapes, match characters, whatever. And then I would number them in sequence. What goes where, when. So that would be the flow. Obviously, it's a bit more sophisticated now.

MR: I guess. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. And there is a kind of story map that the senior creatives in my company talk clients through and they do the same thing, which is go a number, the picture, and then they took them up. At this point we may go up on the top left of the thing and we'll zoom into that bit. We don't tend to storyboard, I don't like to crunch my thing. Look, this is where Scott McCloud comes in again

MR: Yeah, back to the boxes. Yeah.

AP: I don't like panels. I don't want to do—I kind of like free form stuff, so. Plus, I was lazy. You know, drawing panels all the time.

MR: It's extra work. Right.

AP: It's extra work. Yeah. And white balls were brilliant for like, oh, I could just rub that bit out and then redraw that bit, not the whole thing.

MR: Yeah.

AP: Right.

MR: Took advantage of the medium. Yeah.

AP: A lot of the technique came from, at this point, I'm just gonna rub that character out and draw it in a different state rather than I have to draw the whole scene again.

MR: Yeah. That's smart. I think about like, you're using the material in the way that it works, right? You're taking advantage of the materials as they ought to, yeah.

AP: Is was a lot of lazy boy techniques, I think. Could be. How can I be really efficient with this? And you know, over the years—so we've migrated now to doing purely a digital whiteboard, but we still draw on screen. So we have these Cintiq monitors where we actually draw and record our drawings live, but from the inside of the computer rather than having a camera.

MR: I see. Yeah, you don't need the camera anymore. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. And then we put the hand on it too.

MR: That's interesting.

AP: But they are hand drawn and there's a lot of kind of knockoff. You might have seen this kind of digital DIY work on a whiteboard.

MR: I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah, the whiteboard tools where a fake hand draws or something.

AP: Yeah. They're weird. I think they're kind of built by technical people, not visual thinkers.

MR: I think so too.

AP: It's not Microsoft, it's like PowerPoint. It's made by techies. They're not made by people who communicate very well. That's why it's kind of linear and you know, if you go into that clunky. And I think these, these DIY whiteboard that they—there was a story I heard recently in friend of mine talked to me about it. Do you know Concord, the Supersonic plane?

MR: Mm-hmm.

AP: The British and French developed a plane in the '70s and '80s that could fly to New York in three hours or whatever. It's a beautifully designed aircraft. But the Russians got hold of like, they saw this and thought we are gonna make a Concord, right. But they didn't know how it worked, but they saw a picture of Concord and so they'd made a replica Concord. It looked like Concord, but it had like, I think weird jet engines on it. You know, all the mechanics inside of this plane weren't real. It had afterburners on or something like that, which they could only fly the two hours and they couldn't fly fast enough or whatever. It looked like Concord, but it didn't fly like Concord.

MR: Yeah.

AP: I think with these DIY softwares, they kind of look like what we do, but they don't fly like what we do. Stylistically this is what they think it does. It's a whiteboard, it has this, it draws in time with a VO, but it's like, well that's not what we do. That's part of our visual thinking. What we do is we tell visual stories and we unpack at the the DNA level, what is your story about? And a lot of these DIY things, I think people don't understand is, "Hey, I've downloaded this now it's gonna make it for me. I just pressed the animate button.

MR: Yeah.

AP: And it doesn't. You know, you've gotta go, oh shit, I've gotta write a script and I've gotta work out the flow. All the stuff we do, they've gotta do themselves, but it makes you look like, you know.

MR: You take the burden on yourself in a way.

AP: Yeah.

MR: And you're not prepared for that.

AP: And so, we've had a lot of people come back to us and say, yeah, sorry. We went down the cheap route and tried to do it for 30 quid a month, or buy the software and they come back to us, said, we tried it actually, the cost of making it, you know, my time, scripting, trying to animate, working out what drawings I need. It's like you don't go to a restaurant and cook your own dinner, right?

MR: Yeah. And then it's probably limited too, right?

AP: I mean those things, I was originally mad at them thinking, what are you doing your, 'cause you're kind of diluting the methodologies. You're making it appear rubbish. 'Cause I think it does a really good thing. It solves good problems. And when you dilute it with a kind of crappy solution, people think that's what it does. And it does take a lot of work to go. It's better than that.

MR: Yeah. Now that was the question I had for you is, does that software actually bring more people to you? Because I think of it this way, the more they have to do in that software, they realize what you're doing and suddenly your service becomes a real value. Right. Because you're really good at it. I'm sure they probably run into situations where I wanna do this, but the software won't let me because the software was built to just do MVP, whatever and whatever it can technically pull off. Which is not everything, right. You're not really getting the full capability of a team like yours. So that would get frustrating and probably push people back to you. That seems true.

AP: Yeah, it has happened. I mean, obviously, I think people are still motivated by price in a lot of ways. But I do think that essentially what this is, is like Microsoft clip art, but with moving components. 'Cause the thing about what we can do as visual thinkers and including yourself, Mike, is that we can draw things bespokely, you know?

MR: Exactly.

AP: Things that haven't existed before. You know, very niche things. Where a company comes to you and go, "This is what we do, and we're very niche." You can actually go, "Okay, we could draw exactly that." Whereas with these DIY softwares, it is like I kind of need an office scene, but it needs a little, and then they have to get it off the peg and it's not quite right. So they're compromising their storytelling by using flip art.

MR: Spare parts in a way. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. And so, they're building a kind of hash together story, which then obviously they're gonna feel frustrated at 'cause it's not doing what they want it to do. I dunno, some people might be happy with, that'll do, but it doesn't help with telling nuanced stories.

MR: Yeah. Not for the kind of clients that you're normally working with. Right. So, interesting.

AP: Yeah. I mean, I'd imagine it works to talk about very simple stories in a school setting, maybe where it's like one or two concepts and you're not having to dig too deeply with the visual concepts or whatnot. I'm sure it's fine. It's like, but then you might as well use PowerPoint.

MR: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess there probably is some sweet spot of someone who the tools are just enough, and it does exactly what they want. And they would probably never hire you to do it because they don't have the budget for it. So there's probably an ideal of customer, but, you know, beyond them, that's—

AP: And I think that what those guys do well is good marketing. You know, they make it look like it's gonna solve all their problems, gonna panacea to, you know, their visual thinking nightmare, and then they get it and they go, oh, I'm a bit embarrassed about asking for my money back. It's only $30 or whatever.

MR: They just, you know, cancel the subscription and not worry about it anymore. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. Cancel the subscription.

MR: Interesting.

AP: And it's like having a bad restaurant, isn't it? Bad restaurant by the seaside, you know, these people aren't coming back every year. They're gonna have a bad meal and then they're never gonna come there again, so.

MR: Exactly.

AP: Whereas, you know, if you want a nice restaurant, you've gotta work on it and you've gotta make sure it has great food, great service, so you attract repeat business.

MR: It's gotta have all the pieces. Yeah.

AP: Yeah.

MR: You mentioned something before we began and you said that you did some work for an education company with the kind of stuff you're doing.

AP: Yeah.

MR: I would really be curious to hear what your thoughts are on that, that the visuals that you're using can teach, like mathematic concepts and stuff. How do you feel about that kind of thing? We've been talking probably more like commercial applications, like selling our software or our service or whatever, but like, learning, and we talked a little bit about this too, that schools often because of the industrial era where they began focus a lot on producing industrial workers.

And so, therefore it's a lot of verbal capability and they're sort of forgetting a lot of the visual capability. It was interesting that you mentioned that this education company, doesn't matter who they were, would use it to kind of communicate learning. So talk a little bit about that and your thoughts on using this technique and this approach for learning.

AP: I mean, it's a logical step, isn't it? If you are—I mean, and it happened at just post pandemic there where everything went indoors, right? Everybody was learning at home and they needed to have viable solutions that were in classroom based. They'd seen the RSA films and other films that we'd made in that style, and they asked us to put together a kind of proposal and an example of what they could do. And it was really nice collaboration actually. Interestingly, we learned a lot about how they would structure their lessons so that we then responded in, if you're gonna structure lessons this way, we'll respond in that way. So there was an advanced organizer, you are familiar with the concept of an advanced organizer?

MR: Mm-Hmm. No, tell me about that.

AP: It's a piece of content that kind of primes you for what's gonna be learned.

MR: Oh, okay.

AP: "In this lesson we're gonna be doing this and it's gonna do that." That was an interesting thing because when you're priming people to be educated, then they get into the zone and that's it.

MR: Switch into that mode, right? Yeah.

AP: I thought, oh, that's a really interesting way. They were like, oh, why are you animating that? We were just giving you a heads up of what the thing was about. I said, no, but that's perfect though, isn't it? Because they're gonna get a advanced organizer to tell them what's they're gonna learn, they're gonna learn the stuff. And then we did a recap, which is you learn this. This is kind of how we structured it was like, tell them what they're gonna learn, tell them what they're learning, and then tell them what they've learned. At the end of the videos, the hand would go, you learn about this and this and this. And it literally pointed to content on the screen.

MR: Interesting. Yeah.

AP: We lent very much into the kind of literally a whiteboard how it would be used in a school, right? I am a teacher, I'm teaching you this stuff, and it's gonna be in order, and you're gonna learn that, and we're gonna drill down into this bit, and then I'm gonna tell you that you've learned that bit. So it was kind of like that. You know, we made like 200 or so degree-level films. It was biology, physics, some chemistry. And then we've got into statistics and mathematics. Now, I will say that statistics and mathematics are slightly harder to visualize because they do rely very much on the equations themselves.

MR: Yeah.

AP: But interestingly, my son is, he's into math and science, you know, I dunno why. I dunno.

MR: Not sure how that happened.

AP: I don't know it happened. He talks to me, I'm like, you're talking in—I can't understand the word he says, but anyway, he's very much into seeing a hand just draw equation is how he learns. You know, those symbols mean stuff to him. So we kind of lent into that, which was have the hand come on and literally draw those equations, like it would be drawn on a whiteboard and it seems to be perfect for them, you know, and then you can put some little storytelling notes around it, and some vignettes and things. But mostly with those ones, the sort of physics equation, the math equation, you just draw them as they are taught. And that seems to work.

MR: Interesting. These 200 films, they were kind of overviews about the topic and then the ideas was then you would do some kind of activity that was deeper or practice, or were they quite detailed?

AP: They Initially were on their education platform and then they kind of got rolled out to YouTube. I'll give you the links, people can check them out if they want afterwards. But yeah, they would be things like what is photosynthesis, for example? Or how do cells work? And then you would have an animation. All the kind of stuff inside a cell. Some of the physics stuffs were like gravity, just yeah, the sort of basic physics electronic components or, you know, all of that sort of stuff.

MR: Kind of conceptual learning in a way. Like you're getting the concept of it, and if you have a good foundation, it makes everything else easier.

AP: It would be the groundwork for it. But we were really happy to see that over the course of a year, you know, while we were doing these films that I think they were viewed more than a hundred thousand times.

MR: Wow.

AP: No, actually no. It's 1.4 million times.

MR: Wow.

AP: And 100,000 subscribers.

MR: Wow. That's having an impact.

AP: It does prove that this stuff, A, is engaging and it does work. You know, back in the day when I first when the RSA started to get popular, I was skeptical 'cause I was thinking, why is this working? And so, we got approached by a psychology professor called Professor Richard Wiseman. And he phoned us up one day and we ended up doing some research about these things. So he ran a test, a talking head video versus an animation.

So we set up an experiment and it ended up being that, you know, our work, few, thankfully ended up being more shareable, more entertaining and more memorable. You know, these are the three components to be tested for. I can send you the link. I did a little case study video and Richard talks about this, so I can send you the actual research. But yeah, we are keen on—you know, it's not just a style thing. We want to make sure this stuff actually works and it's does work—

MR: It work very effective, actually. It's effective, yeah.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Huh. Wow. That's really interesting.

AP: I can give you all those links, definitely.

MR: Yeah. We can put 'em in the show notes for sure. There might be some fans here that will definitely wanna see the educational ones. We'll dig up. I'll have to reach out to you separately and like, it would be fun to see the first one if it's on YouTube and—

AP: Then, oh yeah, definitely. Yeah.

MR: You know, like pick sort of something in the middle and something now and sort of see the progression. That would be interesting to see.

AP: So the documentary I'm making, because I was interested in just how things start and then how things end 'cause we don't make RSA films anymore. They stopped doing them, but if you look at the last one I did compared to like the first one, it just worlds apart.

MR: Yeah, I bet.

AP: So I can give you the first one. I'll give you the last one.

MR: Yeah. Then people when they're done listening here, they can go watch those videos and do the comparison because they're only a couple minutes long. So you can see them both pretty quickly.

**AP:**Well, they got shorter actually. I think. The first ones are actually 10 minutes and then they kind of cut them down then called the mini mates instead of animates. And they kind of ended up being five minutes long. People's attention spans got less.

MR: Shrinking.

AP: It's ironic though, isn't it? Now everyone's like listening to podcasts for over an hour.

MR: Yeah, I think that what I'm learning is YouTube, especially people put it on in the background and go, you know, wash the dishes or something like that and let it run in the background, so.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Someone's probably doing that right now with us.

AP: Are we going out live at the moment then?

MR: No, this is all recording. It'll be released later. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. You're gonna chop it up a bit.

MR: The only time I've cut these is when someone sneezes or coughs or something, or says something wrong and said, "Oh, I need to do that again." Otherwise, it's just pretty much we turn on the mic and the camera and we roll and we just let it be what it is. This community's, you know, they love all of it, so we don't need a lot of editing, which is great.

AP: All right.

MR: Makes my life easier.

AP: It certainly does.

MR: So typically in these podcasts we talk about tools that you like. So you mentioned one already, which is that whiteboard paint, which I'm gonna research that and put a link in.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Are there any favorite like whiteboard markers that you used? Are there brand that you like and any other tools that you think might be interesting for people?

AP: Yeah, so when I did the RSA animates—do you have a company called Staples in America?

MR: Yes. Yep. It's a office supply company. Mm-hmm.

AP: Yes. Office supply company. So I used to go to Staples and they used to do black markers and red markers, like in a 12 pack or a 10 pack or something.

MR: Yeah. Their own brand, right? Their house brand.

AP: Yeah. Their own brand. And that's all I used. Why I liked them was when they were new, they had a really thin bit of the chisel nib, which you could get really fine stuff going on. Obviously, they splay out over time.

MR: Yeah. They get soft.

AP: And it's interesting, when I first started because the camera was over my shoulder and it wasn't a particularly high-resolution camera when we started, couldn't pick up a lot. We used red and black because they were picked up on the camera flip. And when you look at all the people that were copying the RSA animates, they would be red and black, right?

MR: Uh-huh.

AP: It wasn't a style choice. It was just literally because they were the things that showed up on camera

MR: The limitation, yeah.

AP: But it's interesting how it kind of permeates in into the kind of methodology that it ends up being. That's the style. Well, that was only because the greens and the blues didn't show up.

MR: Interesting.

AP: So yeah, the Staples markers, the Staples whiteboards were great.

MR: Okay. That's a surprising one. I wouldn't have guessed that, but that's pretty interesting.

AP: Yeah, they're not fancy at all. They were just like—

MR: I'm a big fan of Office Supply stuff.

AP: I could buy them in bulk. I think that was the thing. And they would run out pretty quickly, you know, 'cause I would be—not like the usual whiteboard. You know, some of these pens probably last years in some people's offices, but with me, I would get a new box for every animate I did.

MR: Wow. Okay. Staples markers. That's nice.

AP: I dunno if they've kind of gone bust in this country, I think. So I think you could probably get them in America if you want to go old school and make some old school RSA animates, go down to Staples and get the red and black.

MR: I'm gonna go take a look now.

AP: Obviously, we've gone digital, so I just draw on Photoshop. I love Photoshop.

MR: You mentioned Cintiq. A few people use those.

AP: Yeah. I've got a Cintiq. I've got a 16-inch and I've got a little travel one. It's a 13-inch that I sometimes use.

MR: There's a lot of people on here that are more iPad people they may not have experienced. Cintiq is basically a—it's a monitor that you can draw on with a dedicated pen that's got pressure controls and such.

AP: It's like an iPad without the computer in it.

MR: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

AP: The Wacom people that make the Cintiq, the pressure sensitivity is really quite good.

MR: Yes. Yeah.

AP: I had an iPad, but I could never bridge the gap. I'm an old folk, so I know my way around Photoshop. I could never—well, I only use—

MR: You've perfected your system.

AP: Well, I only use like one thing really in Photoshop. If I do work, it's pretty much drawing with a black marker pen.

MR: Basic nib.

AP: You know, it's a Photoshop brush, but I've made it, and it's got the precious sensitivity and it feels like a pen for me.

MR: Mm. Interesting.

AP: I don't tend to use all the fancy stuff and cross thatchy brushes and, you know, I just like black pen. There you go, draw.

MR: Keep it simple.

AP: It's old school.

MR: Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, when it comes down to it and you're under pressure, having those solid things can often be a huge benefit. You mentioned sketchbooks. Are there any sketchbooks? Do you carry a sketchbook around and do doodles and such like that? Or when you're done with work, do you kinda leave it behind and you just, you know, you'd rather have a tea and read a book? I dunno.

AP: My sketchbooks are actually—I always am impressed by people that can do really nice sketchbooks, you know? And they're kind of works of art in themselves, whereas mine is a utility device.

MR: Yeah. I think I'm like you in that way. Yeah.

AP: How do I get my thinking down so that it's recorded, it's scratchy. They're the next step to get me to the level. And then I'll take it into some other medium. Or they're not the thing itself. They're just the delivery of my ideas to some plane where I can remember them. But you know, you can go on Instagram and Pinterest, you just see these beautifully rendered things. I mean, if you look at someone like Peter Duran, you know, his sketch notes are Just really bloody neat. And you think, I haven't got time. I literally haven't got time for that. I've got time for Peter's work, but I haven't got time to do that myself. I'm not as disciplined

MR: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I think of somebody like Danny Gregory, if you've seen his work, his stuff is really amazing. This interesting story about—I should see if I can get Danny Gregory on. He started quite late, I think he was under stress or something, and he started drawing as a way to relax himself or something like that. And now his whole business is teaching people how to draw, so.

AP: That's cool.

MR: He is an interesting guy.

AP: That reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut book, Bluebeard. Have you read Bluebeard about Kurt Vonnegut?

MR: I've read Vonnegut, but not that one.

AP: There's a character in it called Dan Gregory.

MR: Really?

AP: And he's an illustrator and I think he's based on—who's the guy that used to do all the kind of covers for the kind of Americana, you know, kids in getting haircuts and—

MR: Oh, that was—I was just thinking about it.

AP: Rockwell.

MR: I know who you're talking about. Rockwell. Norman Rockwell.

AP: Norman Rockwell. So Dan Gregory was based on Norman Rockwell, but I think it's quite nice. But I think it's quite funny that you're talking about Daniel Gregory as an artist.

MR: As an actual real person.

AP: That was his story.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

AP: It's not real.

MR: Interesting.

AP: Sketchbooks, so I use Moleskines and actually, I like Leuchtturm.

MR: That's a German brand competitor to Moleskine. I like those too.

AP: Yeah. I like the kind of little wallet thing in the back. I quite like just copy paper sometimes. Just sheets of paper just to make notes notes on.

MR: Not very pretentious at all. Yeah.

AP: No, not at all.

MR: A funny story is when I started teaching workshops, I had this idea that I had to give away fancy Moleskines and pens and it quickly became clear that people were very intimidated if they didn't know how to drop by these fancy tools. So I almost immediately switched to a—I would buy a ream of printer paper and a box of flare black pens. That was it. And I would pass 'em out. They were cheap. The great thing about printer paper is if you don't like it, you crumple it up and recycle it and take another sheet. They cost you, you know, a fraction of a cent, right. So there wasno pressure to make anything beautiful with copy paper.

AP: I used to have a little sign on my desk, Mike, that said, "I will not be afraid to make bad art."

MR: Hmm.

AP: Because I think that in a way, if you have, you know, sometimes these tools, as you say, they inhibit your thinking. If you're too precious about them and you don't want to make your precious little sketchbook rubbish with your imp crappy drawing.

MR: Imperfect.

AP: Yeah. Imperfect. Then you tend to be petrified by it and don't do it. You know, I keep all my crappy little sketches because I think they're just a nice sort of imprint of my brain over time, you know? And sometimes there's things in there I think, oh, that's a good idea. I forgot about that.

MR: Yeah. I do the same. One of the things I mentioned is I'm a blue-collar guy, grew up that way. Everything, I need to have a practical angle. So one of the things I do in the podcast is ask guests to think about what are three things that you would encourage somebody with if they were sort of stuck or they just need some inspiration. They can be practical things, it could be mindset things, but just three tips that you could give them. What would that be?

AP: The way that I visually think through ideas sometimes, or problems, or try and solve problems is, I call it thinking visual German. Because the German language is constructed with a lot of compound words, right?

MR: Right.

AP: They just tend to like string them along until it's a 40-letter word.

MR: Yeah, exactly.

AP: It means the same thing. It's like they bootstrap them together. And I think that if you do that in a visual way with concepts, it often helps you get around problems. You know, if you think about having, I dunno, a photocopier, a double decker bus for example. You know, put those two together. What does that look like and what problem is it solving? You can draw this kind of weird machine. It's a bus that copies things or I don't know.

When you are applying these in kind of visual thinking terms or in storytelling terms, A, they're memorable 'cause they're weird. But they also help you start to think about the connections between things and then the reasoning why you've done that. So I love visual German in a way of just put juxtaposition is good and putting stuff together just to see what happens. Putting one thing near another and watching what the chemical reaction is.

MR: I like that.

AP: So, that's one, visual German. I think a lot of people procrastinate. And so half of the challenge is just draw something. Even if it's to write a title or do a circle and then write something in it and then mind map it. Just break the seal of the paper or break the seal of the whiteboard, or just make your mark is the other thing I would suggest to do. Because I think there's some psychological studies that say that procrastination can only—this sounds really obvious. Like procrastination can only be beat by doing something. So if you just take the step to do it, then you win, right?

MR: Yeah.

AP: You end up like, oh, I've done it. Oh, what was I procrastinating about? So there's that. So in a visual way, just don't procrastinate, just draw, create.

MR: Do something. Yeah. Just to get moving.

AP: Do do something. Yeah. And what's the other thing. What the other thing is, I'm not one of those people that, you know, it's like learn to draw and all that nonsense. Yeah. Okay, fine. That's a facility and if you wanna do that, go for it. And there are courses and things to do. So I would just not be too precious about it. So find solutions that work for you. I love collage. I'm a collagist. I love making collage because my whole visual thinking career, including the RSA animates, are literally collages. And I think life's a collage. We have a collage of experiences that we manifest, which creates our life. So like putting one thing against another is collage, right? It's juxtaposition.

So don't be too precious with stuff. Find what works for you. Don't procrastinate about it and just do it. So there are solutions out there. If you just draw matchstick people, you know? Draw boxes, whatever it is to get your ideas down. Something will happen over time. You'll look at my early RSA animate films and they're really, really ropey because I didn't know what I was doing. I was learning on the fly. If you look at the last one, and we can put the links in the show notes, you'll see the difference. It's miles apart. I think that for people listening to this, just don't worry about that. Don't worry about being perfect, just do it and you'll get better and you'll find a way that becomes you. Like what you said to me, pretty cool, Mike. You said, "Oh, you've definitely got a style."

MR: Oh, yeah.

AP: Which is interesting for me 'cause I never think I do have a style, but that style has only happened over me just doing stuff, right?

MR: Practicing. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. So I can't remember what those three things were there. So visual, German visual, just do it, don't procrastinate and find a way. Don't worry too much about how you do it.

MR: Great.

AP: So they're quite practical, aren't they?

MR: Yeah.

AP: They're not really arty should be more arty than that.

MR: But they can play in anyway, right?

AP: Yeah. And you don't have to be a visual thinker to do that, right?

MR: No.

AP: If you're writing a book, you can do it.

MR: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for making time for us. What is the best place, if someone wants to see your work or visit your company, where should they go?

AP: Website is first port of call, www.wearecognitive.com. I have a podcast called The Visual Flaneur, which I'm starting to talk to all of the people that I've animated their RSA films. So I've interviewed all those guys, so you'll be able to hear from the horse's mouth about stuff there. If you wanna see my collage work, I've got an Instagram. I could put that the show notes.

MR: Yeah, we can get that for sure.

AP: Yeah, so mostly through our website and YouTube.

MR: Cool.

AP: And you know, you're seeing the really talented people that work at Cognitive, not just my work.

MR: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then we'll look forward to the documentary that you're working on. So, you have to let me know when that comes out and we'll share that with people so they can watch.

AP: Yeah. Yeah. So, the podcast is actually, I'm building the documentary piecemeal, I'm putting it out as podcast in a way to organize my thinking.

MR: Got it.

AP: Rather than trying to eat the elephant all at once at the end.

MR: Yeah. Bits at a time. And then at the end you kind of make sense of it all and think it just like the process, tight. Find the story and reveal it.

AP: Exactly. I'm, yeah, doing it organically.

MR: Cool. Well, that's the way that works for you. So it makes sense to me. Cool. Well, thanks so much for all the amazing inspiration that you've given the world in doing your animation, and now you're building a company and team and they're doing the same. That's a pretty cool thing. So thanks for doing that for us. I appreciate you, and you definitely have a style. I think people will back me up on that one. And hopefully we can maybe meet up in the UK when I'm over, so.

AP: Yeah, I'll definitely make time to come up to Birmingham, and that sounds like a whole lot of fun.

MR: Sounds good. Well, thanks, everyone. Everyone who's watching or listening, that's another episode. Till the next one, talk to you soon.

She discusses her role at Ink Factory, hints at upcoming projects, and offers thoughtful perspectives on the intersection of AI and visual art.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Lindsay Wilson
• Origin Story
• Lindsay's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Lindsay
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Ink Factory Studio Website
• Ink Factory Studio on Intagram
• Ink Factory Studio on LinkedIn
• Lindsay on LinkedIn
• Ink Factory Studio on TikTok
• Ink Factory Studio on Facebook
• Ink Factory Studio Chicago Office

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Spiral bound sketchbook
• Sketching pencil
• Correction tape

Tips

1. Find a community that's right for you, whatever your practice, and lean into it. Find feedback that could help you or give a direction on something that you could improve or work on, or even practice.
2. Look for avenues to practice, or within the community.
3. Warming up and giving yourself time to get prepared in that space whether you are sitting, standing, on a long day, or on a short day.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everybody, it's Mike, and I'm here with Lindsay Wilson. Lindsay, welcome to the show.

Lindsay Wilson: Hello. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

MR: It's great to have you. I've been wanting to—the problem with having a show like this is the longer that I do the show, the more people I want to get on the show, and it's like impossible to get everybody all at once, so you just have to wait your turn, I guess. But [crosstalk 00:20].

LW: Understood. Amazing, amazing. Happy to be here. And as we talked about in the preamble, have been following all the great work that you have been doing across the globe. I know you're going to the UK soon.

MR: Yeah.

LW: And, you know, just excited to be here and get to share a little part of my story.

MR: That's great. Well, let's go ahead and get that started. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and then jump right into your origin story. Everybody's used to it now. The listeners know the origin story's coming.

LW: Okay. Jump right in. Excellent. Well, I am Lindsey Wilson. I am one of the co-founders of Ink Factory. Some of you may know me as my—before I got married, Lindsay Rofe, but I go by Lindsay Wilson in a professional capacity. And as I said, one of the co-founders of Ink Factory, a visual note-taking firm located here in Chicago. Just about an hour—what would we be south, southwest, or Southeast of you in Milwaukee?

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

LW: But my origin story, woo hoo. I have listened to some of your podcasts, and I was like, how far back do we go here? And I'll just start at the beginning.

MR: Yeah. Cool.

LW: I was lucky enough to have parents in the military, and I was born in Germany, Heidelberg, Germany. And I share that with someone else that you've interviewed, Brandy Agerbeck. We were both born in Heidelberg, but soon transitioned to grow up in Texas, believe it or not, even though I consider myself to be a mid-Westerner, through and through, I have lived in Chicago longer than I have in Texas. But I grew up in Fort Worth, Dallas-Fort Worth area. And you know humble beginnings, I would say.

And I know lots of people talked about if they were creative at a young age, and I have to jump in and say, yes, I love to draw. I feel that I came from some talented people. My father, although never practiced art, is very, very talented, as was my grandfather. So I get it through those genetics. But I was also encouraged to, and I know that maybe other people's experiences growing up didn't have maybe that much encouragement, but I was good at it. I was encouraged to do it, and it felt like I just followed that path.

I'm sure I wanted to be a veterinarian at some point, maybe an astronaut, but when it came time to decide a major, I did go to study art at university. And I think one thing, when I was thinking about this story and what might be helpful to share, I wanted to share two poignant crossroads that I had in my journey to where I am now, and I feel like without those two moments, my path would be completely different.

And as someone who starts out at university, we think everything is possible. And I had big ideas about what I wanted to be and really honed in on graphic design. And so, I went to a special university, Texas Christian University, that had an amazing graphic design program that you actually had to test into. So I had to take a whole semester where I had to prove myself worthy for this program. And fell in love with it. Absolutely fell in love with graphic design, spending so much time understanding typography, studying it.

We didn't get into the actual technicality as far as like the programs and the technology that was available in 1998. We did everything by hand, and I loved it. I ate it up. I loved the whole process of working with my hands and laying out things, and again, studying all the key elements of typography. I feel like that shows up sometimes in my work.

So when I talk about this poignant moment, I was on a trajectory. I was, you know gonna graduate, thought, you know, I'd already done an internship, I'd done all the right things, but my professor came to me in my senior year saying, "Lindsay, I think we need to talk about some things." And I'm like, let's talk. What do we wanna talk about? Thinking about, it's my senior show, or stuff like that. And he said, "You know, I think you're struggling." And, you know, of course, you know, that took a more serious tone.

And my professor really sat me down and said, "You know, what I'm seeing with you is that you, albeit you're doing what's being asked, where I feel that your execution isn't where the other students are. However, your storytelling and your ability to define the purpose and again, the story of everyone else's work and the critiques," he's like, "You land the message like the other students are not, but their execution is better." So we had this whole conversation, and he basically was telling me, "I don't wanna let you continue down this path because I don't think it would be fruitful for you."

And of course, I'm looking at him, you know, wind knocked completely out of my sails and thinking, well, what am I supposed to do now? I'm an artist. I'm a graphic designer. This is what I've spent the last four years doing. And we had a hard conversation. And, you know, he said, "I think I actually need to walk you across the building to our speech communication department." And what? What? I don't even know what you're talking about.

So the reason I bring that up is because this person thought enough of me to tell me the truth and to tell me that this wasn't where, you know, he saw a trajectory for me, and how about this? And, you know, I did what every senior college student was due. I cried for at least two days. And then I said, you know what? I'm gonna dig in. And I ended up with a degree in speech communication and a minor in graphic design because I had essentially finished the program.

And that was a moment in my life that, again, I could have packed up. I could have, you know, done so many different things, or I could have—he gave me the option 1to go back and remediate some of the classes, and that did not feel right 'cause, you know, I felt that my passion had been kind of tampered, but that gave me so much insight into another muscle that I have. And that is, again, what I didn't even know was possible, and it is that storytelling. So I learned to have a voice. I learned to be able to really ask questions and understand some of those nuances and how humans communicate. And I think it primed me perfectly for what I do. Although we aren't there yet, 'cause I didn't even know I would get there.

So we continue on. I've graduated, I made the decision that maybe I would go into advertising. And what felt right for me was Chicago. So I packed up, moved to Chicago, didn't have a job, but I had purpose, and I had gumption. And I showed up and thought, okay so this is fast forward 2003 you know, that I could just land in Chicago and find a job. Well, thankfully, somebody pointed me in a direction that was like, "Lindsay, if you don't find anything, this avenue might just be perfect for you."

And I don't wanna be a broken record 'cause I know that you've talked to other people before, but I come from the MG Taylor model. So I landed as a knowledge worker with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young back in those days for people like Kelvy, Christopher Fuller, Brandy Agerbeck, Alphachimp, both Peter and Diane. These were all people that they were my mentors, some of them I never met. I only heard their names and saw their work.

But essentially, I ended up becoming this knowledge worker in this very collaborative, very fast-paced business environment that I wasn't prepared for, but I got the indoctrination of a lifetime, and I could not be more grateful for it. To all the people that shared their knowledge, shared their time, and training. And for Matt and Gail to set up the system, I learned on the job. And I didn't start scribing, or I was forced politely to get up to the wall.

And in the ASC, the accelerated solutions environment, all of our work was big. We were on large curved whiteboard walls. The intent was that our work was meant to be seen by all, to be able to be referenced and viewed. So, real-time time it wasn't necessarily meant to be pretty, it was meant to be an actual capture of the conversation. And so, that is where I got my start. And like I said, being forced up there and then realizing that I had pins in my hand, whiteboard markers, and that if I moved, if I physically moved, people in the room could see what I drew. And I was like, woo, this is intense. But somehow through practice and a lot of encouragement, you know, practiced that craft and got better.

The second poignant moment was I spent 11 years with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. They even got rid of the Ernst & Young, and it was just Cap Gemini and stayed with them, but also contracted with a lot of the other big consultative firms that were harnessing this methodology with their clients, this visual scribing methodology, [coughs] excuse me.

And it was at the 11th year where I had really maxed out all the levels. I knew everything. I was a process facilitator, which means I was helping manage these events. And I was told by two of the consultants that I had reached my limit and that there was no further progression for me. And that's what another hard-to-hear thing when this is something that you lived, eat, and breathed, and it was also your income. And they didn't owe me anything because I was a contractor, but it was a hard message to receive. And the fact that I felt I had learned purposely to help embellish the work that they did and help deliver. And then, you know, just was politely told that this is what they had to offer.

And thankfully, my two business partners, who also were knowledge workers, and that is Dusty Folwarczny and Ryan Robinson, were also knowledge workers and very talented scribes. We just started a conversation, and they had heard a similar message. And it was at that point that we just said, you know what? I think we could do this outside. I think we could start something together. And we started having conversations.

And Mike, you mentioned something about this podcast being accidental or just those accidental meetings that you have. I thought I was starting a club with Ryan and Dusty. I didn't think I was starting a business. And they tell me that I'm an idiot every time I say that. I'm like, guys, you really don't know what was on my mind. I thought we were just starting a fun club where we could, you know, share work with one another or stuff like that.

But that is where we get to Ink Factory. So this would be 2011. And we, Steve and Ryan, and I were, again, just having conversations in the background. And there were others, talented scribes that had gone on to do many other things, do this professionally on their own, start their own businesses, and, you know, so we had an inference that it was possible, but, you know, we had to make our own way.

And so, that's where we decided to start Ink Factory. And it was just the three of us. And I don't know that we had the intentions that we do now and or did we dream that the trajectory would take us here? But I'm so grateful that we have just been along for the ride, and we have said yes to a lot of things. And we've also admitted when we don't have the information and chose to seek it out.

So when I think about how young Lindsay drawing you know, silly portraits when she was seven, to where I am now, again, I'm grateful for those two moments where people gave me the truth so that I could make decisions that were right for me, because otherwise, I don't know where I'd be right now, and would I be happy?

MR: That's a great story. I think the questions that come up for me is number one, if you're listening and you hear something or you feel something for someone, it's really important that you be honest with them in a kind way, and let them know the truth, right? Because it's so easy to just kind of roll by and not give the truth. I know it's challenging for me. And it's important to remember that, you know, they need your honest truth because, like, what would happen if say the instructor in the university didn't tell you that you probably would've become a production designer, maybe, right?

LW: Yeah. yeah.

MR: And doing the work—so I came up as a print graphic designer, did everything the old way, you know, marking up boards, and T-squares and all that kind of stuff, right?

LW: Yes.

MR: So I know that world, and I saw where it went to, right? You know, that where it went is everybody that made boards manually within a couple years didn't have a job anymore because they were switching over to Macintosh computers, and you know, page layout tools and Photoshop and Illustrator. And if you didn't make that transition, you probably had limited options. So I think it's so important that someone told you the truth when the truth needed to be told. Like, that's really great.

And then the other thing I guess I would say is in the second one, it would be interesting to dive more into what that looked like, that you had maxed out what you could do at Cap Gemini, and that that encouraged you to start something new. I suspect that there were other people behind you, and maybe the intention was, is to make room for those coming up behind, but it does sound like a pretty interesting opportunity where you actually built a business out of the work that you did there, and that the opportunity that you had other people there with you was pretty convenient and probably critical that you would make that choice.

So I think it's really important if you're listening and you heard Lindsay's story, is that if you have something that's in your gut that you feel like you need to tell someone, you should do that. Obviously, find a nice way to do that. It sounds like at least maybe one of the two were gentle in the way they told you these things. Maybe the second one maybe wasn't, and I think it's really important that you tell people the truth. I had to do that with a friend who was gonna get married, and I had concerns about his choice of person, and I had to sit down and tell him that. And I said, "I will still go through with the wedding and be your best man and all that, but I have concerns about what I see."

LW: Right.

MR: Unfortunately, in the long run, it didn't last, and he's now happily married to someone else, but I felt like I had to say something as his best man. Like, I can't let that slide, right? So if there's any lesson you take away from this, it's be honest with the people that you're work with and that you spend time with.

LW: Absolutely. And I think the counter to that is if you are the receiver of information like that, yes, it can, as I said, knock the wind out of your sails and change, you know, the steps that you have put in place or that you saw in place. And, you know, again, I can talk about it now 'cause hindsight it's 2020.

MR: Yeah.

LW: In the moment, both of those—

MR: Weren't very nice.

LW: -those cross sections in my life, it took me a moment to recenter, regroup, and take action. But those are choices that we make. So I definitely think, yes, if there's something that you could share with somebody, it helps to be honest, but also take a moment if someone's being honest with you, and receive that.

MR: Right. And I think, you know, the other thing too is like, I think about it, I don't know your whole situation, but like, in some ways, coming to you when you were a senior, I suspect that person probably should have told you when you were a junior. Now, I don't know the program or all that stuff.

LW: Yeah.

MR: Maybe you weren't ready to hear it then. You know, like, maybe he or she hoped that you would, oh, you know, it's junior year, they're gonna figure it out in their senior year, right?

LW: Yes.

MR: And then when it became clear, like, okay, I just see this being a problem and that her life is going to be problematic. Like, I gotta stop this before she gets stuck in this path, right? So, I mean, you know, that's always a balancing point of when. I mean, probably, it's not easy anyway you go, but I think, you know, it sounded like you eventually, after the shock of it, I mean, you telling me the story, I was being shocked, like, oh man, I can't imagine what that would feel like, right?

So I could feel it even as being told a story that once you get past the shock of it, like the reality, there were probably things that he's said that probably resonated with you after you got over the shock of it. Like, you know, he's got a point, and, you know, actually, I do like the storytelling part. I mean, the other interesting tidbit I thought of knowing the creative field is like, you probably would've made a really good creative director or an art director, right?

LW: That's what he said.

MR: Yes.

LW: That's what he said. No, and those are all fair points. You know, I think I wish he would've told me earlier, but I think the time in which he told me was when we started using the technology, and that's where I definitely struggled.

MR: Okay.

LW: I'm very good with my hands. It's when it came to understanding the programs and being able to do that. That's where, again, the voice and the muscle memory of my hands really helped. But yeah, I appreciate both of those. And again, it took me a long time to even be able to share these two stories because I took those as reflections of a deficit, versus, you know, what these people actually—you know, believe it or not, I should go find them and thank them. I haven't because again, those were hard conversations, but as I've evolved as a human, I am grateful that I had those. So if you have those situations in your life, again, handle it with grace if you're given the feedback and grace, if you're receiving it.

MR: Yeah, that's good.

LW: Yeah.

MR: That's a good thing to remember.

LW: Absolutely.

MR: And I think it's really interesting too that you point out those two pivot points in your life, like, had you not had those things happen, and they were typical in the moment, you wouldn't be where you are now, right? Number one, you might be a graphic designer struggling to find work right now. I don't know.

LW: Yeah.

MR: I mean, maybe you would've found it after all. Anyway, I mean, it kind of seems like you're pretty tenacious once you got your teeth into something. So you would've found something, right? I think I get that sense.

LW: Yeah.

MR: And then I think the other opportunity is having been told in the second instance, and having Dusty and Ryan both kind of feeling the same vibe, and the fact that you were there together, that you could do it as a threesome and go together, you had support network, right? To do it solo is tough. I know Brandy Agerbeck did it solo. She probably took the tough way, or Kelvy, or you know, whoever else, maybe had to go solo. It's pretty tough that way. So, it actually probably in a great sense, like having the three of you do it together probably was a blessing that you couldn't have imagined in the moment, right?

LW: No, not at all. And again, all of this origin story is a hundred percent—right now, is me looking backwards in hindsight, and I can see some of those serendipitous moments, you know, those struggles, et cetera. But I'm glad you brought up Ryan and Dusty at that time because in a business, we are very unique. We are a threesome, and that threesome has been a huge benefit to the fact that we have played to our skills, our innate skillset in forming the company and growing it to where it is today and leaning into those 'cause Ryan, Dusty and I, although we practice the same craft, we are three very, very unique individuals that bring unique skill sets that help the company grow.

MR: Yeah, that would be a strength, I would think, having those three different perspectives and three different skill sets, makes you stronger. And that would be kind of what I was alluding to, versus an independent individual, is you have these skills that you're really good at and stuff, I don't like the accounting. I mean, you could hire a lot of that thing out, right? But like there's, you know, a business sense that someone might have might be a big advantage, or in your case, the ability to tell the story and to weave it all together could be a really important skill to convince the client, like, hey, what we've done for you is actually what you asked for, and here's how we can apply it. Because often the customers themselves don't know what they want or how it can apply, right? So you have to guide them, especially the first time through.

LW: Yes, yes. Right. A hundred percent. And, you know, being in a partnership versus solo, I can definitely echo those moments where, you know, certain things, like I've heard from a lot of practitioners, practitioner imposter syndrome, feeling legitimate, you know, just being able to feel credible in a space that sometimes hasn't been a legitimate place for artists to show up. You know, we have been able to bounce ideas off of each other, but also, you know, scaffold that support of like, no, this is right, you know. Or client B is being what client B wants to be and isn't listening. And so, having that partnership has been really great along the way.

MR: Well, and I understand, you know, you started with three of you, but I suspect now that you're a bigger business, you have staff that work with you, you're guiding and leading them. So talk about what is Ink Factory look like now compared to those early days of the three Amigos.

LW: Great question. Yes, the three crazy Amigos. So, yeah, so we started in 2011. October 2011. Will be 14 this year in October—

MR: Congrats.

LW: -when I think this airs. So hello, future folks. Ink Factory has grown steadily and intently. So when we took on our first employee team member it was done with what we hoped was a lot of intent around being able to craft a company that again, gives legitimacy to a skillset that sometimes can be—you know, everyone's gonna have their opinion, and we have to combat that a lot with our clients about is what value does this bring? And, you know, just artists in general showing up in a business capacity. So how can we create a company that when we bring somebody on, we aren't, oh crap, a couple weeks later, having to let that person go.

So as a business owner, we wanted to make sure that we were to designing to have staying power and scalability. So right now, currently we have 16 full-time employees. Ten of those are artists. All artists that we have trained. None of our team has come from any of—I know that there's probably many schools, but two in the U.S., as far as the MG Taylor model and those that got trained from The Grove, David Sibbet's, and then anywhere in between. But all of these team members have found us in some capacity of wanting to draw, and we have trained them and how we practice visual note taking.

The others are administrative and sales folks, and without them, Ink Factory would cease to exist. So each team member plays an enormous role on making sure that we show up on social media that we're showing up where we need to, and that we're also having a seamless experience with our clients because again, they do pay the bills.
And really, with this acquisition of talent, we're also trying to push the envelope of what is next. And I can't answer that right now 'cause the client ultimately will help us prove that. But you know, I've heard others mention, you know, how did we pivot in COVID, and you know, we used to be a hundred percent, "We have to be in the room." You know, "No, you need to fly us out to wherever." And then COVID chain changed all of that and gave us permission, to be quite honest, to explore the digital side, 'cause we were doing digital before, but it was not a common request.

So now we're able to show up for a one-hour meeting, you know, somewhere in a different time zone. So it just begs the question, what's next? What is possible? And you know, I am always and Dusty as well, Dusty and Ryan are both our big thinkers. I'm the operations lady. I'm the one handling the money, making sure you know, we're requisite with all the things that we need to be where I lean on Dusty and Ryan to be the big thinkers

But AI is bringing up all sorts of questions on how this field continues. And while I think there is right to be—I try not to lead with fear. Fear sometimes is my guiding emotion is to be aware, not to fear it, but to be aware of where it's going and how we can do it. And my team right now is leaning into understanding how we can use those tools, and dare I say, doing a little bit of training ourselves of the AI to see where it can go.

MR: Yeah. I mean, that's oddly enough, the last two years since ChatGPT hit the mainstream, really, almost every discussion seems to touch on AI eventually. One of the other ones in this series for this season with Dan Rome, who's kind of leaning into it and trying to find ways that he can use it as a tool. I think, you know, there's all different feelings all over the place, right?

LW: Mm-hmm.

MR: Like you said, if you lead with fear, it's like, "It's gonna take my job," and, you know, to some degree, it's going to do some of the work that we maybe used to do. I mean, that's just the reality, right?

LW: Yep.

MR: But I always think too, that—and the reason I say this is because I've worked with technology since it first entered the market, and I see it in like desktop publishing, which we sort of hinted at.

LW: Yeah.

MR: Came up in a similar timeframe. And, you know, I've seen the great things about desktop publishing, and then I switched into web design, and I've seen great things there, and other technological revolutions always seem to promise more than they can deliver.

LW: True.

MR: And they, you know, usually have the thing that's promised, and then the thing that's the reality is somewhere back over here, right?

LW: Yeah.

MR: You know, it's never as bad as you said it thought it would be, but it's never as good either. It finds sort of an equilibrium somewhere in the middle.

LW: Exactly.

MR: And so, I suspect maybe we enter a place where, yeah, you know, you can go on ChatGPT and make a Studio Ghibli version of some icon or some images. But can it hold in its mind a whole three-hour meeting broken up by breaks, look at the consistency outside of just notetaking text and make visual sense of all that information, where a human is sort of built to operate storytelling space, both as a receiver and to hear the stories, right. Hearing is really important to the work we do, and then visualize it, right, to connect the things together and see the connections, which maybe there's a place for AI to help catch the details, and then you just review and refine, maybe, I don't know exactly.

And that's ultimately the discussion is always, we don't know, but it's interesting to see what it can offer. And just my experiences, you know, the technology is always gonna need like fiddling and maintenance. And it's never gonna exactly—you can't just turn it loose and let it do stuff and trust it totally. At least not yet. I mean, hallucinations are still in there, and mistakes are still in there. I've experienced, you know, plenty of them in my experience. So there still does need to be somebody, even if you're using these tools, kind of overseeing it as an art director, as I mentioned earlier, like managing and making sure things make sense, and then aligning it to the expectations, so.

LW: Absolutely. I think you get as visual note takers, we get to be a part of a lot of those conversations that are happening now. Like you said, I don't think I've been in a meeting yet, or in the last six months, maybe a year, that hasn't somehow mentioned AI. And I think the theme that I keep hearing from those that are smarter than me keep talking about the human in the loop. You know, let's AI do what it can do to help us, but there will always be a human in the loop.

And Mike, you brought up about the changes in desktop publishing. And yes, you and I probably did so many things by hand that were like a computer to do it, but you have to know how to do that stuff by hand before you can really get the computer to do that for you. So I still think there's value in slowing down before you get to using AI or slowing down before you get to the computer and making sure that you're trying everything in what I hope is a very free environment, no critique of just putting marks on a piece of paper versus going straight to an iPad where—

MR: Finished. Yeah.

LW: -yeah, you can put that line, and you might spend eight hours putting that same line, but had you been a little freer, I think it helps with the actual, the actual work and the practice of being visual.

MR: I think that's really important. And I did a post about a year ago, and I talked about don't give away the thing that makes you special to the robots. I call them AI robots, right?

LW: Yeah.

MR: Because I think my concern, and some of the studies that are starting to come out now with people who use it for writing, is the people that use it for writing and rely on it start to have less ability to process and be critical about information.

LW: Use this muscle. Yeah.

MR: Yeah. And the same thing is like, if you have a process where you deliver stuff, there's places where maybe it helps you. Maybe it's in pre-research, or maybe it's taking, documenting the text while you're working, and then you can review and say, oh, I missed that little bit, I'll add that, right? It could be that, but like, if you give away whole parts of your process to some tool, which you don't control that you know, suddenly, you know, OpenAI decides we don't think that feature's important anymore, and that your whole process now depends on that. That's a problem.

LW: It is.

MR: And you know, the other thing would be, you know, if you're even considering using tools like this, map out your process, understand how it works, and selectively use it in places where, you know, if let's say OpenAI just changes a feature that if that disappeared, you could now step back in and do a human part of that, or find another way to solve that problem, right. So it's really like process ownership and then being aware of like where you allow these automated tools to fit in so that something doesn't cripple you, right? Because—

LW: Exactly.

MR: Yeah. And I—

LW: Go ahead.

MR: And you, the other point that I liked was knowing how it works. And I think about this when the digital design era came, you know, I used to build boards and use these ink pens, and I would draw the crop marks, and we had blue line pencils, and I stuck wax on pa—you know, we did it all manually, and we achieved a result.

LW: Yeah.

MR: But what I think, you know, as cool as it was, it was also very limiting, right?

LW: Sure.

MR: There were certain things you just could not do, or it was so difficult that the time you have, you would make that decision. Like, okay, I could do that, but like, do I wanna spend the time? Is it worth that effect? You would make those decisions.

LW: Sure.

MR: Desktop publishing made those possible, but now the other problem was you could now do stuff that you shouldn't do. It was possible, but it would be a disaster on press because, you know, by experience, you know that that's never gonna work because these colors are gonna mush together and turn to green or whatever.

LW: Yeah.

MR: The thing was right, you had to kind of know the basics and understanding, just 'cause you can do it doesn't necessarily mean that you should do it, right? That kind of a thing.

LW: Right.

MR: So.

LW: Yeah, and I think whether that's a purist thought process or not, I still think it comes down to yeah, understanding what is possible and knowing that craft, and then you can bring in technology to help you. And so, I guess coming from the background that we did, I see things differently where, you know, I have three generations on my team, Gen X right here, and we've got millennial, and Gen Z, and I can see how they instantly go straight to technology to do things where I'm grabbing my handy dandy sketchbook and using paper and pencil before I ever go into you know, getting on the computer and designing.

MR: Yeah, exactly. I think there's sort of, in some ways an attraction too to this that I've noticed that like everything for Gen Z is so digital. Like there's kind of an attraction. I see it in my son and my nephew's fascination in record albums, Polaroid cameras, like shooting film, like these kinds of things that you can easily do them digitally, and there's some advantages, but there's sort of an interest in the process, in the vibes of it, I guess. So that's interesting. And, you know, part of what I like to do is provide these drawing skills, and I you guys do this too to people so that they have the ability to visualize their thinking, right?

LW: Mm-hmm.

MR: And I think further, like, as you know, I know that you guys teach visual, you know, note-taking basics. I do the similar stuff. There's a bunch of people that do it. I honestly believe that it actually makes our profession more, I don't know, how would you describe this? It gives a reality check. So if a client learns how to do visual note-taking, and they can do it to a basic degree that fits their needs. They will also realize, holy cow, that is hard, hard work, and now I know why I hire Lindsay and her team because they are really good at it. You know, it's sort of like the Nailed It show, right? Where you try to like replicate a cake by someone and you realize how hard it is, and you appreciate the skill level of those other people that produce those things, right? Yeah. It's kind of cool.

LW: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you mentioned teaching, and yes, we have dipped our toe in that water. And, you know, anyone who's interested in a workshop—you know, I know we have other visual practitioners that want to learn it, but a lot of the people that reach out, they have a day job.

MR: Yes.

LW: And, you know, so I often say to them, I'm like, you know, our approach to this is we're not trying to train you to get paid to do this. I mean, that is a path, but it's more to give you skills and confidence to capture information differently. And, you know, if you're a kinesthetic learner or, if you're a visual learner and have multiple disciplines, just being able to take notes for yourself, not for anybody else to see. I love lots of sketchnoting, it just really helps give you another tool in your tool belt, but not to be your full-time job.

MR: Right. I think that's great.

LW: Although I feel like some people that try it and like it, they're then like, do I want to be this other person that I'm doing right now?

MR: Yeah. That might be an option. I mean, that might be the way to find your next talent. Right, and you never know.

LW: Exactly. No, true.

MR: Interesting.

LW: True, true, true.

MR: Interesting. Well, I love this discussion. I think, you know, it's an ongoing discussion. It's not been settled, and we have to figure out where, as a community and as a profession, how we're gonna deal with it. And it may change.

LW: It's true. Yeah.

MR: Right. So we can't even—as much as we wanna settle it, it's probably not going to be for a while.

LW: Yeah.

MR: But I like your idea of not leading with fear and leading with openness and curiosity, and like, how could this interesting tool be helpful, and what parts do I wanna keep under my control? Because I feel like what I provide that thing can't do, right. And that makes you unique. I think that's really important to thing to think about as a visual person.

LW: I mean, yeah. I like it.

MR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

LW: Yeah.

MR: Moving away from AI as a tool, what are some of the tools that you just find yourself always using all the time? What do you come back to? Are there like, stuff you keep in your purse, in your backpack, in your pocket that you just love? That can include pens, pencils, books, spur, whatever you like.

LW: D, all of the above. If you saw the bag or the bags that I bring to events, you'll be like this is overkill. And I'm like, I am a belt-and-suspenders type of person. My whole team jokes they're like, "What the heck are suspenders?" And I'm like, shut up. You're too young. But I would say I love a sketchbook. I know that people have different opinions, but I prefer a spiral-bound because I like to work multiple different ways, and I feel that my fat figures and stuff get in the way. But when I think about a sketchbook, I really am thinking about the actual paper. You know, the weight of the paper that I'm using so to make sure that it doesn't bleed. This is a sketchbook that we designed for workshops.

MR: Yeah, it's a cool one.

LW: And, you know, we did a lot of research to find out, you know, like what paperweight was gonna be the best for some of those great pens that we use. I can't name them all. But also, to think about lined versus unlined. We even have some gray scale that has grids on it, just because, again, sometimes having a little grid helps, you know, your handwriting be a little straight, but I always go to paper first. When I think about maybe other tools, I am a huge fan of a pencil. I'm a gestural drawer by nature. And so, if that pencil gives me permission to put marks, that if I go straight to a pen, any kind of pen feels more permanent. So I'm always drawing with a pencil.

And I think my favorite thing when people come up to me on events and they see me drawing with pencil, and they're like, "Oh, oh, you trace that." And I'm just looking at them, and I'm like, how do you think these marks got on this board? Like, just 'cause it's a pencil, you know? And I love sometimes demystifying the drawing process for people 'cause they're like, "Oh, you're doing it in pencil. You've traced it." And I'm just like, came from this hand. But anyways, I love a flare. I love a pencil.

MR: Oh, yeah.

LW: And then I think my go-to tool that I don't talk about enough, and don't get too excited. I have dyslexia, and I have done my best to overcome it for years. But being able to have some correction tape—

MR: White out tape? Yeah.

LW: I'll have it in my pocket. I have it in my bag. I have backups to this because, you know, I'm doing—well, as we do this craft, we're doing so many things at once, spelling sometimes goes out the window. And it keeps me honest and make sure that the client's not upset. So having some correction tape or just the ability to know that I can undo something. Now, have I drawn something really big? That's a lot of correction tape. But yeah, I would say those are my go-to tools.

MR: Interesting. And, you know, the correction tape, I know what that is because we're old GChen X.

LW: Yes.

MR: But like, you know, Gen Z, like, "What the heck is that thing you got?" You know, you guys gotta demonstrate it.

LW: Exactly.

MR: But it's 'cause they've never had to type a paper with a typewriter or an electric typewriter or a printer and then have to fix something, right?

LW: We used to have to wait for it to dry, you know.

MR: Yeah.

LW: Now, we don't even have to do that, but yeah. No, my team definitely leans into having the ability 'cause again, we're often working analog, markers to a physical board.

MR: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I've forgotten about correction tape. I used to use white out in the little bottle, but it'd always give gloopy. You know, it'd get gloopy on the brush. You'd have to clean the brush off.

LW: I mean, it smells good, you know.

MR: Yeah. Well, and you had to be careful, certain markers would kind of taint it and it would turn like gray. And then if you put it in, now you basically have gray out, right?

LW: It's like, should we be white? Maybe gray should be the back of the board. No, I hear you. Yeah.

MR: Yeah. Exactly. So, well, that's pretty cool. Really simple tools. I love it. And they're easy to get any place. Right.

LW: Exactly.

MR: And I've seen your notebook. It looks really cool. I love the spiral and the style of it, and the size of it is great. And like you said, you know, the paper is so important. It sounds it's great that you've done research and obviously got just the right kind of paper that makes it work. So I'm glad to hear that.

LW: Yeah.

MR: Where can people pick up that notebook? Is that available at the Ink Factory website in the shop?

LW: You know what, I don't think it's currently available because we've believe—thank you for asking. We've actually put some pause on our Think Like Ink, just because we're doing some other things behind the scenes.

MR: Yeah. Okay.

LW: I can't really talk about it just yet.

MR: That's fine.

LW: But we've got some things in the mix, but it is our hope to have something to offer 'cause, you know, we wanted this to be made in the U.S. and worked with a provider here, but it's just when is the right time to sell it.

MR: Right. Yeah. Well, it's good to hear that you got something in the works, so that's exciting. Look forward to and to keep an eye on, right?

LW: Yes. Yes.

MR: That's pretty fun.

LW: You heard it first, but I can't tell you. Shh.

MR: Well, you know, maybe by the time this actually releases, it'll be out and we can put that in the show notes.

LW: Wooo, yes.

MR: We'll see, we'll see.

LW: We hope.

MR: Cool. the last thing I'll ask is, yeah, so I'm just a practical person. You know, and I think it's important that we teach practical techniques and have practical mindsets, right?

LW: Mm-hmm.

MR: I think that just is reality, how we have to deal with life. So let's assume there's a visual thinker listening, and there maybe are stuck in a rut, or they just need a little inspiration. What would be three tips that you would give that person to kind of encourage them to help them out of a rut? Just to give them a different way of looking at something?

LW: Okay. I have found myself in those ruts many times. I think that again, is where, you know, what you provide Mike, as far as a community, I think, you know, not AI, but technology, we have so much at our fingertips that sometimes it gets overwhelmed to even know where to look. So I would definitely say that, you know, finding a community that's right for you, whatever your practice is, and leaning into that.

I'm also a huge, huge proponent—is that the right word? I agree with feedback, looking for feedback. Again, I got feedback from two people in my life that I wasn't prepared to receive, but if you go seeking feedback and asking, you're in a position to receive that. So I think if you can find maybe not your best friend, you know, again, maybe someone in the community to provide feedback that could help you or give you a direction on maybe something that you could improve or work on, or even practice.

Because my second offering would be practice. We teach it in our workshops, and it is what most people don't wanna hear when they're starting something new, is that it takes practice, and it takes you know dedication with that practice. And so, I think, again, with the community, you can find ways to do that, or you know, look for avenues to practice. Then my third one would be because I often—you know, I should have added it to the tool as one of the tools, but maybe I'll add it here, and we'll say both, but your body, like, I don't think enough of us pay enough attention.

Well, that's rude of me. I don't know who's listening. I bet you're all great practitioners and mindful of your body. But what we are doing is physical, whether you're doing sketch notes you know, in a small capacity doing something large, this is our physical body, this is our brain. And, you know, we're all getting older, I'm just realizing that, you know, warming up and giving yourself time to get prepared in that space, whether you're sitting, standing, a long day, a short day, I really think understanding and paying attention to your body.

So I think that both a tool but could also help you get out of a rut in that if you're often sitting, when you're drawing, stand up, get big. You know, I talk about your body as a fulcrum. We've got a fulcrum in our shoulder, we've got one in our elbow, in our hands. And so being able to get physical with your work, I think can help you find some of those images that maybe wouldn't have come out if you were sitting or—

MR: That's great.

LW: -the opposite, so.

MR: Yeah. I love all three of those, and the last one especially because I thought often, you know, like you say, we sort of so conditioned to think digitally. And like, I've had cases where I've done projects where I've done sketchnoting all day with my iPad, and I came back and my shoulder was so twisted up, I just was not even thinking about it, I had to go to the masseuse and get massaged so I could loosen it up like duh.

LW: Which was probably nice, but.

MR: Yeah, I kind of felt like I had to at that point 'cause it was just so bothersome that, you know, the masseuse kind of loosened it up, but it made me aware too.

LW: Yeah. And the thing that just occurred to me is that, you know, one of our team members was struggling with being able to write continuously in a straight line, always going up or sometimes going down.

MR: Yeah, sure. Probably common.

LW: And, you know, through practice, you know, it got better, but I was like, you know what? I actually want you to step back and, you know, I wanna see your whole arm getting into this. And, you know, once they were able to kind of practice some of those bigger movements, all of a sudden that strain that was causing them to go up, I can't remember if it was the up or down, was overcome. So again, your body, your little fingers, your wrist, everything we need to take care of it and figure out how we can make it stronger so that we can continue to do this.

MR: Yeah, that's a good point. I think that's something that's often forgotten and not even in our awareness a lot of times.

LW: Yeah.

MR: So that's a good one. I like that.

LW: Awesome.

MR: Well, Lindsay, where is the best place to find you and your company's stuff?

LW: Oh, amazing question. We are Ink Factory, Ink Factory Studio on Instagram, on LinkedIn. We are even on TikTok.

MR: Nice.

LW: We love good TikTok. If you're over there and wanting to giggle, we do some fun things over there. And then where else? Also on Facebook, but really, you know, we're in Chicago, and if you're ever in the area, would love for you to reach out. Happy to make new friends and new faces in the community, but otherwise, Instagram is probably where we show up the most. We love it over there.

MR: Got it. And I would assume that your website is Ink Factory.com in case someone wants to hire you for—

LW: Inkfactorystudio.com.

MR: So, inkfactorystudio.com. Thanks for correcting me, yeah. We'll make sure we get that right on the show notes.

LW: Yeah, I think a tattoo parlor got there before us, but that's okay.

MR: Yeah, that's a good point. I've thought about tattooing, yeah.

LW: Oh, we have people come into the studio, like literally knock on our door and are like, "Hey, can you guys do a tattoo?" And we're like, where's the no soliciting sign, and we are not tattoo artists.

MR: Yeah, that's funny. Interesting that the impact that you're naming has that you don't think about in the moment.

LW: No, they don't, yes. Exactly.

MR: Yeah.

LW: We will do tattoos, you just might not like it. I'm just saying.

MR: Well, they may not be that permanent, right? With a Neuland marker, you know, eventually gonna wash off. Yeah.

LW: I love that.

MR: Cool. Well, thanks so much for being on the show, Lindsay, and thanks for you and the Ink Factory doing the great work that you're doing and helping people and encouraging and teaching. I think that's really important.

LW: Yeah, thank you.

MR: So thank you.

LW: Well, I thank you for having me, and you know, so great to finally make your acquaintance.

MR: Yeah.

LW: And for anyone who's listening, would love to hear feedback. Again, I'm open to it and ready to start conversations. So thank you for having me.

MR: Cool. Well, thank you. And we'll have to say everybody, wave at her little dog back there. What's your dog's name?

LW: I know. This is Dennis. Dennis—

MR: Hey Dennis.

LW: -you say hi.

MR: Hey, big guy,

LW: He's been quiet the whole time.

MR: Yeah, he is. Been a good boy. Good boy, Dennis. Good boy.

LW: Yeah, good boy.

MR: Well, and for everyone who's watching or listening, that's another episode. Until the next episode, we'll talk to you soon. Bye.

LW: Bye.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Ted Shachtman?
• Origin Story
• Ted's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Where to find Ted Shachtman
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Ted on LinkedIn(https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-shachtman-70930b239/)
• The Mental Atlas Method(https://www.mentalatlasmethod.com/)

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everybody, it's Mike Rohde again. Got my friend Ted Shachtman here. Ted, how are you doing?

Ted Shachtman: I'm good. How are you?

MR: I'm good, man. It's good to have you. So, Ted is a very unique guest for the Sketchnote Army podcast in that he is someone who has discovered and has been developing this concept called the Atlas Method. Is that the right way to describe it?

TS: It's the Mental Atlas Method, but yeah, typically we just call it the Atlas usually.

MR: Yeah, yeah. After a while, you just sort of, the thing. You know, the thing we do. And so, I'm gonna have Ted talk about what he does in his origin story so he can say what it is. But I've experimented with this technique. And it's a way of improving or retaining memory, or I guess both those things. And I found it really fascinating. And I thought for visual thinkers to have expanded memory is always a good thing because in the work we do, where we're trying to take information, complex information, process it, make sense of it, and then put it on a board or on a screen or on a page, is really hard.

And anything we can do to expand our capacity, our cache, our whatever it is that we're using to process this is a benefit for us. And then additionally, the way that we're going to do a little demo, it actually gives the capacity for you to not have to draw anything, if you wish to. I think that would be a fair way to frame it, think?

TS: Yeah.

MR: Okay, so with that, Ted, tell us who you are and what you do.

TS: Sure. So as said, Schachtman. I am an educator and software engineer, and cognitive scientist. I went to Vanderbilt University for elementary education and cognitive studies. I've been a teacher for the past three years, and I'm also getting a master's in computer science. So the story with the Atlas was, in around November, and I asked myself this question, which was, how do I become the most general smart person? Like, almost like by the time I'm 50, how can I become just the best leader, CEO, researcher? And I kind of just embarked on this question and led me to a bunch of research, just kind of explored different paths, started visualizing things, talking while I was visualizing. And then the end result after about like eight months of constant work and research is the Atlas Method.

MR: So that leads me to the next question, of course, is tell us a little bit about the Atlas Method and how you developed it, in with the framing of an origin story like a superhero.

TS: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I personally have a really, really bad part of my brain that takes what I'm currently thinking and writes it to long-term memory. You know those games where everyone goes around in a circle and is like, okay, name your name and something you eat, like your favorite food. I'm terrible at that. I'm really bad at watching lectures. I have to watch a video six times. And I wanted to get rid of that because I've always been pretty creative. And I was always looking for some technique or something that would allow me to, I guess, learn faster.

And so, the actual origin story is I started talking out loud and visualizing at the same time back in October or November. And I would be analyzing some lecture I watched. And I noticed that as I was visualizing the lecture and talking out loud, it would really start to make more sense, like doing both of those things at the same time. And just happenstance, I would take another lecture I watched and be like, man, I want to compare between these. I would switch from like visualizing one to visualizing the other, and it would just be awful. Like I'd have to like go like, urgh! Like going from one to the other.

And one day, I just tried putting them in the same space, like visualizing one video here and the one video here, like right next to each other. And it felt so much easier. It felt like I was able to hold both in my mind at once. And this kept going. I would analyze around two at a time. And then one day I was like, all right, well, I want to get a third. I put a third one in there, and it worked. I stayed at three, and then I went to four.

And then I remember I had about nine full videos, like nine full 20-minute lectures all in the same visual space, and it was somewhat different than it had been before. Like, I started noticing connections between all the videos that I didn't typically find. And it stayed at this point. I'd visualize where 9 or 10 at a time. But I always had this idea that was, surely, I can't keep going, right? Surely nine, like it's impossible. I was like, what am I doing?

MR: Set boundaries.

TS: And then I started reading a lot of research. I started reading a lot of research that essentially said when people switch visual contexts, they lose so much information, and when people are searching from the same context, they can hold so much. Like visualizing someone's hometown, for instance, they can hold that whole thing, but as soon as you go hometown and then like a college campus, they incur so much cost. It's almost like it's hard to think of when you do that cost.

And so, the origin story, how this all started, is I was on a call with my friend Ben, and at this point, I've been telling him like, you know, my cognitive science ideas. You know, just techniques to try to improve this process, and he wasn't super into all of them. He would be like, "Okay, that's a fine one." And I told him the following idea. I said, it seems like if I actually stored everything in one big space, meaning not just nine videos, but every single video I watched, every concept I'd want to think about, in one big space, it seems like that should be more efficient, all the research points to that.

And I was waiting for him to say, all right, sure, maybe, but, you know. But he didn't. He paused for about 10 seconds and said, "You know, Ted, that's not a bad idea." And I just kept going with it. So essentially, the journey is exploring the following question. What if you take your hometown, like Memory Palace, like a method of loci style, and you're building these huge interactive visuals and doing a voiceover on top of them, like describing what you see, the patterns you notice.

And you just keep putting these huge visuals all around your hometown. And you don't stick with nine. You go higher and higher and higher. And so, I kept practicing this. And so, the real origin story, where I guess this technique became not just a way for me to remember things, but kind of the Atlas as it is today, is I was reasoning about one of the videos, and I noticed a pattern about one of them.

And as soon as I noticed that pattern, my visual attention just zoomed, snapped over to another one. And it felt like automatic. It almost felt like if somebody says, say you're looking at a wall of food in the grocery store, and someone says, find the cheese, and your eyes just go to the cheese. Except this happened with a really complex pattern.

And I was like, that was weird. And I added more videos to the Atlas, and it kept happening. And then I sat with a hypothesis. I did the following experiment. I visualized my bathroom and then said, find the sink. Found it, visual attention snapped there. You guys can try to follow along. I said, find the shower curtain. And that was fine. And then I visualized my hometown. Like my whole hometown, I said, okay, find the front door to my friend's house. Find the apples in the grocery store. And it snapped, just like that.

And I thought to myself, it doesn't seem to be any different to my visual system, whether I'm searching among my bathroom or whether I'm searching among my entire hometown. And this snap that I would get between simple objects like the apple in the grocery store or the shower curtain felt exactly the same as the snaps I was getting between these incredibly complex videos and the patterns in these complex videos.

And so, I really sat there and I said to myself, this seems preposterous, but the logic says that I should be able to scale this up. And as I scale this up, the snapping will work just as much, and I'll probably find a lot better patterns. And it turned out I was right. So it wasn't an easy journey. Many pitfalls, many weeks of me doing the wrong thing, not realizing why it was the wrong thing and then figuring out why.

But then the end results, I shared this in May on Reddit, an R/pneumonics, and it got a really, really great response. Like now it has like 10,000 views, like 60 upvotes, like 100 comments. And kept sharing it. Now it's getting researched by Professor David Uttal. It's got endorsements from a neurosurgeon neuroscientist who just found the technique. And it's kind of great. And I use it all the time, like eight hours a day, just to think. And you can use it to do some really, really amazing cognitive feats. So that's the origin story, superhero style.

MR: Wow. Wow, that's interesting, and it seems to me like when you tell that story, it feels like the brain just works this way, and you're sort of like reverse engineering the features in a sense, right?

TS: Yeah, yeah.

MR: Like so, like well, what if I plug this in here, just got a shock that's probably not good, you know what I mean, like it's almost like that, right?

TS: Yeah, the best way I guess to describe, like exactly what you're talking about is like your visual system has four properties. First one is huge, durable storage. You can like pull up your visual of your hometown, super easy, and it's super light on your mind too. Not only do you have the storage, it's like really easy to use. And then also the method of loci says you can write to that storage. You can like store if you want to remember, like your grocery list, you can store a picture of zucchini, and it's really durable.

And next, you have like semantic meaningful search across your whole visual space. Like the example I gave is you can find the pairs in your grocery store if you're searching in your hometown. Totally fine. And it's kind of like as soon as the idea of pair enters what you're thinking of, you just snap to it. So you have like search among this. And also, your visual system it doesn't only just represent like shapes and like objects, like a triangle, it can represent real meaning.

Like, if you try to pull up right now a visual of your family member, it feels like them. Like, when you pull up that visual, it feels like you're looking at the idea of them. And so essentially, the Atlas technique is asking, what can you do to make these things useful, where you have this one huge space where everything is durable? You have search across it, and you can store everything with tons of meaning. And through a lot of cognitive science and research and discovery, I guess.

MR: Experimentation?

TS: Yeah, experimentation. That's what the technique does.

MR: So when you first reached out to me, the first thing I thought of was Memory Palaces in the type of or the Momento Mori, is that?

TS: I think the name is--

MR: Is that the name of it? I'm not sure. Oh, yeah, maybe.

TS: Yeah, maybe. I think that's of loci. Yeah, yeah, I think it is, yeah.

MR: So talk to me about that concept and how this differs because I think that might be the most similar thing that someone listening or watching would snap to and think about, right?

TS: True. The method of loci is static, meaning--well, I guess here's the mechanical differences. With the method of loci, you don't use dual coding, meaning you don't verbalize, and you don't talk and look at the same time. And also, it's mainly to store just like objects. It's mainly for memory. With the method of loci, you walk around to remember things. With the Atlas, you actually never walk around. Like I remember in our demo, I actually instructed you to store things miles apart in your town. You don't walk in the Atlas. Instead, you snap around, just like that demonstration of find the apples in the grocery store, or find the front door to your friend's house.
Next, the mind palace is for memory, meaning if you want to remember all the digits of pi, use the mind palace. The Atlas is extending the mind palace to include those other features of your visual system, not just durable storage, but also the semantic search and the meaning. For instance, a lot of practitioners of the mind palace say, okay, it's useful, but let's say I want to use this to really for dynamic problem solving. I can't store the concept of supply and demand in a meaningful way where it's useful for reasoning. I can store like supply where it's like the word supply or like a supply drop or something.

MR: A symbol for it.

TS: Yeah, a symbol for it. Where the Atlas is fundamentally about reasoning and fluid reasoning, and I guess creativity and thinking, and intelligence usage and all that good stuff. It looks a little bit like the memory palace, it's built on that foundation, but it is fundamentally for a different purpose, which is, I guess, reasoning and learning.

MR: So this is like the extended capabilities would probably be attractive.

TS: Yeah.

MR: I'm thinking of a sketchnoter who we deal with concepts and metaphors and those kinds of things, or anybody doing visual thinking, those are kind of the places that we work. And I think there's something that struck me and I think about before, and that is that our brain--so our eyes are the way that we perceive the world. For those of us who can see, right? But effectively, what we see is translated by our brain, right, to mean something. So our brain is actually doing all the work to manufacture meaning, and we're sort of interpreting it in our brain.

So basically, what you're saying and in the test that we're going to do in a minute, I close my eyes, right, for some of it and imagine with my eyes closed. So in a lot of ways, the same tool that we might be using visually to draw and stuff is actually happening in the brain. It's just that we've trained ourselves as visual thinkers to take what we're seeing in our mind's eye and then translate it to the page or the screen or the board, and for graphic recorders, right?

TS: Yeah.

MR: So that stands to reason that if we could develop this capability of our mind's eye, in a sense, or this Atlas technique to visualize concepts that that would be really fascinating and potentially a game changer for visual thinkers. And I'm going to bring up somebody else who I know and I know has been experimenting with this, is my friend Andy Gray. And he's talked about--so his story, and I'm hoping to get him on the show soon.

His story was he went to an event. He was supposed to do graphic recording, which is basically this big board and markers. He listens to what's happening. He processes the information and he does a metaphorical or representative on this board of like the discussion. Both what the person says from the front and any reactions, right? He sort of tries to capture this. And normally, you do this inside on a stand with a board. But the guy decided, the speaker decided, hey everybody, let's go out and sit in the yard under the tree and I'll tell you for an hour and a half or whatever about this concept.

And so, Andy had been training himself with memorization techniques. I don't know that he's run across your techniques, so I've connected you with him. But basically, he sat out in the yard, and he basically used the techniques they did have to memorize the talk and then come back in and reproduce it on demand.

I thought that was really fascinating and that's where I think like this thing that we're talking about could be really valuable both for, let's say you know you're going to go into a complex talk, you can do the research on what this person's talking about, use the Atlas system to memorize the concepts and store them in your brain. So when you get on the board or on the page or the screen, you now have access to the concepts that they're talking about.

That often is a challenge with--so another friend, Rob DiMio, talks about the challenge he faced with sketchnoting scientific speakers. They kind of come in assuming you've read all their research up to that moment, right? And they'll present some new thing to you, assuming that you know all the basics. They're not going to give you a primer and talk to you about all the stuff prior. That's just not the way it works.

And he realized that. So he talked about when he started doing sketch noting of scientific talks, he would do a lot of research, but these were like amazing scientists that would come right to his installation, where he worked. So he would research them, learn about the basics, learn about their perspectives, and sort of build up this, group of knowledge before he then went to the event to listen to the thing they talked about. He now had background. And I could see again this atlas method being really fascinating way to do that preparation and have it immediately on demand in your mind by just closing your eyes, oh that, this and this and then and then making it happen, so.

TS: Yeah. So you speak to a pretty cool, I guess, novel ability of the Atlas, which is learning speed. So I have demos online that involve a couple other people, and other people can have also like tried this. And you've actually experienced this in the demo--

MR: Yeah.

TS: -where you watch really complex subjects. And the Atlas essentially allows you to absorb and remember and really understand conceptually the topics and videos really well in a way where you retain it excellently and you're able to use it immediately for creative tasks and reasoning. To speak to this use case of researching the scientist and then having it all right into your brain, that is absolutely an amazing use case where you really can with it learn quite quickly.

Like I referenced in the beginning of this talk how I guess what sparked this whole journey was my brain is not very good at learning. Meaning like, yeah, when I watch a lecture without the Atlas, I'd have to watch it like six times. With the Atlas, you can see the demos online, it's pretty quick. yeah, like I have no issue in, for instance, like watching like a 30-minute rules video on some complicated board game and then just playing immediately and knowing all the rules, which is a cool skill to whip out on game night.

MR: Yeah.

TS: But yeah, so that is a really awesome ability of the Atlas. Yeah, so thanks for bringing that up.

MR: Yeah. No, and when we were when we did the tests, we did a short version which will do a demo for you in a minute around goals and then we did a longer session, which Ted recorded it's up on his YouTube channel, where he walked me through watching videos and memorization techniques. It was pretty fascinating. And I'm pretty you know it was the first time I did it, and I was getting something out of it so I would imagine the more I practice the more natural it would become. But the thing that I sort of reacted to is that it's a little bit like the matrix you know, Neo goes in and they put the cartridge in he says, "I know Kung Fu," right? It's kind of not quite like that, but it's pretty close, right as close as we can get.

TS: Yeah, that is a good way to describe it. It's a little bit like when you're actually absorbing the concept, like something you're able to do is in real time, watch the video. And this is one of the coolest things that I guess I'm able to do is you in real time, watch a complex video and you're building the video as a 3D model in your head, and you're describing how this 3D model works. And at the end of the video, you've watched the whole thing in real time, you have it in your head. Like in a fully inspectable, full detail model, and it's super durable.

So in that way, it is like downloading Kung Fu. Like it feels very different than just watching the video regularly, where you're like, sure, yeah, I get it. Yeah, I get it, and then you end up you end the video and you're like, what was that again? With the Atlas instead, it's like it's literally right there, like the whole videos right there, and yeah, that is a really cool feature.

MR: And what you think about it is basically very intentional listening and building, so you're doing something in a lot of ways like sketchnoting visual thinking is over and above listening. So if you just go and sit and listen to a talk that's like level one, but if you can now like really intently listen and then the next level is I'm actually drawing the concepts. So, for me, I do sketchnoting physically with an iPad or a piece of paper and a pen or whatever because for me, once I switch into that mode, I am really engaged with the content. I'm really processing it. I think I'm using a lot of these features and don't realize that I'm using them. But then my purpose is to get them on the page in a concise, compact way.

As an example, when I go to church, I'll do the sermon and I use my iPad. I'll produce a sketch note. It's pretty basic. It's nothing fancy. And I send it off to the team, and it gets bound up with questions that people ask about the sermon in between weeks, right? So it serves me to help me to stay engaged, but then it actually produces a reference that other people can scan what the sermon was about in about five minutes and then have a discussion about it without having to watch the whole 40-minute thing, right?

I just think this could be really useful, and I think what we want to do is, Ted is gonna have me walk through a demo so you can actually see what it looks like and sounds like. I'll be the guinea pig. And I think before we begin, it would be helpful for you to describe like--because I think this audience would appreciate like describing for them maybe even individually like what are the components and how do they work together, before we do the demo? So then they as they're listening to me do this, they can sort of in their mind put together and make sense of what's happening.

TS: Totally, yeah. So a small note is this will only work for people who answer yes to a couple questions. You need a certain level of high visuospatial ability to really get the full benefits from it. So the first question is, can you visualize your hometown as a 3D model that you can fly around in? And it's almost like the whole thing doesn't--you don't have to wait for each part to load. It's kind of just like one big model you can fly around in.

The next question is can you stand outside of your house in your mind's eye and, without moving, confidently point in the direction of landmarks? For instance, you point in the direction of the library, point in the direction of your favorite restaurant. The next question is, when you're holding a visual, does it take a lot of focus? You don't want it to take a lot of focus. For instance, people who answer yes to this question can really easily just visualize the front of their house while they're talking, their eyes open. So if you answer yes to these three questions, then you can go ahead and follow along, and it'll work for you.

MR: Okay.

TS: So with that being said, the actual mechanisms of like, how is this thing gonna work? So it starts out just like the mind palace, where you're gonna visualize a place you know really, really well. Let's take your hometown. Then choose a specific spot you can clearly visually see, such as let's say in your house, let's say your kitchen table. What you're going to do is when you get a concept you want to put into your atlas, you're going to come up with a symbol, like an analogical symbol that represents the concept you're going to build that as a 3D model and you're going to put it on that spot in your house or in your big space.

And then once you've built that 3D model, you are going to while visualizing that 3D model talk and describe what you want that symbol to mean. So an example of this would be, say you want to understand the concept of heat stroke, you might visualize a bison falling over and panting, and a little sun above it. You might put that in your kitchen sink. And then while visualizing that bison with the sun over it, simultaneously, you might describe this is the concept of heat stroke.

Some examples of heat stroke are a runner who's running a marathon and they get too hot, or a bison who's been out in the sun too long. So while you're saying that, you want to be simultaneously visualizing the 3D model. That's pretty much the only mechanism you use to actually put things in your Atlas. And then we'll figure out, we'll see later what it looks like to actually use the Atlas to solve a pretty cool, I guess, goals task, where you plan for what goals, you want to accomplish.

MR: Okay. So Ted and I talked a little bit, and we thought it might be fun to do the first test that I did, in maybe an abbreviated banner just for time purposes. And that was to set goals using this technique for something that I need to do this week. I've got plenty of things that need to be done. So it seemed like a really logical thing to do. So with that framing, why don't you go ahead and start the test, and then we'll run it. And I think maybe let's go for like two goals just for time purposes. I think I have two goals in mind I can pick.

TS: Yeah, perfect. Okay, so the first step is choose a spot in your hometown that you can clearly see.

MR: Okay, got it.

TS: Okay, and where is it?

MR: I think for this demonstration, I'm sitting at my dining room table.

TS: Sure, great. So now what's the first goal?

MR: So the first goal is I need to pull some weeds today, now that it's cool, it's been blazing hot, so.

TS: Great. Awesome. So, can you come up with an analogical symbol that represents this idea of needing to pull weeds? An example might be you reaching down and literally pulling weeds.

MR: Yeah. The physical act, yeah. I can imagine the weeds that I need to because I've seen them a lot and I can imagine--actually it's very satisfying this particular weed when you pull it it's sort of like if you pull little bit it actually pops and the whole root comes out with it so I can use that--I can imagine that.

TS: Cool. Okay. So now take that 3D model and put it on your dining room table.

MR: Okay.

TS: Okay, now, while visualizing the 3D model you just put on your dining room table, describe what you want this to represent.

MR: Okay.

TS: So here's the best way I found people can understand what this task is. Imagine if you just drew this 3D model on a whiteboard and then a whole room of people are wondering, like, what does this thing mean? Like, what does this mean in the rest of the lecture? Now, you need to be visualizing the 3D model you built the whole time while you're talking. You can imagine if your eyes are going somewhere else, or if you're like picturing something else, or you're not even picturing it, that's like you're pointing at something else on the whiteboard, and the whole class is like, what's this guy talking about? So as long as you're visualizing a 3D model the whole time and you're speaking, describing what this symbol is supposed to represent, it's gonna work. So give it a shot.

MR: Okay, all right, here we go. So I'm sitting at my dining room table, and here we go. So I'm imagining me pulling out these weeds, which have a nice satisfying pop as the root comes out. So I need to pull the weeds on the east side of the house because they've grown outrageously high in the sun and the heat, because my wife is being frustrated by these weeds being there, and she would be happy for them to be gone. So tonight, after dinner, when it's cool, I will go out and I will spend 15 minutes pulling as many weeds as possible.

TS: Awesome. Okay. So you just executed the three steps, which is choose a spot, make a model, and then do a voiceover. Now you're just going to repeat those, but like we referenced earlier, you're not going to put this on a journey. You're not going to walk between these. Instead, find a place in your hometown that's like miles away from this spot. And let me know when you have it and where it is.

MR: Okay, I think I picked a good spot.

TS: Okay, and where is this?

MR: So this is a little coffee shop that's about a mile away.

TS: Cool, awesome. So now, what's your second goal?

MR: So my second goal is I'm helping a friend with a logo, and I need to do the style guide for this logo. So colors and rules and such.

TS: Okay. Awesome. So now what's a 3D model that might represent as a symbol this goal?

MR: Well, in this case, I've got a logo so I can actually imagine her logo and make that into a 3D model, which would make a lot of sense here.

TS: Yeah, so go ahead and place that in the coffee shop.

MR: Okay, got it.

TS: And now do the voiceover. What does this symbol mean? What do you want this to mean?

MR: All right, so this is the Westfall Law logo design. I produced the logo, the customer is pleased with it, but now I need to take the logo and produce the branding document or rules so that when the logo is passed off to printers and other people that need to use it, they will have references to colors and limitations, and good and bad uses for the logo.

TS: Awesome. So, now you have two icons in your Atlas. You can use these to reason about a problem. So, this would work for if you had like 20 goals. We actually did a demonstration earlier where you had more goals. But since we have two, it's totally fine. The task you're going to do is now come up with a plan that accomplishes both goals. And your job is to come up with a synergy plan. So don't be like, I want to pull the weeds and then do the logo. So, an example might be like, okay, if I pull the weeds on Tuesday, then I'll be too tired to work on the logo. So you want to see how they interact.

And what you'll notice while you're doing this is when you're focused on one and you're analyzing it, as soon as you notice something that would have to do with the other goal, your visual attention will just snap. You won't have to go, I remember that it has to do with this other goal, and then you'll move your visual attention over manually. It'll just happen.

And the other thing you'll notice is as soon as your visual attention snaps over, the entire idea of the second goal is going to hit your mind immediately. And you'll kind of just understand how these two things interact. So what you're going to want to do to start is visualize just one of your goals, and you can talk out loud and start analyzing it and try to be almost as abstract as you can, like analytical as you can when you're analyzing it.

MR: Okay, I think I'll start with the second first and see if somehow the weeds relate to my logo problem.

TS: Sure. Yeah.

MR: All right, so I'm going close my eyes. I'm sitting at the cafe and imagining this logo. So the reason that I need to work on this is, conceptually there's a problem when logos tend to go to third parties, is they tend to screw them up. They use the wrong colors, they put them in the wrong proportion, they stretch them. There's weird things that happen with logos. And if I don't define how I want them to appear, all bets are off, and it could appear in any number of ways. So the goal around doing this guide is so that those people who use the logo have a clear idea of what it is they need to achieve, and then they can produce the logo in the right context in the right way to make my client happy.

And as I'm thinking about this, actually, this is pretty weird, but there's something visual about pulling the weeds on that side of the house that I'm imagining that just come to me. So it's oddly enough that the idea of the weeds just automatically snapped into mind. And there's something about the alignment, like I'm defining for my house how I want the plants to operate, and weeds are not part of that plan. Is that weird? Okay, that's like pretty bizarre. Like I didn't--

TS: Yeah, yeah.

MR: Okay.

TS: Yeah, that's actually kind of the really cool part of the Atlas. The types of connections you find are not like, oh, you know, this is this has colors. The weeds are like have a color. It typically works on extremely deep, unintuitive, creative abstract pattern finding. So the when you say like, was that weird? Is that a weird thing to snap to? That's actually like why it's good.

MR: Okay.

TS: So the what happens when instead of storing like two goals, right, two pretty simple concrete things, what happens when you store something like 16 lectures, which is one of the demos I did, is you'll be analyzing one of the lectures, like the anatomy of the heart, and you'll notice something where it's like a bilateral mechanism. And as soon as that idea enters your mind, you'll just snap over to some other lecture that in incredibly abstract way shares this pattern.

And in a way that you just wouldn't have thought of. And if someone said, up with something that like complicated and abstract, what you'd essentially have to do is hold the idea of one topic in your mind and then iterate through every other topic. I mean, like go over one by one and go, does this have this exact pattern? Does this have this exact pattern? Which is just really slow and also not fun.

MR: Right. Yeah.

TS: With the Atlas, you almost get a different mechanism. It essentially asks this question across in your Atlas. Let's say you notice a pattern like you did when you were designing the logo, or you were fitting the logo to exactly what you wanted it to be. What essentially happened in your Atlas is that pattern, that complex idea, entered your thoughts, entered your working memory. And it got sent down to the part of your brain that stores the Atlas. And it asks this wonderful question. What object in the entirety of Mike's hometown is this pattern?

And it evaluates this in parallel. It goes to your couch in your living room, and goes, is this this incredibly abstract pattern of designing the space? And it's not. And it goes to every single object. And there's one that's more that pattern than the others, which is you designing your house and pulling the weeds. It's like a big competition where all of these circuits in your brain that represent the objects in your hometown compete, and the one that matches this pattern the best wins, and you just snap to it immediately. You experience this in less than a fraction of a second.

MR: Right.

TS: You experience this as just a connection and the real like I guess magic or wonder of the Atlas and why it's kind of like the realization I came to in the origin story which is what happens at scale is you did this with two items, right? You did this with two goals. The question is, what happens when you practice this for nine months? Like I have in my case, and you have not two things, but you have 4,500 things. And the objects aren't simple goals, but like really complex lectures.

Essentially what happens is you will snap to the best pattern, but it's not the best pattern among two things. You snap to the best pattern among all the things. And so, what practitioners at the Atlas get when they scale up is incredibly unintuitive and wonderful connections. Well, they'll be analyzing some lecture and then they'll just snap to some lecture they've watched months ago that they wouldn't have thought of this ever, but it has the exact same underlying abstract structure.

Like in your experience, when they snap to it, the entire connection and idea just kind of pops into mind at once. And the really, really cool part is for typical cognition, that task is tough, like almost impossible. If you ask somebody, if you give someone just a concept, and you say, generate a super abstract, deep analogy with something else. People struggle as in experimentally, this is like an impossible task. With the Atlas, it's easy.

And you might be wondering, why does that task matter? Like, why would I want to see connections? Throughout history and in the research of like, what makes a good scientist? What makes someone who can actually make breakthroughs in fields? It typically is someone who is more skilled at seeing connections between different things that nobody else can.

MR: Hmm. That's really fascinating. Going back to that, I was totally focused on describing the logo problem, and the idea of how the plants fit it just snapped themselves onto what I was talking about that was really interesting. So that brings me to another interesting question is if your brain always finds the best match. Let's say you've now got 4500, let's say it brings to you an idea that's the best match, can you tell your brain, or you can enact this activity that says what are the other 10 things that are similar? Can it do that kind of stuff?

TS: Yeah. Yeah.

MR: Okay.

TS: You can. Yeah, so the way it feels is like you snapped the best match, but you almost get this tingly feeling, how people describe it, where if you hit something. Like say in my Atlas, I go like the color green, that almost goes like, it's almost like it's too bright in my eyes.

MR: Yeah, it's too many things, right? A lot of green things in there.

TS: Yeah, but when I hit on something that's maybe like four patterns, it feels like a burst and almost like I have to fight to not think--to think of them one by one. When it gets to around 10, it's a little overwhelming. If I search for something like rotation, that's a little uncomfortable because there's just too many things. It's like, what do you mean rotation? There's hundreds of things that have rotation.

MR: Right.

TS: But yeah, you generally cannot just find one best match, but you can find 10 if you just keep searching in this really, really cool way. And then also allows you to do an amazing feat, I guess, which is you notice a pattern, and then you snap to something that has that pattern. You start analyzing this, you snap to something else that has that pattern, you snap to something else that has that pattern, and you get like 10 items deep all within the span of 20 seconds where you just snapped all these 10 things. And you sit there with yourself and go, what's going on? I just have 10 abstract ideas, like how a Vibro hammer works or how back propagation works or something really, really complicated subject.

And you notice this abstract pattern among all 10 of these lectures that you had no idea existed. And you sit there, and you go, wonder what this thing is. And you actually get to explore. typically, personally, if I try that task without the atlas, I literally can't. The act of thinking across 10 things at once and rapidly finding patterns across just things you've learned in the past. I can't do. With the Atlas, though, I can. And this experience is shared by at least like, I guess, 15 people now who have active testimonials saying they experience this exact same thing.

MR: So it almost seems like our brain has the capacity there and like us trying to manually brute-force it is not a great solution. It's better to just work with a system that exists like the giant river, right, or whatever.

TS: Yeah. Yeah.

MR: I mean the other question I had with the last question I'll ask before we go to where to find this reference is could you theoretically sit and say you know work snap through these things and then group them like imagine a new place and then take all these things that relate to each other and then drop them down in this new place and have another, almost like a grouping so you could take those 4500, take a subset and then group them and stick them in a new place and now this becomes--it's still the same 4500, but now you've got a different grouping that could then all these things related to rotation that I think are important are now in a place could you do that?

TS: So, you can't do that specifically, but the intention of what happens when you notice an abstract pattern, like how do you store that? That is actually so wonderful. You can do the same thing that you would do with a heat stroke icon, which is what we call the visuals. You essentially, let's say you notice this rotation pattern in 110 items. You make that itself an icon and it turns this abstract idea into this concrete thing that you can then see and manipulate. And you can do this at infinitum, where typically when I'm thinking, I'll think of around 20 things at once, and I'll find patterns among them, and then I'll notice a pattern, I'll make an icon, and then I'll notice another pattern among the 20, and I'll make another icon, and then I'll notice a pattern between the icons, and so I make an icon. And you end up with this pretty expansive system--

MR: Network really. Yeah.

TS: -or just map of this sea of abstractions, but they don't feel hard to think about at all. The way a medical student who found the technique describes it is when you get experienced with the Atlas, it feels like walking through your imagination. And I really, really like that verbal description. It very much does feel like that, where you have pretty much everything you've thought of, every thought you've had since you've been using the Atlas, at your fingertips. And you can just see it all, like all at the same time. And you would think this is exhausting or heavy, but it's not. It feels light.

MR: Only because our brains have built over a long time to work in this way, and we're just uncovering these functionalities it seems like.

TS: Yeah.

MR: So Ted, I think the next thing we need to do is just tell people where they can go to see the demos, to read the materials, like what's the best place to go or best places to go.

TS: Sure. Yeah, you can take a look at the Mental Atlas Method, sorry, mentalatlasmethod.com. We have all the resources there, links to the demo, me and you did, a couple other demos, the research, all the testimonials. And then also reach out if you're interested in doing research or learning more about the method, or you think you have something to contribute to this burgeoning idea. Yeah, absolutely reach out.

MR: Well, this seems like the right audience to ask that question of because these are typically visual thinkers who I can imagine could imagine their hometown and do this visualization pretty straightforwardly so you might have a nice collection of regular people who can do the tests.

TS: Yeah, true.

MR: Cool. Well, Ted thanks so much for making time to be on the show and explain this and do this little demo. And, you know, I was thinking like well what if it doesn't work, and it did, so I don't know what to think about this, but it's pretty cool and I you know I'm still trying to figure out like how do I integrate this, but I think it's great to have the option, and I'm gonna keep on working it, so thanks so much for making time to be here.

TS: No problem. Awesome. Thank you, Mike. My pleasure.

MR: Well for everyone who's watching or listening it's another episode in the CAN, we'll see on the next episode of the Sketchnote Army podcast.

She discusses how her art has evolved through various stages, provides insights into AI, explains why the unique process of graphic facilitation has yet to be fully captured by technology, and reflects on the story behind her book.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Cara Holland
• Origin Story
• Cara's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Cara
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Cara's Substack
• Visual Edits Newsletter
• The Journey Of Tiny Things
• Graphic Recorder Club
• Graphic Change Academy
• Cara on LinkedIn
• Cara on Intagram
• Draw A Better Business Book

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Neuland graphic board
• Neuland roll of white paper
• Neuland markers
• Leuchtturm small notebook
• Micron Pen
• Copic marker pen
• Fountain pen
• Water colour
• Procreate
• Affirnity
• iPad

Tips

1. Be clear on what it is you're trying to achieve. Don't overproduce or overcomplicate what you're doing.
2. Ignore the rules.
3. Find a community, pull from each other and find ways to collaborate.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde and I'm here with Cara Holland. Cara, how you doing?

Cara Holland: I'm doing good, thanks. How are you?

MR: I'm doing well. So Cara, talk to us about who you are and what you do.

CH: I'm Cara Holland. I'm based in the UK, and I'm a graphic recorder and a trainer.

MR: Okay, and talk to me a little bit. I think we all in this audience know what a graphic recorder does. Tell me about the training part. I'm curious about that.

CH: Well, I guess there's quite a lot to it.

MR: That's what I thought.

CH: It's probably, in one way or another, about 50 percent of my time. We have an online academy called the Graphic Change Academy, and we train people to do what I do.

MR: Okay, got it. Yeah, because I mean, when you say trainer, that could go in a lot of different ways, right? You could be an athletic trainer.

CH: Sure.

MR: You could be all different, but obvious it makes sense that you would teach the skills you know well and help people enter the business right because graphic recording and graphic facilitation and those sketchnoting are tough to do. They demand a lot of you as a person.

CH: They do. They do.

MR: Primarily, you are listening. I would argue that listening is way more important than your drawing skills, personally.

CH: I agree. Yeah, I agree.

MR: And we're not trained to be good listeners. We're trained to flip our screens and listen for two seconds and move on. So it's gotta be kind of an intense thing, but I suspect a fun thing, right, when you see people learning and then applying those concepts.

CH: Yeah, it's great. It is great. I think it comes from being in the business myself and in the early stages of my career, feeling that lack of training and feeling like I wanted somebody to give me some hints and some direction. And it sort of came out of that place really, a need that I had that I found hard to fill.

MR: Interesting. Huh, and so do you tend to focus on a certain student kind of profile or you're open to anyone who comes to you? And maybe in that case, who are the kind of students that come to you? What are their backgrounds?

CH: It's really varied. And so, we've trained people in 92 countries so far.

MR: Wow.

CH: So it's really widespread. And we have a suite of courses. I guess people come for different reasons and there are different courses to suit. The two big courses are be a graphic recorder and be a graphic facilitator and they're two distinct courses. So people come with different desires for both courses.

MR: Got it. I would think that if someone who is a facilitator now but doesn't do the graphic part might be more interested in the graphic facilitation side of things. Where maybe graphic recorders are someone more entry level who just wants to get into the business. Is that a wrong kind of assumption?

CH: I would say that you're right probably on the graphic recorder side, it tends to be people who want to be graphic recorders, although we get quite a lot of in-house people who are wanting to draw more in their workplace. And then the facilitators are really, really varied. So teachers and educators, community workers, people doing that kind of engagement piece on whatever topic they're in who just want to be facilitating more creatively.

MR: Yeah, integrating the visual component to some degree or another, right?

CH: Absolutely. It's all about the visual.

MR: Yeah, because I think, you think about a graphic facilitator, that is a really hard job. Like graphic recording is hard, graphic facilitation can be even harder because not only are you wrangling a room of people who may be squirrely, but then you're attempting to take the things that they're saying and make sense of them and then put them on the wall and then, you know, get a reaction and then obviously move them toward a goal or something, right? That's a lot of things to hold in your head and your body and get people moving forward.

CH: It is a lot of things, but I think the beauty of graphic facilitation in the way that I interpret it, and obviously there's different interpretations to what even this language is, but how I interpret it is there's a lot of pre-creation. And so, if you can create the right template, if you can have the visual assets around the room that support whatever it is you're facilitating on your subject matter expert niche, then those visuals carry you an awful long way.

MR: So, it's a lot to do with framing and preparation and research and understanding and strategy, those kind of things.

CH: Yeah, definitely.

MR: Like before you ever walk in the room with the people, you've got to have a pretty clear idea of where are we going to go with this? How are we going to get there? What are the elements that we're going to use to achieve it, right? All those things.

CH: Exactly. What will you need as a facilitator to have been successful in that session? What do you need out of those people? And how can you use visual tools and visual assets in the room to help you achieve that in the most effective, painless way?

MR: Right. I've done a little bit of this, I guess it would be facilitation when I worked for a financial services company as a contractor. And I worked on a whiteboard and we had developers that sat around the table with product owners and business analysts. And they, we took a feature by feature and designed them on those whiteboard. And I would just listen to what they said and draw what they were saying and then add my own commentary and notes to it. So it was in a sense, facilitation.

I think the good thing about it that I saw was, and I tell this to colleagues now whenever I work and do something like a mock-up even or a wireframe, is at least we have something to argue about because the worst thing that could happen is this illusion of agreement where we all think we agree on something and we actually don't agree and we all have 5 or 10 different, slightly different variations of the concept and by visualization, it can be really made clear like, that's what you mean? That's not what I think. Okay, well let's hash it out and maybe we have to work through some stuff to get alignment, right?

So ultimately the goal there is alignment, which is a long way toward your solution so that you are all aiming at the right thing. Because if five people are doing all five different things, you're have to have another meeting to clarify that.

CH: Absolutely. Yeah. The power of working visually is like getting it out of your head, isn't it?

MR: Yeah, yeah.

CH: And if you get it out of everybody in the room's head, you can see where you're misaligned is, you know, is magic.

MR: Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Those sessions were really popular. We did them every Monday and developers told me they always look forward to them. Honestly, I've told the story before. I did them because I was the bottleneck. I was one designer with 50 developers, product owners and business analysts all breathing down my neck looking for mockups. And so, my solution was, well, I can't hold up the whole team for my mock-up, so the other solution would be, let's just whiteboard wireframes, and worst-case scenario, we'd take a picture of our final solution with notes, and the developer could build it, and then come to me and say, hey, I built this thing, what do you think? And then I could react to it, right? That eased a little pressure. So that was a really practical. I think what I liked about it, it was very practical, it wasn't esoteric in any way, it was very practical, and it solved the problem, so.

That was pretty fun. So it's really important for me to get origin story. So we know you're a graphic recorder and you're a teacher, a trainer, and you teach in these spaces. How did you get here? Were you always doing this stuff? I mean, graphic recording is kind of a new thing-ish. I mean, David Sibbitt did it in the '70s and it's sort of grown over time. But I mean, it's relatively new thing in the scope of, you know, design and creativity as a specific practice, right? So how did you come into it and what did you do before you became who you are now?

CH: I mean, I guess the question here has to be how long do you want the origin story to be? Because I'm in my 50s, right? So there's decades that got me here. And I suppose, pinpoint moments that were maybe the stepping stones along the way.

MR: That sounds good. Yeah. I mean, we have time here, so we're a podcast. We can go longer if we want to. So don't feel constrained. But I think focusing on highlights or pivot points, I look back at my life and I think like, wow, if that didn't happen, I might not be where I am now, right? So those are really fascinating to think about because listeners may be facing pivot points in their own life and think, okay, well, maybe I shouldn't brush off this pivot point. Maybe I should pay attention because this could really impact my future, right?

CH: Sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, then I would say that I didn't go to university. So I'm to start there. I didn't go to university. I left home. I moved to another city. I started working in a picture shop because I was interested in art in the broadest sense, but I didn't consider myself in any way equipped to pursue anything to do with art. And so, I worked in a picture shop, and it seemed like, you know, maybe as close as I was going to get.

MR: It's pretty funny.

CH: And it served me well for a couple of years until I realized that perhaps I might actually want something that had a little bit of a career pathway or somewhere to go with it. And when I was 21, after a little bit of re-studying in social work, I got a job working in a hostel with young people, with teenage mums.

MR: Wow.

CH: And I was the only worker in this hostel that was present in the building. And I found myself using drawing as a tool. So we would draw to socialize, to create sort of like a relaxing space of something we could do together. And I would, with the young people draw in a--let's imagine what your flat might be like when you move out of the hostel, that kind of using drawing as a way. I didn't consciously do it. It's just I like drawing and I like to shoehorn things that I enjoyed into my work. So we would do a bit of drawing there. I didn't really give it any thought.

And then my next job in my mid-20s, early mid-20s, was developing a new project for a charity. And I ended up having a team that I managed and we would have to do--this was pre-computers, which is, you know, mind blowing now to think, but we had paper files and filing cabinets. And if we were writing a report, you know, it would be typed up and copied and sent out. All very old school. And every year, me and my team would have like a planning meeting where we'd look at, well, what have we done in the last year? Where are we going in the next year? What do we want to achieve? You know, the kind of thing.

And then every year in the early years, I was going about that, I take notes, we'd have flip chart, would write on the flip chart, that would get rolled up and turned into dust and rammed in a filing cabinet and lost forever. And one year, because I like drawing, for no other reason than that really, I decided we would draw our annual plan together. That annual plan went up on the wall. The team chose to display that annual plan because they were pleased that they'd done it, right? They were sort of impressed with the output.

MR: Proud of it.

CH: And they'd connected with the process by drawing, even though they were resistant at first. Everybody added to this picture. They drew the annual plan. The annual plan went up on the wall. And over the coming year, I would be at my desk in the corner of at sort of team office and I would see them come and get people and bring them in and show them the plan and then they would talk about the plan and occasionally they'd want to try and add something to the plan and by the end of the year everything on this plan had been achieved. And as a manager I was like well that's something like that's sort of gold dust right when you have a team doing the plan and feeling part of the plan and like they own the plan and they're proud of the plan. And that just got me curious, but I didn't really do anything other than start to shoehorn more opportunities for drawing into my job.

And so, they liked drawing the plan, we'll draw more things. We'll draw an hour one-to-one supervision sessions. And so, I started to draw more at work as a tool without really thinking about it too hard. It just, seemed to work. I enjoyed it. All right, let's do that. And then in the early '90s, I had a different job by now and was managing different projects. And I met a psychologist. All of my work has been with children and young people. Back in my days, I was a social worker. I had gone to night school in the job working with, you the previous team and I'd got my degree. I'd qualified as a social worker. I'd done all of those things.

And then I met a psychologist in this new job and she introduced me to person-centered planning and using visuals to help people plan the services that they're accessing and how they access them and where they are wanting to go and how that might be achieved. And that felt like a little bit of another light bulb moment. I went to a conference and at the conference was a guy called Jack Pierpont who, along with a woman called Marsha Forest invented a person-centered planet called the PATH. And Jack very kindly in this conference said, "If anybody's interested in learning how to do this, stay behind after, I'll teach you how."

So this guy's like a, you know, in his field of inclusive education is like a force, right? He's a big name guy and he stayed behind. And me and one other person chose to stay behind. And he had like a big graphic wall. I'd never seen one of them. He had a big roll of paper. I'd never seen one of them. And some big marker pens, like all of the toys. And he taught me and this other person how to do a path. And it honestly was just a revelation. was just like, ah, not only is this a very exciting thing to do, but it's drawing and it's big and I get to do it and it seems like it's a really effective tool. So that was a little bit of a revelation to me.

And it started me really thinking about, how can I how can I use tools that are used in person-centered planning in a more business setting? Which then got me exploring a little bit more widely. And I came across the Grove and David Sibbitt and started to think, actually, do you know what, there are these things going on in other parts of the world. And some of them have actually been going on for some time.

Like I'd seen mind maps before, but I hadn't heard of Tony Busan. I hadn't looked into that history of people using visual tools to try and make meetings more effective conversations more efficient. And so, all of those things really just floated my boat and I thought, this is what I want to do. And so, in 2006--probably a little preamble to that. So between the years of maybe 2003 and 2006, I was doing this exploration and finding out that such a world of work existed. I had no idea it even existed. I just thought it was something I did because I liked it.

And in this period of exploration, I started to build in more and more opportunities to experiment in my job. So I started to do visual templates for meetings. I started to graphic record meetings. I used to go out and train other people's teams in different things and I started to create big visual training sessions. So I would work through the session and fill bits in, you know, a big visual template.

And so, over the next couple of years, I just did as much of that as I could get away with really. And then one day I was shopping in town and a guy who was the manager of a team I had done some training for came up to me in a shop and he said, "We're still talking about that training. We've still got the picture up on our wall. Can you come and train us in this other thing?" And I thought, well, that's really not my job. So I said yes. And then I went home and I set up my own business. And that was the beginning of the next phase, I guess, of having setting up Graphic Change and calling myself a graphic recorder and a graphic facilitator.

MR: So how long did it take from that moment when you had the opportunity to--it sounds to me like you don't work in the other social work job anymore, so there probably was an endpoint to that.

CH: I do not. A little bit less than a year, I went half time almost straight away. Luckily, my job structure just made that okay to do. Yeah, a little under a year, I worked half time still in my old job and half time as a graphic recorder. And then yeah, jacked it all in and went full time. Early 2007, I was full time.

MR: Okay. So you saw enough work coming in that you could actually make that jump. Otherwise, you know, just because you have a company, it doesn't mean you can just quit your job necessarily. mean, but yeah.

CH: No, that's really true. I think I was quite lucky that it was like it was nearly 20 years ago. So was a long time ago when I started. And I benefited, I think very much from the fact that it was very niche back then. And there weren't an awful lot of people doing it. So I think if you were looking as a company and the certainly the big companies were. If you were looking as a company, you would find me because there weren't that many people to find.

MR: Right.

CH: And what that meant was I got some, I guess, high profile clients quite early on, like big corporations. And that, you get to then put them on your website. That leads to the next thing, gives you a little bit of credibility.

MR: Yeah, cred.

CH: And I also had a good network from my years in social work. I had local work as well for different smaller organizations, so I had a balance from quite early on and you know, that served me well.

MR: Yeah, you don't want to be beholden to just one big client because if they decide they don't want to hire you next year or to the next project, suddenly you've got a problem, right? You want to distribute those clients as much as is reasonable. I mean, you often don't get to choose your clients. They choose you, but having a mix is good.

CH: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that was 2007. 2006, I started Graphic Change 2007. I went full time. And within the first couple of years, really, I'd started doing some training because I felt like it was missing. I felt like I would have liked some training to have stepped into and other people also might like that. So I started offering training and that was a very small part of my working percentages. And over time that just grew and particularly once we took that online then obviously it becomes--your reach is bigger but also, yeah, it's easier. It makes it easier to reach more people more widely.

MR: Yeah. Well, and especially if it's recordings, people can watch at their leisure, right? You don't have to physically be there to teach them. They can follow that. And whether you have live sessions, which is one way people do it, or, you know, online support where you're just chatting, so.

CH: Yeah. So we have a lot of the content is online because we have people from, you know, all different time zones. But for me, the thing that I really wanted, I think when I was, you know, in the early days, I really wanted feedback from somebody who knew what they were talking about.

MR: Yeah, a mentor.

CH: Yeah, I was conscious. I didn't know what I was doing. I was making it up. And I wanted somebody to sort of hold my hand a bit and give me some guidance. And so, from the very early days without training, like it's always been really important to me that everybody gets one-to-one feedback on everything. So every piece of work I see it, I feedback on it. It's an ongoing dialogue throughout the course. And to me, that was a really important part of it. And it's over the years that's built up.

And so, I think that probably took me through the middle stage of my journey. Growing the training, still doing the graphic recording, and very much sort of business as usual with the graphic recording. And then, that brings us, in 2018, my wife joined the business, who is more technical than me. And she built the online academy that we have now. So that's our own platform. And what else? I had a book published in 2018. That was sort of a bit of a key moment for me, I guess.

MR: What's the name of the book so people can go buy it?

CH: It's Draw a Better Business.

MR: Draw a Better Business. Sounds cool.

CH: And that came about because I was really conscious that I was running a small business and other people are running small businesses, but creatives running businesses don't necessarily have business skills. Your main passion is what brings you into the business. Your creativity brings you to the business.

MR: Right, doing your thing, yeah.

CH: And suddenly having to learn how to run a business is tough. And yet I was in the other half of my life, I was in all of these, you know, high level business strategic meetings and learning all of this business knowledge. And I felt that sort of disconnect between coming in my ears was big business expertise, but the other side of it was running this very small one-person business. So yeah, that's what the book was about. Then what else can I tell you?

MR: I'm kind of curious, so when pandemic came, were you relying more on like physical boards and being in person and how did that impact you? Did you shift to iPads or some online tool where you could continue to do that work? That seems like a theme for most agencies or individuals that do that work.

CH: Yeah. I mean, I was very glad we had the academy when the pandemic hit because the training continued. But yeah, the jobs, they fell off a cliff, didn't they?

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

CH: So it went from, it went from busy to I had a little job board next to my desk and I was just pulling those post-its off, you know, every day. It was quite--

MR: Yeah, crumpling them up and throwing them in the trash, right? Well, there goes that one.

CH: Yeah, it was a daunting time to have, you know, that was our business was the only income into our household. So it really was from, you know, we were doing absolutely fine to almost zero coming in apart from courses we sold. When it started, the new term had launched sort of a month before. So we'd done all those sales and there weren't going to be any new sales for a little while. So yeah, that was a daunting time and it did absolutely kick me up the ass and make me learn to record digitally. And that has stood me in good stead because it's not, although it has gone back a little bit towards people wanting, you know, big paper. I would say more people ask for digital now than paper.

MR: Yeah, I can see. I mean, there's, I think of immediate benefits to digital is often the format tends to be more conducive to sharing or publishing or posting where big, wall sized things are more difficult to, how do you show that without people's pinching and zooming, right?

CH: Yeah.

MR: So in a mobile context, they're great for in person, they're great for like your team to hang it on the wall. If you can convince them to do that. Because like you said, many of these pieces end up getting rolled up and put in a closet someplace. But it sounds like the kind of work you're doing typically would be stuff that would hang around and teams would hold onto and use basically with your mindset around it and why you would build it and maybe your recommendations to them, how to continue using it as a reference point, right?

CH: Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world, that's what we all want, isn't it? We want what we've done to be useful and to have a life beyond.

MR: Yeah, some period of time. Yeah.

CH: Yeah.

MR: Because eventually, you know, the one-year plan, after the one year, it's old news and you have to make a new one because all the context changes, right?

CH: Definitely.

MR: But that's good for you because then you have to go back and help them or at least be a facilitator. Unless you're teaching someone in the business to be a facilitator, which I guess is okay because then they would probably share with their colleagues like you guys should do this, talk to Cara and she'll get you set up.

CH: Sure, So yeah, think the pandemic was a key sort of step change towards a new way of working. And I don't mind it. I work very happily digitally. I still do really enjoy working pen on paper or pen on cardboard or pen on random surfaces. And I think maybe what has evolved for me in more recent years, maybe since 2018, 2019, and then the pandemic has been--because I feel like I've been at work a long time.

And to me now, what that makes me think is that I want to do work that makes me happy. Whereas when I was a little bit younger, my motivations were maybe slightly different. I wanted to work, I don't know, because I wanted to grow or I wanted to earn or I wanted a particular client. So I was striving, I think, for a long time, trying to work my way up and make my business successful. Whereas now in more recent years, I think my focus has shifted and I guess I'm lucky that it can, that I've got consistent enough work that I can shift my focus towards what do I enjoy, what sort of makes me happy, and how can I do more of that?

MR: Yeah, having a reputation certainly helps there, right? Having a track record and a reputation means you can make those selections like, I'm choosing to do this and not choosing to do that because that one is more interesting and more fun.

CH: Yes, definitely. And so, I think that's sort of the stage I'm at now, which I feel lucky to be in. It feels like another step change for me. And I'm enjoying being able to view it all just very slightly differently, maybe from further down the track than I've been able to before.

MR: Well, that's great. That's great. It sounds like you're in a good place and, you know, this business seems to have lots of twists and turns, so we don't know what the next twist and turn will be.

CH: That's really true.

MR: I mean, probably the next thing will be, you know, we chatted before we got started with how will AI impact this? How will an influx of lots of graphic recorders and sketchnoters and facilitators impact the business? Like, does it get spread across more people? We don't know that, you know, is it still valued by companies? guess that's, again, that's our job is to show the value.

CH: Exactly. Like I'm really conscious that I've been training my competition for a really long time now.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

CH: But honestly, I like it. I think that the future for, I hope for me, I hope for other graphic recorders--this sounds maybe not how I intended. Artisanal, like, is a really misused word. But like I think the art of what we do is just is glorious. And I think the rise of AI just makes it more glorious. And I think the more people do in it and the more we can show the value of the human mind and human hand in the process, the more opportunity there will be. Like it will become more sought after, I hope.

MR: Yeah, it'll be more unique.

CH: Not less and what will drop off are those sort of lower end jobs that maybe what will happen--I don't know if this is true, but maybe what will happen is those early stepping stones will become harder to find for people who are starting out and as more experienced or people further down our careers, we're going to need to maybe find a way to build the ladder for those people because those low end jobs are what will disappear. Maybe that's the jeopardy is how do you, you're starting out, get those early gigs that are maybe the ones that are more likely to have been farmed out. And that's a dilemma--

MR: For new people. Yeah.

CH: -I think, you know, we need to, as an industry, figure out, because we do need new people. It isn't a closed gate situation. And the more people doing it, the more we can collaborate, the more people there are spreading the word.

MR: Well, I think there's a lot of opportunity. Like all the work that we're doing, if you counted everybody doing this work, like it's a fraction. We're a small percentage, right? Like you think of it that way, even though there's more people coming in the space, it's still a fraction and there's so much opportunity. So thinking of it as like this competition, it sort of is, but like, I think what'll be interesting is new people that come into the space with different perspectives.

Like you came from a social work perspective. What if somebody comes from, I don't know, a technical perspective or something else, like, they're bring a unique perspective and be able to address different people that you and I can't address because we're, because of our unique perspectives, right? Like, we have certain spaces that we fit naturally, and we hope that the skills of being visual and using it in a way to move things forward would expand into different areas that, you know, we can't address. That's what I always think when people write books, like you say you have a book. I'm excited about that because what that does is validate the space of visual thinking.

CH: Definitely.

MR: You know, my book is great, but maybe it doesn't excite certain people. Maybe your book is a better fit for them or, you know, like, just the reality that everybody's in a different place and like sometimes things just fit better because that's just who they are, right? It's not a knock against anyone's book or approach, but just that fits better.

CH: One of the things that I really try and get learners to understand or appreciate is that they can start from where they're at. So they have expertise in their history, their subject matter, their degree, their previous jobs. Starting from that position and looking around, there will be opportunities already waiting to be tapped into this visual market. And you're already an expert in wherever you've come from. And we don't need to necessarily be looking at where somebody else is. And there's such power in seeing ourselves as a community and finding ways to collaborate or finding our peers and learning from each other. Yeah, think AI is a threat in the same way as the pandemic was a threat and going hybrid and working online was a threat, but that what we do is not confined to creating a picture that AI could do if we asked them to.

MR: Yeah, I think, you know, the test that I've done and I haven't done one recently with AI is to tell it to build a sketch note from a--like, I gave like the Gettysburg address by Abraham Lincoln. Like it did something that looked like a sketchnote, but like all the words were gibberish and they were just random images. Like, I'm sure that it could probably improve, but like that is a very difficult skill to like make choices about what's important. Like it's really good at recording everything in a meeting. Like say we recorded this transcript, like it can do that pretty well because there's no--and it does summarization too, but sometimes those summaries are problematic.

I know Apple and their summary engine has had issues where it takes something that meant one thing in its full context and tried to summarize it and it meant something completely different, right? So the risk is there, you're going to let the AI hallucinate your meeting and maybe say things that weren't said because it doesn't understand the context. And so those are challenges that I think I haven't seen it addressed yet, it may. I'm not saying it can't, but.

CH: I've had clients already come to me who have come to me with AI images and said, "Can you improve the AI image? I've already got them to do this. Can you correct it?" So that's already happening, you know, where people are for--

MR: Interesting

CH: -for the, I don't know, their slide decks or what they see as sort of those everyday kind of visuals that maybe they would have hired somebody in to do, or maybe they would have used clip art. I don't know, but they use an AI for something more sophisticated to give them a more sophisticated visual. But they are so flawed, so flawed right now.

MR: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting too. I guess maybe this season is going to turn into the AI season. don't know. The other past seasons have touched on it, of course. like, I think what, if people are going to use AI to replace someone who would do normally what we would do, maybe at the low end or a small project, like they're going to face all the problems that we face, right? That it's really complex to condense ideas and like, how do you think creatively? And I mean, the AI isn't really gonna think creatively for you, it's just gonna take other people's ideas and kind of mush them together. So it may not be satisfying.

And then on top of which, like in my experience, I prompt a tool to give me a visual. I can't just go in and say, take away the six-fingered person and change their t-shirt to say this. And it just gives me like a whole new image. Like it can't do revision in that way, at least that I've seen. Again, it's possible, it's already happening, but like, think about all the overhead of a person who's just trying to get an image and they're struggling because they're constantly prompting and tweaking the prompting to get it to do that. Like at some point you're probably spending more time prompting than maybe, you probably should have hired someone just to do it, right? In some cases, I don't know. So it's interesting.

CH: I think it's a real education piece that we need to be able to explain what it is we do and how the visual output is just the finished product. But the process of how we get there and the thinking involved is not something that can easily be prompted into AI. If you want somebody to draw you a logo or create you a picture, AI can do that. You can say, you know, draw me this, but that isn't what we do. We just happen to be thinking out loud, you know, with pictures. But it's the thinking that people are hiring us for, even if they don't, they, yeah. The processing, yeah.

MR: Yeah, and the listening, right? The listening and, you know, those things, a combination.

CH: Yeah.

MR: I know a couple of seasons ago we had a guest on and she talked about using AI and she said her impression of like these large language model type applications, which is what most of us are dealing with. If they try to do everything, they struggle, right? Because it's hard, you know, and but if you give them guardrails and give them structure, and within a specific thing, like listen to our meeting and write everything down that I say and then summarize it to your best of your ability. Like that narrow framework, those tools seem to work better, but if you give it a swath of things that it has to consume and make sense out of, at least right now it struggles.

And that's sort of, in effect, what the job we're doing, right, is taking all this crazy stuff, like what's it like in the room? Are the people angry? Are they happy? Where's the contention? It can only transfer what they say, but what is the attention behind it or in the context of like, well, that department's angry because they didn't get as much budget last year and they're worried that they're not gonna get as much budget so they're more aggressive and like all these dynamics are happening, but it's not being documented anywhere. It's sort of a spirit in the room. Like you kind of need a person to identify that stuff.

And then like, okay, understanding that, how do we then approach this so that that department gets their message out so they feel like they're heard and they're not ripped off on not getting budget that they feel like they should have, right? How can I emphasize them? And, you know, that's all the kind of stuff that's going on, which is often misunderstood as not even being a thing, right?

CH: Yeah, we're not graphic recording everything that happens in that room. We're filtering, we're prioritizing, we're making connections, and we're bringing clarity to the whole day's conversations and summarizing that into something that is relevant and concise and memorable.

MR: Right.

CH: So yeah, eventually AI will be able to do that, but it's a little way off, I think.

MR: Yeah, well, I guess we'll see. You again, I don't say any of these things thinking it can never do it. I just haven't seen it yet. So it'll be interesting to see where the improvements come. Again, if it doesn't make money for the company doing the AI, they may not focus in those areas, right? If it's a really hard problem, it just may never do it because not that it couldn't do it, but no one is interested in making it do that, right? So--

CH: Yeah, people will be cheaper, I think, for a little while than to have a raft of expert prompters figuring out how to un-wrangle a situation they haven't been in yet.

MR: Yeah, potentially.

CH: You know, it's complicated.

MR: Yeah, it's interesting. Anyway, so that's our little AI chat. I guess it seems like it's hard to avoid these days with it appearing everywhere. So let's do a little shift. I'm really curious to hear about your favorite tools. Start with analog and then go digital. So I love to hear like pens, pencils, notebooks, post-it notes, I don't know, whatever those things are that you just seem to keep gravitating to because they work well in your work.

CH: I guess different tools for different types of work. So if I start with the big stuff, if I'm working in a big scale at an event, then I'm gonna be using my old Neuland graphic boards that are ancient and they don't sell them anymore. But I don't want to upgrade because I'm quite short and I can't really handle those easels and boards. So I like my old ones and Neuland Roll of brilliant white paper and mostly Neuland pens, like I'm pretty much Neuland. And so, that would be big scale, but I really like, not everybody agrees to let me do it at a big event, but I like working small scale at big events and working on--you can get like biodegradable phone board or card and working at maybe A3 scale and creating lots of individual images that can be moved around on a wall as a live part of the event.

MR: Interesting.

CH: So it can be grouped or prioritized as an active part of the facilitation. So I really enjoy doing that and I think it has a different kind of value. So depending on what the client is trying to achieve, I might suggest that to them and I really like that. I also work on a small scale because I keep a public visual journal. And when I'm journaling, so I have like a Leuchtturm. So that's what I keep my journaling.

MR: It's like an A4 size.

CH: It's slightly smaller than A4. I think it's like B5 or something.

MR: Okay, all right.

CH: I might've made that up. So I really like that. And I would probably use like a Micron--

MR: Microns, of course, yeah.

CH: -pen and either Neulands or Copics for color. So that would be my journalling. When I'm sketchnoting, I quite like to work really small. So I have like--this is my current one, which is really small.

MR: Yeah, it's even smaller than an A5. It's probably like a--it looks like a traveler's notebook size. Something like that.

CH: And that's what I'll just use, you know, do sketching in. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of thing. So I really like working, you know, that kind of just with whatever pen. So whatever pen I have, I'll do that.

MR: A little less precious, I guess, right?

CH: Much less precious, and that's always in my bag, that one.

MR: There you go.

CH: And I really like, yeah, I just like the act of pen on paper. I wouldn't want to ever move too far away from that. And I think at the minute I'm exploring a bit more sort of graphic journalism, at the minute, I'm hoping to start a project that's based on that sort of live situation, illustration and pulling together a narrative from lots of individual stories. So that really interests me and that will all be pen and ink, probably a fountain pen, which I haven't decided which one yet, and watercolour, I would think. But that's a project I'm just sort of dabbling in now. So that would be my analogue tools.

MR: That's great. Then I assume probably an iPad and maybe Procreate, which everybody says.

CH: Yep, it's true. Yeah, it's hard to bit, I think, for ease of use.

MR: Yeah, I'm a Procreate user for certain things, illustration a lot of times. Although I've been using Concepts a lot in the last couple of years and quite like it because I'm an old graphic designer who came up with Adobe Illustrator and vectors. So there's some very powerful things that it can do, which I suppose also would include Fresco if you're in the Adobe world. But basically, the idea of vectors and movability and resizability and those kinds of things are pretty cool. So, nice.

CH: I've just, not quite just, but a few months ago, I made the move away from Adobe and to Affinity, but I'll be honest, I haven't learned to use it yet. So I'm waiting for something to make me learn to use it.

MR: That project. Yeah, I'm like that too. Okay, that project I'm using that tool and then that sort of forces you to figure it out.

CH: Yeah. Whereas now I'm thinking of more and more projects where I can just be more analogue. So I'm regressing, I think.

MR: Or just, know, varying yourself. You know, if you think back, we talked about the pandemic before. I think one of the positive things. I mean, if you can take a positive thing out of that is I think it forced a lot of people who were really only doing, you know, physical boards to learn the digital and where it fits with them. And what it did for customers is it opened up the menu, right? So you didn't just have, okay, I can either do a big board or nothing. Or a small sketchnote or a big board or nothing else. And now you had digital and you could come into a meeting and do it live and switch the camera to it and, you know, have probably the ability.

Like a lot of times when I do this kind of work, I will, I'll take a recording, I'll turn it into a sketch note so it's not necessarily live, feed it back to the client. They will then say, this isn't the focus we want or there's a typo right there and I'll just make some tweaks and then it. That's now ready for sharing or printing or whatever they need to do with it. So that's an interesting opportunity too. So I think having these more options is good for both customers and for us if we're willing to be adaptable.

So I want to shift to the last thing we're gonna do, which is I always like something practical. Let's say there's someone listening to visual thinker or whatever that means to them and they're maybe stuck in a rut, or they just need a little inspiration, what would be three things you would offer them, mindset or practical tips that would help them kind of move forward and get excited again.

CH: So first of all, I'd say be really clear on what it is you're trying to achieve. And by that, I mean, I think the perception of graphic recording is very shiny. It's very, it's these beautiful big graphics and it's all very slick. but graphic recording can be that stuff you talked about at the beginning, can be in the room, much more, you know, evolving in the moment.

MR: Rough and tumble. Yeah.

CH: It's more of a working tool, right? I call it that sort of roll your sleeves up and get a bit scrappy with the information. Doesn't have to be tidy. Doesn't have to be in a particular kind of pen. Doesn't have to be, can be on anything, in any tool, but it's graphic recording still, right?

MR: Mm-hmm.

CH: So be clear on what it is you're trying to achieve. What does the client need you to achieve and work accordingly. Don't over produce or over complicate what you're doing if you don't need to. That would maybe be my first tip. Second would be, second would be, maybe it's similar to first, ignore the rules. I think we're really good at thinking there is the right way of doing stuff. And there isn't, if you, if you think about what makes you happy, what subjects you're passionate about what way you like working, know, maybe you like working with I don't know charcoal and watercolor Well, do you graphic recording that? it?

MR: Find a way to do it.

CH: Exactly, so sort of pursue your passions and your way of being fulfilled because life is you know long and hard and you can make yourself stressed or you can make yourself happy in these little moments. We don't have control of everything or many things even but if we can make some choices about where we focus our work, then that's a good thing. And also it's a little bit about why your work is your work. So it's a little bit about individuality, I think.

MR: That's good.

CH: And then I guess the third thing is to find community. Like seek others, whether it's in in graphic recording, whether it's finding other people who share a passion for particular way of working or a subset of the graphic recording community that works in the way you do on the subject that you do. So to find your people and, you know, pull from each other and find ways to collaborate.

MR: Get that support. Yeah.

CH: I mean, even, you know, that'd be the most exciting thing. Find ways to work together and, you know, connect with the people where you can be mutually useful to each other.

MR: Yeah, I found those are most satisfying when I've partnered up with people that I admire and we've done work together. It's been great.

CH: Yeah.

MR: Well, those are three great practical tips. Thank you for sharing those.

CH: You're very welcome.

MR: And then the last thing we'll do in the episode is how can people find you? Where do you do your work? I know you have a sub stack that you're doing and you probably get websites and training.

CH: Yeah.

MR: So tell us about those. We'll make sure they get in the show notes.

CH: So Substack, I'm enjoying Substack at the minute. We have the Visual Edit is the graphic change newsletter. So that goes out to, I don't know, about 1400 people or so. And that's sort of practical bits about being a graphic recorder. But also, we've just started the graphic recorder club literally a couple of days ago. And that's sort of like a membership space on Substack where you can hopefully learn in a bit more detail and connect with other people. And also on Substack, keep my journal, the jot, so I have a couple of Substack publications. I like it as a format a lot. So if you're into visual journaling, that's where you'd find me.

MR: That's the one I'm subscribed to and I enjoy it when you post.

CH: If you're interested in training, we have the Graphic Change Academy site, graphicchangeacademy.com and on there you'll find all the courses. And I'm also still on Instagram, but honestly, I've got limited energy for social media and the energy I have is more on Substack right now. So technically I'm on Instagram and I'm also on LinkedIn, you know, I'm going to say, I'm going to say come to Substack, find me there. That's what I'm going to say.

MR: Yeah, and your links to those other places like LinkedIn and Instagram will probably be in your profile so you can get to them. Yeah.

CH: Probably. Somewhere, maybe, yeah.

MR: Maybe.

CH: There's a limit, isn't there, to where you can be.

MR: Yeah, there's almost only so much energy you can put out there. So you have to make your choices.

CH: Yeah.

MR: You have to make your choices.

CH: Yeah, definitely.

MR: So cool. Well, thanks, Cara. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and your story. It's always great to hear another story and hear where you came from because I think in your story is the universal, which is everyone came from some strange place to this. Because like we said at the outset, this is a pretty new space. So everybody had to come from somewhere else.

I mean, maybe now there's young people that are starting out in this space as professionals and will stay there their whole careers for all we know, right? But maybe for the generations before that, you would have come from somewhere else. And I think that's still going to be true. That people are going to come from odd places. And I think like you identified, bringing your unique perspective, whatever that interest it is and overlaying it on top of graphics is really powerful because that gives you a unique voice. So thanks for reminding us of that.

CH: Yeah, you're welcome. And wouldn't it be great if they did teach that graphic recording existed at school? Like if I had known that in art class at school, it would have been just like a genius moment. But yeah.

MR: Yeah, I mean, I think you could take private classes, kind of like graphic change, but I don't know that there's any universities teaching it. Again, it could be that we're just not aware of it. That would be cool. So maybe it's your opportunity.

CH: I think there have been some moves towards certifying certain elements of it. But I'm not really into that either because think, yes, as we formalize it and say you have to have a qualification, it excludes so many people. you know, just tell everybody about it. That's enough.

MR: Great. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks so much, Cara. Thanks for being on the show and for everyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army podcast. Until the next episode, this is Mike, and I'll talk to you soon.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Nishant Jain?
• Origin Story
• Nishant's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Nishant
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast

• Nishant's Sneaky Art newsletter
• Nishant’s Website
• Nishant on Intagram
• Make (Sneaky) Art Book
• Find Nishant on his book tour
• John Muir Laws Sketchnote Army Podcast Episode

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Lamy Safari fountain pen
• Stillman & Birn brown sepia toned sketchbook
• Moleskin sketchbook
• iPad
• Apple Pencil

Tips

1. Carry a small sketchbook.
2. Give yourself permission to be curious.
3. Get started as quickly as possible.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with my friend, Nishant Jain. Nishant, it's so good to have you on the show.

Nishant Jain: Hi Mike, thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to talk to you.

MR: Yeah, we've been talking for not quite a year, probably six months, but we've been aware of each other longer. I've been a subscriber to your Sneaky Artist Substack for a while.

NJ: Mm-hmm.

MR: And I think our meeting story was we were at—what's the name of the event that John Muir Laws puts on? The Wild Wonder event.

NJ: Yeah, Wild Wander Conference.

MR: And I think, was I doing something, or you were doing something, and I said, "Oh, look, it's Nishant Jain" And you're like, "What?" And you knew who I was. It was a funny moment, I think.

NJ: Yeah. I think it was your talk, and I was curious about sketchnoting, and so I jumped into it.

MR: Okay, got it. Got it. And for those who are not aware Wild Wonder is an amazing organization. You can go back—I'll put a link into the John Muir Laws interview from years ago. He's a super fascinating guy. If you listen to that podcast, you'll want to grab a sketchbook and a pen and go outside and sketch birds or something. Seriously, he's very, very exciting and inspiring person, and they run a workshop every year, I think around September. And they just have amazing people, and you can learn so much, and it's worth going to.

After that sponsorship by Wild Wonder Foundation which I'm happy with sponsoring because they're great. So that's how we met. And then we just started connecting and chatting, and you were a great advisor to me in my Sketchnote Lab startup. You gave me a lot of mindset around the way you handle your Substack, which helped me a lot. That really accelerated the way that worked, and I think the way I think about it, which has been encouraging. So, thank you for that.

NJ: Mm-hmm. I'm glad to hear that.

MR: I think you do a lot of things, so before I assume what you do, coz I don't know, even if I know, tell us who you are and what you do.

NJ: Sure, sure. Okay, so I'm Nishant and I gave myself this job title a few years ago of Sneaky Artist. It turns out you're allowed to make up job titles completely from scratch.

MR: Oh, yeah.

NJ: I was delighted to discover this, but I'm not just an artist, although art has become my primary medium of expression. I'm a writer, I'm also a podcaster, and as one has to be in this independent career climate, you cannot just be one thing. Everybody is multi-hyphenate. So as an artist, what I do, it's a practice that I did not think would make me an artist. I did not start this practice in order to become an artist. I just did it as a distraction technique. I just did it as a way to maybe learn to draw a little better.

I was trying to be a cartoonist and I was trying to be a writer. And before all of this, I was an engineer. So I completed a master's degree—I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering. I've worked on race cars. I've worked on human prosthetics. And then I started a PhD program in neuroscience to become a neuroscientist working with stroke patients. But through this whole journey of education, I really, really—if you asked me, I would have said what I want to be is a writer. All I wanted to be was a writer. All I wanted to do was write political satire, write humor.

And that's what I was doing every evening. I would do my studies, I would do my assignments and my projects and then for an hour or two hours, whatever time I'd get, I'd be writing stories. I wrote scripts for standup comedy. I tried open mic standup comedy. I wrote for television shows in India. I wrote a blog. I had a web comic of political humor for years. And I tried to express myself with everything that I could, you know?

And for someone like me who isn't educated in these things, who isn't in the network of these things, the internet was a big boom. Immediately I started putting my work online first as a blog and then when Facebook came along, then Facebook, and then images became a thing on Facebook, so I pivoted to comics. So, I was very naturally agile around the medium of expression. For me, very quickly it became that you have an idea and then that idea can be expressed in lots of different ways and sometimes it is dependent on you to figure out what is the best medium to express this idea. Some things are better as a joke, some things are better as a comic, and some things are better as short stories.

So quickly this became something for me to figure out and I became very excited by being able to do this as well. The freedom of the internet to let us express ourselves in any way we want and hopefully build an audience. So after a couple of years into my PhD program, I finally decided to commit to a life of creativity. I quit my PhD program. I moved in with my girlfriend, who's now my wife, and I started writing this big novel that was inside my head.

And after years of writing and writing, it was such an amazing rush to be able to do it full time, but I would get about 30 percent into it and I would hit a block. And so, I would start again from zero and then again 30 percent and a block. And I wrote five drafts this way. The last draft I wrote by hand with a fountain pen thinking maybe just writing by hand will somehow unlock something special. And I kept hitting this block.

And I was so frustrated and I was so mad at myself and I felt so many different feelings that I just in—there was this one day that I just grabbed my notebook and I grabbed my pen and I went out to a café and I decided that I was just done with words and words were just not working for me and I need to spend some time away from them. So I got a coffee and I started observing these people around me.

I was an immigrant in North America. I was in Chicago then—and I'm fascinated, but Chicago is my favorite city in the world. I was fascinated by the people around me. These, you know, just the way people live their lives in America is so different from everywhere else. So I started observing them. I gave myself this room to observe them because I needed to distract myself. And I started making quick drawings of them.

The drawings were quick because A, I am naturally impatient and B, I didn't know when they would leave. I thought they might just get up and go, so I need to draw very quickly. And finally, because I was very self-conscious of doing this very strange thing, I was trying to look at people and draw them and I didn't want anybody to see me do this funny thing, so I thought I'd be very secretive about it. I'll keep the book in the palm of my hand, and I'll draw very quickly, and nobody will see me do this "weird thing." This became the origin of Sneaky Art.

MR: Right.

NJ: I started calling it sneaky art because I was being sneaky and trying to get away with a sketch, an embarrassing sketch that wasn't very good and that you're not supposed to do. Like it just felt wrong. What a strange thing to want to do as an adult. And I realized this is a lot of fun. I finished a drawing in an hour, and it didn't look all that great, but I felt so proud of it because it just felt like a wholesome one hour had been spent, observing and translating, and it just felt good.

So I came back to do it the next day and the next day and the next day and before I knew it I was on this journey to discover new things to see new people. I would go to different parts of Chicago, different neighborhoods and just sit in new cafés, watch these people and try to come away with something new. Did I do something today that I didn't do yesterday? Am I able to draw something today that I wasn't able to draw yesterday?

And it began with this humble idea that I just want to be able to maybe draw slightly better comics. Maybe I'll learn how to draw nice backdrops and settings and, you know, like make a person look like a person. My comic so far for five years, I'd been published in newspapers and things, but still it was a stick figure comic because I just didn't know how to draw any better. So my goal with this was that maybe I learned to draw a little bit better in and make my comics richer, but it became its own thing.

As a person who loves words, as a person who finds so much inspiration in books and novels and stories and humor, suddenly I found that just the art, just the lines and the shapes were saying things that I had been having a lot of trouble saying for the past few years, especially in the political climate that India was going through at that time and is now right in the middle of a right-wing authoritarian government. Not really leaving a lot of space for dissent and humor.

A lot of people were coming under a lot of abuse on social media platforms for expressing views against the ruling party. And I felt really disheartened by this situation. I took it very hard. I wasn't thick-skinned enough. Like, I got a lot of negative opinions from a lot of people, some of whom I knew personally, and it just made me feel like there's something here that's missing. Like I'm trying to say something, but it's when I say it to them, they hear something else entirely.

And I think we are able to see this now, the different realities people live in based on their spot on the political spectrum. And it made me feel that words are perhaps not very useful because they don't get the point across. And I think inside my heart, I was looking for something to say, something to express that could be just universally true, that wasn't up for debate, that couldn't be misinterpreted.

And so, now looking back at it, I think the journey with art was a journey to find something that is universally true. When I think about my tiny people drawings now, and I talk to people about what my art is, I tell them this, it's a way to take away the differences between people and show you the universality of our human existence.

I was an immigrant in North America. I was feeling really out of place as a brown guy with a beard in that particular situation in those years. And for me to feel like this place can be home, needed me to find these correlations between people. How are they similar to me? Not how they are dissimilar to me. And differences are very surface level, but this journey with art and drawing tiny people was a journey to peel away these surface differences. Take away the recognizability that makes them uniquely the person that I'm not and come to that level at which I can relate with them as a human, human to human. And that's what the art today is.

Words made a comeback into my journey very soon because I love to write, and I started writing a newsletter when Instagram started to feel exploitative and poisonous and algorithmically driven, it started to feel like I'm being manipulated and this is not a good way to engage with people who like your work. So I started writing a newsletter.

And so, now today I can say that I'm a writer as well because every week I put out a newsletter to share what I see in my world, the drawings I make of it, what it makes me think about, the things I read, the things I feel, and those are the things I write today. I also have a podcast. I make the Sneaky Art podcast in which I speak to other people who are obsessed with drawing from observation, from walking around their world and sitting in street corners and drawing into sketchbooks. And that's what we do. We talk about this on the Sneaky Art podcast. So these are the things I do.

As of this year, I'm also a published author. We'll talk about that a little later, I'm sure. But yeah, like it's been a journey of—since I quit my PhD program, I promised myself that I would do everything that I wanted to do, and I would never narrow my path. And that's the journey I'm on. It's a journey of curiosity. It's directed by specific job titles. It's directed by what feels like fun and what I want to explore.

MR: And I'm sure just like you talked about writing the book, and you'd get stuck at this 30 percent mark, you know if you're doing things as an experimental sounds to me like you're experimenting. If you did something, and it just didn't feel right, or it just wasn't working you would just leave it behind and move to the next experiment until you get a set of experiments that continue to work, right, and sort of think things that way?

NJ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you know, I think drawing comics brings that home really, because to try and draw a weekly or a bi-weekly comic means you generate ideas every moment of the day. And maybe one percent of those ideas you take to completion. So you have to get into the habit of having an idea, loving it, trying to develop it, and then it doesn't work, and you have to put it aside, and you have to do something else.

And at first when you start, of course, it feels like a loss, like I got this, I have to finish it. But then I think over time, the more you do it, you get into this cycle of knowing that no good idea is ever lost. Everything stays in the back burner of your mind. And maybe in a few years or a few months, I'll be in a space to revisit it. It'll occur to me again, and I'll see it from a different perspective, and it'll work. So I think one of the boons of drawing comics for me and writing short stories was that no idea in itself is so precious and nothing is ever lost.

MR: That's a great way to think about it. think this just happened to be last week in a project I did two and a half, three years ago, an interface design. It's someone came with a request and I mean that wasn't exactly that, but it was mostly based on what I'd done. So that thing that I did two and half years ago that went nowhere suddenly is revived and coming back to life again. So I see this in all of many other areas too.

NJ: Yeah.

MR: I always think I always wonder like sometimes the ideas are good, but maybe their timing is wrong, right? Like you have to wait for the time to be right.

NJ: Absolutely.

MR: Yeah.

NJ: So, so true. Sometimes the timing is wrong. Sometimes the world isn't ready. Sometimes you're not ready. And one or the other needs to shift a little bit. And sometimes that's just about waiting.

MR: Mm-hmm. Well, the other thing you didn't mention is you're also doing a course. So you do this tiny people drawing and you're teaching that in a course which I see on social media probably because I'm following you and like your stuff, but that looks really interesting too and why don't you talk a little bit about that, and we'll work backwards from that into the book that you're writing because I feel like they're sort of two halves of the same coin or something, or I don't know how you would—

NJ: In a sense, yeah, the book has a larger ambit, but the course is quite focused on something that I am most popular for. The reason why my Instagram account blew up one day is that people love to see me draw these tiny people. So how it began is that firstly, I draw tiny people like I told you, because I'm fascinated by people. I love to see what people do. And as a new person in a new world, I was trying to figure out how I should fit in. How do I know how to live here? How to make these public spaces my space as well? How to give myself permission to enjoy this café, this park? And the way for me was to watch what other people do and the way to allow myself to watch other people was to draw.

So, although I was super hesitant about taking on this role as an instructor, a bit of imposter syndrome kicks in, like I feel like I'm not equipped. Surely, I'm not qualified to be telling other people what to do. I think what worked is knowing that I have an experience to share, and sometimes you don't need to hear from someone who necessarily knows a lot more than you or is somehow the best at it, but just somebody who can give you permission to think a certain way. And I think of my role as a teacher to be that of a facilitator. I'm here to point the way to some interesting things and maybe people find something to do from it.

So I did a bunch of Zoom workshops and I did a lot of in-person workshops, and you know, all of them are basically two hours, two and a half hours, and people can join you if they're physically near you or people can join you if that time zone works out for them. And as my audience started to grow and the number of people who wanted to learn from me started to grow, I realized this workshop business is not really doing them enough service.

So I designed the course because a course is entirely self-paced. I get to make it to the level of depth that I want. There is over seven hours of content in this course, more than 50 different videos. I get to take people outside. I've recorded myself drawing and talking inside the café, at a street corner, on a train, things I can't do for a workshop that I do.

MR: Right.

NJ: Everybody around the world is able to buy it and then watch it at their comfort, watch it at their choice of speed, at their choice of day of week and hour, and follow along and consume it the way they want. So there's a lot of consent and mutual respect in this whole setup, which I'm really appreciating. I have the freedom, and they have all the freedom to do it, how they want.

So this course has been a real blessing for me because I've put—this is a course specifically about how to draw tiny people. I think everybody should be in the business of tiny people drawing because it is—you know, I think one of the biggest crimes of our modern technology in our lives is, it's put us into little bubbles. We look at our little devices, we listen to our music, and we stay in, you know, this sensory bubble that insulates us from our world. We don't interact with our world so much.

And everybody's like this. You go on a bus and everybody on the bus is on their phones inside their own little cocoon, not interacting with each other, not looking at each other. And I think it makes us more disconnected and it makes for a lonelier world if we are this way.

So a sketchbook habit is a way to perhaps look at other people, to find commonalities, to perhaps understand how rich and beautiful our world is. And one of the reasons I wanted to make this course is I want other people to see that around you there is so much diverse human life, so much happening at all times of the day, and if you look, you will always find something beautiful.

So now we have a little community, hundreds of participants sharing the tiny people they find in their corner of the world. Every morning I wake up and I see drawings of tiny people from Hong Kong, from London, from Australia, from somewhere in Europe, somewhere in South America, it's absolutely rich and beautiful.

And you know what we're seeing? We're seeing that no matter where you go, you find humanity is still the same. A tiny person in Brazil having coffee is the same as a tiny person in the UK having coffee. There's something beautiful about that. And there's something beautiful that someone was able to share it with us. And so, it's been a real delight to be able to make a course and have people learn from me and see what they come up with.

MR: There's something you mentioned in there at the outset, which is you had a little bit of imposter syndrome, like who am I to teach? I thought when I was asked to write a book about sketching, I'm like, why am I the right person to write about this? And the thing that brought me around was thinking, okay--and anytime I teach anything it's like I may not be the expert on Sketchnote layouts, but I have a way that I do it that works for me that I can share with you, right?

NJ: Right.

MR: That sort of brings it down to more local right? It's not like , I'm gonna teach you the right—again, that comes to like, what is the right way compared to what? Related to what, right? Again, that comes to context, like, well in this context it's this, and in that context it's that. Again, I think it's more relatable to share the things that you do well in a way that someone can then say, "Oh, Mikey, does it this way, I like what he does, but kinda I wanna do this other thing a little bit differently." And it gives you the permission to say, that right so that's really fascinating to hear that parallel.

NJ: Yeah, so true.

MR: And then, so I would imagine you've got the course, which now you're making me think about courses, which I had sort of dismissed a long time ago because a lot of what I thought was influenced a little bit by Seth Godin who created courses and he found like, know, he would get 30 percent of people that would actually finish the course. And the course creators would say, "Seth, that's amazing." And he was like, "That's terrible. Thirty percent is terrible." Right?

I think, you know, there is that, but I think, the points that you bring out is offering it to people in a way that relates to where they're at. And maybe you shot 50 hours, maybe they need 20 hours and they're good to go, right? They don't need all 50, no?

NJ: Absolutely. You know, so as I am a very distracted student. So if I'm in a class, I'm the guy looking out the window in my own train of thought. And I keep circling back to—like, I think I love to learn. I love learning all kinds of things that I don't know. So in a way, I'm a good student, but I am not a structured—you can't put me on a syllabus student. So I am part of that other 70 percent who might not finish a course that they bought, but I am always going to come away with two or three good ideas.

And there are so many books I haven't finished. I'd never read them all the way through, but I still left with two or three good ideas. So, you know, I don't know what a good number is. Thirty percent to me, going from start to finish sounds like a very good number because I do think that the other 70 percent are still a subset of the general population. These are people who nevertheless committed to give time and money to something.

MR: Right. Right.

NJ: Maybe you are not the course that made them into an artist, but maybe you did something that inspired them to take a step towards this thing. And who knows when that pays off? Who knows how it makes them more—maybe it makes them more serious. Maybe it makes them think--you know, maybe they just didn't like what Seth Gordin did, or they don't like what Nishant did with tiny people, but they like the idea of having a course.

So there's so many different ways that—like what I come away with, you know, is a general respect for the fact that not only do you think I am worth your time, you think I'm worth a certain amount of money. So I think there is a general level of respect I have for that. And then I put it at the same level as a New Year's resolution. Like New Year's resolutions fail all the time, but who knows? Like if you make them every year, maybe one year, you do fulfill them.

MR: Yeah, that's a good point too to bring out that maybe you were the midpoint between doing something and something else and you ask them, well, how did you end up where you're at? Like they would never remember you, but does it matter? It doesn't matter.

NJ: No, exactly.

MR: Yeah.

NJ: So in the beginning of my course, you one of the videos I tell people that what I'm trying to think of this is like, you know, being a guidepost. I'm not trying to—the Indian attitude towards teaching, which I grew up with is that of a guru who tells you exactly what's what and he is the most learned person.

And I think this is where my imposter syndrome would kick in from that I am not that guy, but the more I learn, the more I understand that you don't learn necessarily because someone has all the answers. You learn from them or you want to learn from a certain person. Just like you like the art of a certain person, not because it's the greatest art in the world, but you relate to it for some reason. It works for you. And the same for teaching.

So one of the first things I say in this course is that we're all on our individual creative journeys and I am not here to take charge of yours. I am not here to for you to make your journey all about me and my style and what I do. I'm just here to maybe walk with you for a little while. How long? It depends on both of us and maybe point out some interesting things to you that maybe you like just as much as I do. And then you go on in your journey and I go on in mine and we're not here forever.

MR: Yeah, yeah, that's true you know thinking about time too like if you have limited time people are going to be efficient about what they take away and what they leave right just like you said so I think that's good to remember and you know expecting 100 percent, you know there's going to be some completion as to I started now I have to I have to check all the boxes or I'll never sleep right they're going to be there that's like one percent.

NJ: Yeah, and I don't know how I feel about that. I don't think that's always a positive way to approach the learning job.

MR: No I don't think so either. Yeah, now it becomes a burden, right, instead of a joy.

NJ: Yeah.

MR: Well, that's really interesting. And how do you relate the course with the book? Because the book sounded like maybe it's a little bit broader in some degree. Talk about that and the relationship.

NJ: Yeah. Yeah. So I was lucky enough to be approached for this book. Quarto publishers contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing a book to share my style of art and how I learn. My first instinct was to say no, because like I said, you know, I'm not a very structured student. I am not the guy who buys how-to books and learns from them. I learn in my own way.

So my first instinct was maybe I'm not the best person to write a book like this. But they convinced me. They told me, "Maybe the job is to write a book that even someone like you would read." And I thought, okay, that is a challenge, and I want that challenge now. I want to figure out what is the kind of book that even someone like me would read.

And me being somebody who's distracted, somebody who—you know when I get a book with pictures--for example, when I was growing up, we would get the reader's digest at home, I would go through it first all the way, very quickly, just flip all the pages from back to front and stop at all the cool images. And then maybe I would think about which chapter I want to read or which story I want to read inside it. I don't go from A to Z, I just hop around, especially with books that don't have a fixed narrative.

And so that's the book I decided I wanted to write. I want to write a book so that you can open to a random page one day, and even if you have one minute, you come away with something in that one minute. And if you choose to read it A to Z, you get something. If you choose to go hop and skip in your own little trajectories, then you should also be able to get something. And that's the book I try to write.

So again, I don't want to write a how-to-book. The book I want to write is why everybody should have a sketchbook. I think a sketchbook is a visual journal of your life. And I think everybody should have a journal. And everybody in some level understands that when you try to write, especially a journal, you're talking to yourself. It's a private space. And that conversation is of value even if you're not a professional writer, even if you're not a beautiful writer. Talking to yourself, writing to yourself has value.

Similarly, a sketchbook has value even if you're not good at drawing, even if you never intend to become an artist. A sketchbook is a conversation with yourself outside of words and language without letting the politics and the messiness of words get in the way of your thought process. It's a way to see your world and to see the lines and the shapes and the colors that make it up. And then to bring it into your mind and then to translate it through your hand and the tool of your choice onto the page.

And this business of input and translation and output is a very beautiful human thing to do. And sometimes if you're really in the flow of it, you can do it without any words getting in the way at all. And I think there's a level of beauty in that.

I read something about the French philosopher Derrida. He said that every statement is a lie. Everything you say is said by you according to the meaning of the words that you have in your mind. But whenever somebody hears it, they have their own meanings to those words, which are maybe subtly different from you. So anything you say to them is not what you intended to say to them. And therefore, every statement is a lie. And words are all we have, but words are not very good at doing this job of meaning things.

So I think maybe if we all had sketchbooks, we would understand where words fail and we would understand that there is a world outside of language, which is becoming difficult in an age of social media and texting. There is so much now that instantly becomes words and language. Everything we process--you know, seeing something absolutely incredible and we're at a loss for words. And we think that if we can't express it in words, it's not a real feeling. But being an artist and being a writer who is now an artist, I have come to appreciate how much of the world exists outside of language.

And so, the point of this book is that everybody should make sneaky art. That's the title of the book, Make Sneaky Art. And everybody should have a sketchbook that helps them express themselves. That can be a private thing that you don't even need to show anybody. Who cares how you draw, it's nobody else's business. And why that would be such a good thing for us as individuals, but also us as a collective species.

MR: So it sounds almost more like a philosophy of Sneaky Art than anything in a lot of ways.

NJ: It is. Very much. So, tiny people is just one chapter in this book. The rest of this book is about the basic ideas that I have for how you can build a sketchbook habit, what can help you to draw every day and have something that fulfills you.

MR: That sounds really cool and I can see now how they would overlap well. Like a little tiny bit of the tiny people in the book but the book is a lot more than the course in that sense. So you could purchase both and both would be really useful. I would guess the tiny people might get the be the spark to get you started and then thbook could then expand on well where else could I apply this sketchbook, or it could go the other way right where you start with this idea and then you specifically want to do little tiny people and then you do the course to get that depth, right?

NJ: Absolutely.

MR: So it works both directions.

NJ: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it expands just the way my art practice also expanded. It started with trying to draw people, learning to draw people and so drawing them tiny, drawing them very quickly. But how it grew it—so, you know, this is what I explained to people that it started with me thinking sneaky art meant that I am being sneaky, trying to make something, but the definition of this phrase has changed in my mind the more I started drawing.

MR: Yeah.

NJ: I moved very soon from Chicago, I moved to small town in Wisconsin called Eau Claire. And for a moment I thought, what am I going to find here? It's not Chicago, you know, it's not a big city of the world. I'm not going to find these iconic landmarks. Where is the art now? How do I draw something? How do I keep this practice going? And I realized very soon from trying to draw every day, this is the new definition of Sneaky Art in my mind, that art is everywhere. Beautiful things are everywhere in ordinary places on ordinary days, featuring ordinary people doing ordinary things of daily life. It's our job, the artist's job, the human's job is to find that art, to be able to see it.

And so, the art is sneaky in the sense that it's right there hiding in plain sight and it needs you to cultivate the mindset and be ready with the tools in order to see it and in order to translate it and to share it and express it. So this is what the meek, sneaky art of this book is. It's not that I think everybody should be sitting in corner seats in cafes with a little sketchbook trying to be secretive, but I think there is beautiful art everywhere waiting for you to see it. And that's what I want to help you see.

MR: Wow, that's a really interesting way to think. That's quite a flip too. Almost a 360 degree flip in a way. That moves you away from—I'm trying to think, Stephen King's book on writing, the way he thinks about writing is he's almost like an archeologist, where the story exists and he's brushing away the bones and the bones and the dinosaurs that he's uncovering tell him the story. And then he just writes it down. That's an interesting way to think of it. In a way, that's the way you flipped your description of Sneaky Art is art is there, it's just a matter, are you gonna notice and be curious and then document it with your sketchbook or whatever.

NJ: Mm-hmm.

MR: That's an interesting way to think of it.

NJ: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a very nice analogy. I like that one.

MR: Well, you can have it. It's actually Stephen King's, so I guess I don't have a right to give it or take it. But I always found that fascinating. He talked a lot about it in that book. It's a great book about writing.

NJ: Yeah, it reminds me of this quote, I think it's attributed to Michelangelo, the sculptor, that "Every block of marble has a statue inside it. And the job of the sculptor is to chip away the unnecessary parts."

MR: Yes, exactly. Yeah that's a great way to think of it. Interesting. Well, these both sound great. I've already purchased the book. I haven't done the course yet it's next on my list. And I might do some research and see is there a course that I need to produce. We'll see.

NJ: Oh, yeah.

MR: But I think you know doing drawing is also fun for me so this might encourage me to do more drawing as well.

NJ: Yeah, absolutely. You know, there are interesting things that people need to learn from each other. Like I can write and I can draw, but still the idea of sketchnoting the way you do it, I stumble. Like I keep hitting blocks and I think those are just little, little obstacles in my mind that I need somebody to show me the way around. Maybe I don't need the skill that I need to learn, but I just need to understand approach and ideas.

And sometimes that's what we need. You know this is why a course helps. Like you can you don't have to edit yourself down to a very small amount of time and you don't know what somebody needs. Maybe I need only 20 percent of your course but that's the 20 percent that's been stopping me up.

MR: Yeah. Right. Well, and you make 100 percent and they decide which 20 percent makes sense for them, right?

NJ: Absolutely, yes, yeah.

MR: Yeah, that's interesting. Cool. Well, and of course you're writing at Substack and at the end of the show, we'll have you give links and we'll put links in the show notes for people. I'm really curious now, let's switch over to tools. I know the answers to some of these things, but what are the tools you like? I think it comes down to like two things, you know, if you consider a sketchbook and a pen but tell us a little bit more detail about the pens and the sketchbooks and what you've sort of found that works for you at least.

NJ: Sure. Yeah. So, you when I started learning, I slash teaching myself to draw, I took a lot of help from the iPad. So firstly, for anybody sketchnoting, for anybody learning to draw, somebody that loves to recreationally make art, I cannot recommend the iPad enough. I think it is a wonderful, wonderful piece of technology. An iPad and an Apple pencil taught me many, many, many things.

I made pretty much all my comics that way for years and years. I made a couple of graphic novels that way. It was backbreaking literally, but it was so rewarding. And it became this zero-cost environment in which I could play with colors as somebody who's nervous around colors, try it and then undo it and then try something else and undo. And you haven't "wasted a drawing" in trying out a color. So I think I learned a lot from that, but there was a certain point I reached with it. I hit a wall when I realized that everything I do, and this is me thinking as an artist and a cartoonist trying to move forward, trying to go deeper.

Everything I do is an Apple pencil on the iPad screen. So the tactile point of contact is always the same, whether I use a pencil tool, whether I use a marker tool or any other virtual tool, digital brush. So I felt like maybe I'm not using these brushes right because I don't know how they really feel. I need to understand the tactility of this device in the real world before I use the digital version of it. And if I learn the analog version, then maybe I'll approach the digital brush with more understanding and better skill. So that's when I started drawing with analog devices and painting with brushes again.

This sort of sent me into a journey which meant I pretty much never use digital tools anymore, like hardly ever. So I don't think there is any right tool per se. I think what we have is—you know, so drawing and making art is joy in the process of doing it. It's not about the result, it's about the joy. Just like children, children paint because with crayons, you know, hold, gripping them tightly and, you know, completely ruining them sometimes, but they are enjoying the act of making this thing and they are not obsessed about what it will look like at the end.

But something happens when we, as adults, we grow up, we become results oriented. I'll only do this if I'm good at it. I'll only do it if the result is so and so good. I'll only do it if it makes me X amount of money. So unless the result, the return on investment is worth it, I will not go through this process. And that's not how children think. That is not how an artist should think. Artists should be about process more than result especially amateurs and hobbyists. It's about the time you get to spend doing this rather than what it looks like at the end. It's irrelevant.

So what tools you use is about what tactile point of contact you enjoy. As a writer, as a sketcher, I love how the fountain pen feels against the page. It gives me that little bit of friction. so my line goes a certain way. If I wrote or drew with a ball pen, with a roller ball pen, it would be a completely different line because the resistance and the friction is different. Like my pen is very smooth, but the little bit of scratchiness it has makes me feel like I have control over my line and I love how it feels against it. It's a joy to draw with it.

So this is my tool of choice. It's a Lamy Safari fountain pen and I like a lot of fountain pens, but this is the one I keep as my workhorse, I keep coming back to it. I'm always using it every day pretty much for the last seven, eight years. Yeah, that's the one. Lovely.

MR: This one right here.

NJ: Yeah, that's a beautiful color. Wow.

MR: This is a special edition and came with orange ink which I'm not using the orange ink but I did once and it worked out really well.

NJ: Hmm. Yeah, that's a really nice color actually. So for me, the fountain pen does that. Like I love how it makes contact with the page. Another funny thing, I started writing with the fountain pen before I started drawing with it. And this has to do with—I'm very good at typing. I've been writing stories on my computers for years and years. So I am very fast as a typist. And maybe I'm too fast for my own thoughts. So I can type out a sentence and then reach the end and be like, I don't like it. So every sentence I write, I would edit it three times because I needed my thoughts to catch up with the pace of my typing.

Writing by hand, drawing by hand, imposes a physical limit to how fast you can go. And in my opinion, as a writer, often the first draft of everything I write is by hand because it allows my thoughts and my writing to be in sync. And the sentence that comes out on the page is usually the third draft of that sentence that I started. It's not something that I write, I type and then I erase and then I type again and then I change again. So it allows me to be more in the flow of writing and constructing thoughts upon thoughts than typing.

So writing by hand has given me a lot of joy. Drawing by hand has given me lot of tactile, pleasure, and a lot of joy in the process of drawing. And so this is what I recommend to people, that you should find, of course, the page is the other end of the equation. You also have to use the kind of paper that the fountain pen feels good against. Sometimes that means if you're drawing, it means slightly higher quality paper than the most basic, thinnest paper, but there are things you can find. Again, there is an equation you want to find.

I love smooth toned paper. I love vellum paper sometimes for drawing in. I love hot press pages, which are like very smooth. The current sketchbook I'm using is textured. So it is cold pressed textured paper. And usually people prefer that for watercolors, but I also love how it feels with the fountain pen nib.

Thing about art that I recommend most of all is that we should be excited for the journey. We should be excited to open our horizons, try whatever tools you can get access to, see how they feel, find what feeling gives you joy and make that central to your art practice, your writing practice, whatever sketchnoting practice, find the paper that feels good. If you're afraid of ruining things, you know, the right pen for you is the one you're not afraid to use.

MR: Yeah.

NJ: The right paper for you is the one you're not afraid to "ruin." The point is to do a lot. The point is not to think that some tool or some medium is so precious that you should only use it when you're ready for it. Whatever kills the hesitation is the right tool for you to use.

MR: That's a great direction. And I learned that lesson when I did workshops. At first I thought people wanted fancy pens and Moleskine notebooks or sketchbooks. And I did the first workshop that way and then realized as I started to go on the road. People were afraid to draw on these fancy notebooks with these fancy pens.

NJ: Yes.

MR: So what I did is like I went 180 degrees switch and I went to a ream of printer paper and flare pens. That was it.

NJ: Mm-hmm . Yep, that's it.

MR: I think a total of like $11 or something. And it worked great because it was so unpretentious that people were willing to draw on it and then if they didn't like it they would crumple it up, leave them behind. It was so ubiquitous they could care less about the material.

NJ: Exactly. Whatever it takes for you to think that you are the master of this universe. You cannot be subservient to your own tools. Whether it's a lie you tell yourself or what it is, whether it needs you to change your tools, but you need to feel like you are in control of this. You need to have the confidence to write something, to draw something, and to crumple it up and throw it behind you, knowing that the next day I do it will be better.

I think when we become in awe of our own work, I draw something and I think, oh, my God, I'll never be able to draw as good as that again. What it means is the next day I'm going to hesitate to start drawing because it won't live up to it.

I have a friend who draws, who doesn't draw in sketchbooks, who's an amazing artist, but only uses loose sheets of paper because his idea is that if I have a sketchbook, whenever I turn the pages, it's whatever I did before is going to intimidate me today, and I won't be able to, so it's a way of setting himself free. He's found his fix. So we should all find our fix in that way, but the goal is whatever helps you do more, whatever kills the hesitations, whatever means that you do something.

MR: So having said all that and knowing that each person's unique situation determines their tools. We know you like the Lamy Safari. Is there a go-to notebook? Like if you were pressed like you have an hour, Nishant, and you need to buy a notebook at the store and you can go to the store and it's got hundreds of notebooks or sketchbooks which one would you choose?

NJ: Right, right. Great question. So first I would choose between two sketchbooks based on the situation. One of them would be something that has helped me to bring color into my drawings as a person afraid of color is to use a toned paper sketchbook. I would buy, speaking of brands, the most convenient one in most art supply stores is Stillman & Birn.

MR: Yeah, good. Good brand.

NJ: I would recommend a Stillman & Birn brown sepia toned sketchbook of your choice of size. Somebody told me this when I said I'm afraid of using color they said, "Why don't you use brown paper because then the first color is already there and now you're just adding a second and it won't be such a leap to add a third." And it has completely transformed my art practice in that way. When it's winter I get a grey-toned sketchbook because of course I live in the Pacific Northwest and it is I live in grey couvre as it is sometimes called rain couvre as it is often called. Sometimes described as the wet apple, which it also is.

So a grey-toned sketchbook is great for the winter months and then spring and summer, a brown-toned sketchbook is lovely. So that's one recommendation. The other one I would say is I would always look for something—you know, I like Moleskine. So Moleskine is one, but there are many, many brands that do this. So I never want to say brand. I want to say size and I want to say orientation.

MR: Okay. Gotcha.

NJ: So a four by six inch sketchbook, which you can hold basically in the palm of your hand. So a sketchbook which allows you when you're standing in line somewhere, when you're waiting for your coffee somewhere, I have two minutes, can I make a drawing now? Yes, I can make a drawing now. So a sketchbook that allows you to build a sketchbook habit with five minutes or less drawings.

And that's a little sketchbook that can always fit in your pocket. You never have to think twice about carrying it. You never have to think about too many tools. One pen, one little sketchbook, and I'm set. I can now be in the business of observing my world and putting it down. I think that's very liberating. It's super empowering. So if I had no other decision to make, just a very quick thing, I will look for the quickest small little sketch pad or sketchbook I can get.

MR: That's interesting you say that too. When I did sketchnoting, I had come from a place where I was writing longhand and large line notebooks and the inversion that I did was I purchased a Moleskine sketchbook at Barnes & Noble and I didn't know what to do with it, it was too beautiful. And I thought well I need to make use of this thing. The reason I chose it wasn't that it was beautiful at that point it was well it's really small I can keep it in my pocket and I can carry a gel pen in my front pocket and I don't have to carry bags or anything, I can just take it anywhere I go.

And so, I took that to the first workshop and used it and it was great because it was so small for many years at the beginning of my exploration I started with those small notebooks and I still like them you know when I travel. Now I use a brush pen and I play with a mix of brush and gel pen to capture environments in a pocket notebook. There's a brand that I have to look for it now and I'll look for a link for it. Little tiny pocket notebooks from Baron Fig they make us really small pocket notebook. That's even smaller than the Moleskine's. I think it might be three by five or something so it's quite small.

NJ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, there are some that are three by five, then even two and a half by three and a half.

MR: Yeah, yeah little tiny one, so.

NJ: You know what, another thing I really like, and this is something I do and why I hesitate to recommend a brand to anybody is, you know, a sketchbook is also—you know, you compose your scene upon a sketchbook. it's the same thing for sketchnoting. You are composing and organizing your thoughts based on the structure of the page that you have, whether it's landscape or it's portrait orientation, big or small, square or something else.

So every time I finish one sketchbook, the next one I buy is a completely different orientation. Because the kind of page you have, is the page you compose upon, is also how you see your world. If I'm drawing on a very tall portrait sketchbook, the way that I look at my landscape is completely different from if I'm drawing in a long landscape orientation sketchbook. The way the information flows, the way my eyes flow on that page, all of those things make a difference to how I'm regarding this same space that I'm at maybe every day.

You know, drawing is about seeing. Forget what you put down on the page. First, it begins with how you see, not only what, but how you see it and how you interpret it and how you compose it. That changes completely if you change your sketchbook paper size and dimensions. So I think it's a very wonderful exercise to change these things, to not get bound to one style and see if it unlocks something in your composition.

MR: And you may even find too, like for me, like certain like that little tiny pocket notebook. If I travel somewhere, I can take that in two pens and I can do environments, I can do food, those kinds of things. And it's easy to bring. Like the friction is really low because it's in my pocket.

But if I'm doing, if I'm doing like say I'm a do a job and I decide I want to do it analog, I probably would take an A5, right? Because I've got a little more space. The purpose is to capture information or if I'm doing for client work, maybe I would choose the iPad because clients always have changes there's something I'll miss I'm gonna make a typo, right, so the purpose drives in a way the tool.

NJ: Exactly.

MR: So you may by rotating through these different books in this case you would sort of discover this is really good for this kind of thing in my context and that's really good for that. So then you have like these collections of different types of books that you find work for you and so they're ready to go at a moment's notice so that can be valuable

NJ: A hundred percent, yeah. Like I have three sketchbooks depending on mood and context that I pick up from my desk.

MR: Wow, that's great. That's great. Well, this has been helpful and I think encouraging for your people to think about sketchbooks and tools in a way that is in context to the way they work. I think that's important. That's why, you know, just because you have the same notebook and pen as Nishant, you have a different experience and you have different environments and you need to take it in the way that makes sense for you. His tools will not make your work like his, nor should you make that your focus. He's really an inspiration, like he said, a facilitator to do that. So, interesting.

NJ: Yeah.

MR: The last thing I usually ask our guests on the show is the tips section. So I frame it like this. There's someone listening, they're probably a visual thinker, I would guess, whatever that means to them. Maybe they're stuck in a rut or they just need a little inspiration from you. What would be three things you would encourage them with?

NJ: Yeah, sure, absolutely. So firstly, something we just spoke about, carry a small sketchbook, something that doesn't intimidate you, something that you're not afraid to whip out with even two minutes of free time. You can go from start to finish in the little bit of time you might have even in a busy day. What I think of is utilizing the slack periods of your day. Waiting for a bus, for example, sometimes. So carry a little sketchbook is number one.

Number two is you have to give yourself permission to be curious. You have to not disregard your curiosity as silly or pointless. When I go out with a sketchbook, one of the things it does for me, even if I don't draw anything at all that day, is I can feel it in my pocket so I know that I'm in the business of observing and looking for things that are interesting. Be in the business of activating your curiosity and seeing what you've—you know, your curiosity tells you something about yourself.

No matter how you draw, nonetheless you are learning, this is what I'm curious about, this is what grabs my attention. And so you foster something beautiful about yourself as a human being exploring your landscape. So carry a small sketchbook, number one. Number two, always be curious. Number three for me is get started as quickly as possible. You need to make your tools in such a way, you need to have your practice in such a way that you don't leave any room for hesitations. Hesitations don't do any good. All they mean is don't do this thing. There is no value to these hesitations. Start as quickly as possible. Whatever it takes for you to get pen to paper.

As a self-conscious person in public spaces, you know, I started Sneaky Art out of being self-conscious. I'm still self-conscious. I take commissions and I'm in public, crowded spots, but I'm still self-conscious. But that these second thoughts and these stray thoughts that stop me from doing things vanish the moment that I touch pen to paper. Suddenly I'm in the zone of making something and now I'm in it. Now those second thoughts don't matter. So what I've learned over time over the past few years is I need to close that gap from wanting to draw to starting to draw. As soon as I can go to the other side, I'm fine. And I need to spend less time in this limbo.

MR: Those are great great encouragements I think everyone could benefit from thinking that way for sure. Well, thank you so much for that. So what would be the best place to go to see the stuff you're doing, to find your book to find your course? Obviously, we can send people to your Substack but there's probably other places too do you want to share those with us?

NJ: Yeah, well, I think the thing I really love is having that inbox relationship with people. So the number one place I send people is always my Substack newsletter because I think it's lovely to be able to come into someone's inbox once a week and share the things that I'm doing. And it's a good way for them to learn about me. And it's a good way for me to share something about what I want to share without the pressure of seeing it all very quickly. Substack is again a very consensual relationship that builds over time. So the newsletter is very important. It's something I like to bring people to. It's my best communication space.

Of course, you're also free to visit my website where I have links to my print store, I have links to my course, I have links to all the other things that I'm doing. I try to update it as much as possible and often I fail, but there are lots of good ways to get in touch with me and see my work. Instagram is where I'm most popular, but Instagram is of course the worst way to stay in touch with anybody's work.

MR: Yeah, no kidding.

NJ: So, if you love my work and you want to see my work, maybe following me on Instagram is the way to ensure that that never happens. Yeah, I come back to newsletter. I think that's been my favorite way to share and to hear from people as well.

MR: What's the link should they go to for the newsletter? Because I think that will guide people to everything else, right?

NJ: Yeah, it's sneakyart.substack.com

MR: Okay, great. That would be a great place to start. That's where I started and I've been following Nishant for I think over a year now, a year and a half.

NJ: Yeah.

MR: So, which is why when I saw you in my session, like, "Hey, that's Nishant." I think I said, "Are you the Nishant Jain? And you said, yes. What else are you going to say?

NJ: Yeah. The only one I know, well.

MR: There may be many in India, I don't know.

NJ: Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure there must be many. Speaking of sketchbooks by the way, Mike, this week I made my own sketchbooks for the first time, I made my own journal for the first time, I'm learning how to do binding and it's been such a joy to work with my hands and to make something like that. It's been a really good expe—I might never buy a sketchbook again.

MR: Yeah , well, there you go. interesting thing that you, if you're making your own sketchbook, you can have it with a mix of white paper, different, right?

NJ: That's the goal exactly. So let me show you.

MR: You can mix it all together, okay?

NJ: This is the sketchbook I made and I've got all different kinds of paper inside it.

MR: Oh, look at that.

NJ: The goal is that every time I turn the page, I want a surprise. I want to not know what I'll see and I want to respond to it in the moment.

MR: That's cool.

NJ: So it's allowed me to mix up different kinds of paper, different colors of paper and then now my job is to meet that challenge.

MR: And I think you did a meetup on Substack where you showed how you did that with a video, so if someone wants—

NJ: Yeah, so we did this live on with the paying subscribers of my newsletter. We did this on live Zoom sessions. We did two Zoom sessions in which I had never done this binding before and I watched the YouTube video with the attendees and then we did this process. I think I pricked myself with the needle about five times and I saw there are like five different occasions in these sessions where I just scream out in pain suddenly.

MR: So you can just come for the pain and you know.

NJ: Yeah, you can just come for that, but it's so rewarding. Like the joy of achievement, but also the joy of creation, knowing that it's going to become something, you know. So I think this is the joy that I want to leave this conversation with, you know, something I think you would share. Whenever I get a new sketchbook or a new journal, you know, this is something I do, Mike, like I flip through the blank pages. Obviously, there's nothing there, but I flip through them and I imagine in a month or two or three, what's going to be there.

Sometimes I think just like that sculptor, just like Stephen King writing about writing, that what I'm doing is I am uncovering what these pages already say and that the white blankness of this page is infinity and every line I put on it suddenly gives definition to that infinity into something finite. And I try to imagine what this beautiful journey with this sketchbook is going to bring me. And I think that joy is something we can all have. It's so easily accessible to us.

MR: That's great way to end things. I can't say it any better. It's amazing. Well, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate all the work you do, how you are so welcoming and encouraging to people and invite them in, in the way that you do. I really admire that. And I want to thank you for doing that for the world.

NJ: Yeah, thank you so much, Mike. This was such a lovely conversation.

MR: Yeah. For those of you who are watching or listening, it's another episode. Until the next one, talk to you soon.

She shares her discovery of graphic recording at art school and winning an art contest, which gave her the confidence to pursue art full-time. In this discussion, Katya offers valuable tips and insights from her career as a graphic recording artist.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Katya Balakina?
• Origin Story
• Katya's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Katya
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Katya on LinkedIn
• Katya On Instagram

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Neuland Markers
• Procreate
• Adobe Fresco

Tips

1. Stop overthinking. You are good enough.
2. Simplify your work.
3. If your drawing can be a photograph, you are not pushing.
4. You are doing everything right.
5. It's good to remember that you are not going to one day just create a perfect board.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everybody, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here with Katya Balakina. Katya, it's so good to have you on the show. Thanks for coming.

Katya Balakina: Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. That's very exciting.

MR: Yeah, I've seen your work around mainly on—not Instagram, I think LinkedIn, actually. And really liked how clean and simple, and clear your work was. We were talking about this before we started recording. How did I find you? I'm not totally sure. I suspect it's the algorithm on LinkedIn that sees other graphic recorders and visual thinkers and puts them in our feed.

KB: I guess.

MR: I'm not totally sure, but I'm really happy I did because you seem like a really fascinating person with really nice work, and that's the kind of person that fits really well on the show. So, thank you for being here.

KB: Thanks so much, Mike, and thanks for your kind words about my work. and I guess I didn't waste my time on LinkedIn if it helped you to find me.

MR: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, the way this podcast works is we first understand who you are and what you do, and then we go right into origin story, sort of bring us back from when you were a little girl and your experiences that brought you to where you are. I think in those origin stories, which I love we can learn a lot about you as a person and how you got where you are, but also, I think it can be beneficial for listeners to think, oh, I'm so different. I can't do that. And then you hear the origin stories and think, oh, wow, you know, Katya actually has a lot of similarities to me, and she's doing it, so maybe I can do this, right? So that's the thinking around origin story. Let's just jump right in. Tell us who you are, what you do, and then go right into your origin story.

KB: Sure. As you mentioned, I'm on LinkedIn, so I do graphic recording, visual notes scribing. I dunno the right way to call it. They're just old terms we use.

MR: Yeah, yeah.

KB: I've been doing that for, I would say, about eight years. Maybe I can say 10, but exclusively more than eight. I've been working as a graphic recorder here in the States for last two years. And before that, I used to work with Scriberia. Your audience probably knows about that company.

MR: In the UK, yeah.

KB: In the UK. Yeah, they're very inspirational. Their work, I would say it's what defines word scribing and graphic reporting for many people. And a lot of people start learning about scribing from like Googling Scriberia stuff. And before that, I graduated art school back in Moscow. And that's where I learned for the first time about graphic recording from my art teacher there. So that's kind of my journey from just hearing about graphic recording and being full-time graphic recorder here in the States.

MR: So, I'm kind of curious, going into your origin story, when you were a little girl, did you always draw since you were little, and then you managed to just keep drawing? Or did you pick up drawing later in life? When did that start for you?

KB: Sorry, I missed the second half of your question. Can you repeat that, please?

MR: Okay. It was, tell me a little bit about when you were a little girl, have you always drawn, or is it something you learned later? How did that happen for you?

KB: I think it happened naturally. I've always drawn, and I have one of the first photographs of me with like a box of markers on the floor. I think I was less than 1-year-old.

MR: Wow.

KB: But since I was born and grew up in Russia in the late '80s, early '90s. Very challenging time, transformational time. Russia was relatively like poor state back then, so I have all those like black and white photographs that look like from I don't know, '20s in America. So yeah, people are having a hard time to believe that those are from my childhood. But yeah, I have like an old black and white picture of myself with markers. Yeah, I have been into drawing and doodling my whole life, but I guess I hear a repeat story of many people who were into this kinda like creative stuff that my parents had an idea that it's impossible to sustain any kind of like, normal life being, I don't know, a doodler whatever, an artist. I don't know, what word would they use back then.

So I grew up with the idea that I do love drawing, but I cannot do it as something real in my life, so I have to find something else. And I became a journalist because I also loved writing. I used to work like a kid journalist for a local newspaper in our super tiny city. I grew up in a very rural area. And so, that was like, I dunno, I had 10 readers maybe, but I was super into it, and I was making illustrations for the newspaper and writing text. So since I thought art is not gonna be helpful for my future career, I decided to become a journalist. And I spent 80 years being a journalist in Russia. I used to work as a radio journalist, but then—my Google keeps showing me weird notifications. Sorry. Let's hope it's—

MR: That's okay.

KB: Yeah. Let me click something here. So yeah, by 2012, it became kind of dangerous to keep being a journalist in Russia, so I had to make a decision between am I staying in that field being a journalist, and being ready to get assaulted or whatever could happen, or should I compromise and only be like a good journalist talking about good things, or I should choose something different. And I decided to quit journalism and pursue art career because by that age, I would say I overgrew fears that art is not good to sustain like a normal life.

MR: You felt like then at that point, you could actually make artwork, probably as a journalist, and being aware as you grew, you probably realized there were things you could do that were different than journalism.

KB: For sure. Also, that happened that around that time I used to work as a journalist in Perm. It's like a regional city in the middle of Russia. And around the time I was a journalist there, the city had an art contest. I accidentally won. I didn't have plans of winning. My friend told me, "Hey you might wanna try." And I tried and I won. And it gave me a huge, like, self-confidence boost that I can actually do something with art.

MR: Wow.

KB: And yeah, by the time I quit journalism, I had like a very shy idea that I can do something art-related. But I didn't know what, I started thinking about illustration. I moved to Moscow started art school there. So I have a degree in editorial illustration, but again, I don't know, I felt that I cannot express myself fully with editorial illustration. And I kept putting little notes next to my drawings all the time. Some kind of like speech bubbles or little descriptions, funny descriptions.

And I remember my teacher used to say, "Remove from your illustrations. You are in art school. You have to express yourself with visual tools. That's it." And I just couldn't get it. I kept putting words. And I remember when he told me about—Victor Millime is my art teacher's name. He told me about scribing. I was like, that's it. I see illustrations. I see little text next to it, feels like something that exist just for me. What do you think? How did this origin story?

MR: That sounds interesting. So, now you've discovered graphic recording through your teacher who kept trying to lean you away from putting words into your illustrations, and you realize, like, okay, I can't stop her, so maybe she needs to go in that direction.

KB: Yeah. I talk to my art teacher every once in a while, and I constantly thank him for that discovery in my life. Because also the first ever experience of graphic recording, of scribing I had when I was in art school. We did one of like TEDx Moscow events. That was the first ever scribing I did. And when I realized that it's something I absolutely love doing, but it took me another three, four years to start doing it as my work. Partially because I moved abroad, I left Russia, and I started working as a graphic record in Estonia, working in English. And since I'm from a very rural part of Russia, I never studied English really in any kind of academic environment. I had to learn English from pretty much scratch.

MR: Wow.

KB: My first graphic recordings were a lot of like notes, a lot of trying to figure out what people are talking about.

MR: Yeah. That would be tough. Wow.

KB: That was really tough. But it took a while to get here, where I am right now.

MR: Well, it's interesting that your first scribing opportunity, you know, no pressure, but let's do a TED. Let's do a bunch of TED talks.

KB: It was I loved about my—

MR: What you try to go for is like when you're five years in, not like your first one. So maybe you just like difficult things, like as challenges.

KB: You know, I would say I believe deeply that you are always ready for what you wanna be ready for. Exactly as I was telling you like five minutes ago, when I was a journalist, kid journalist, I didn't learn anywhere how to write. I just had an idea that I'm a journalist, and all of a sudden, I got a spread in a local newspaper to fill in. So I like that about myself, that I don't really have that perfectionism.

You know, sometimes I talk to people who are great, like I see their work and they're great, but they are afraid to start. They feel like they might wanna do like five more boards and then they can start looking for real client, where I say, hey, you gotta go straight there because you already have everything you need, and whatever you don't have, you'll find that on the journey while you are already diving deep into it, so.

MR: I like that attitude. It reminds me, I had a project that I did actually in Chicago many years ago. It was a blackboard. A company wanted to have illustrations on the blackboard, and they said, "Hey, Mike, would you come and do it?" And I gave him a quote, and they liked it. And so I took the train down, and when they asked me, "Hey, Mike, have you done lots of blackboards before?" I said, I've never done any blackboards before, but by the end of the day, I should be an expert.

KB: That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, I like that too.

MR: So, you know, and they laughed about it, and they were really happy with the blackboard that I did. And it lasted, I think a year or something, and then they brought someone else in to do a new one. And so, it was fun to do that work. And also, it was a good reminder that for many people, when you do the work you do, like, you're very critical of your own work. And it's not up to your detail, but to other people, it's like amazing. Like, how do you do that? Like, even your worst stuff can often be very amazing for other people. So it's a good reminder to you know, don't let that hold you back.

KB: Absolutely.

MR: So, this is great.

KB: I would say that what also I learned from Scriberia, because when I joined, I worked—that was during the pandemic. And I was the only remote. I mean, everyone was remote, but I was the only person living outside the country.

MR: Outside the UK. Yeah.

KB: So that was really challenging for me to kinda work and learn at the same time because obviously when you are not in the same room with the team, it takes extra effort. I was really nervous before scribing, digital scribing. Like most of the work, back during the pandemic was done remotely. And someone from s Scriberia told me that, "Remember you're gonna be in the room of people, even if it's a digital virtual room. You are the only person who knows what you're doing. Those people they're professionals in their own industries, but you are gonna be the only person who is a professional scriber. So that's it. Be confident, you know better than anyone what you're doing." And that attitude really saved me a lot of stress.

MR: I bet.

KB: It allowed me to feel as confident and as I could be, understanding 40 percent of what people were talking about, especially with British accent, but yeah, it really helped me, that attitude.

MR: I sort of picked up on something when you said you moved to Estonia and you started scribing in English, my assumption is most people in business, I guess, are speaking English in Estonia, or did you need to learn Estonian as well?

KB: Yes. Estonian is a very beautiful language, but very difficult to learn. I know Estonian on you know, those like levels of knowing language, A1, A2?

MR: Yeah.

KB: I have B1 in Estonian. That's enough to have a very basic conversation, but it's absolutely not enough to do a graphic recording. To get to the B1, that took me about two years. It's the one thing that is just against my nature to wait to get ready for something that might not happen. So I just thought, okay, what tools I have right now available to me that I can use immediately for graphic recording? And my very basic English was one of those tools. That's why I chose English. I would say I had a lot of projects when I lived in Estonia because Estonia is a very developed country. It's like an IT capital, one of the IT capitals of Europe. Estonia has a lot of great famous startups that everyone knows about. Like Skype is an Estonian invention.

MR: Okay. That's right. Yeah.

KB: So it's very technically advanced country. They do have fair amount of like international conferences. And it's where I started working with Samsung, for example. They're in Estonia and other more local names. And those events were in English. But I felt like there is a limit to what I can do in Estonia without speaking Estonian language fully.

MR: Yeah, for sure. I suppose the advantage of having an international conference in a place like Estonia is you're going to get people from literally everywhere in the world. So English for everyone is probably not their primary language. So that maybe work to your advantage. I suppose.

KB: Yep. Absolutely. That's a great, great point. Yeah, yeah, because we just spoke basic English to each other with different accents. And it also helped me to feel more confident about working on-site in a language I'm learning. And just like in general, not looking for perfection. And also—

MR: And then—

KB: -yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

MR: Oh, go ahead. You finish your thought.

KB: I was just trying to say that nobody expected me to speak perfect English, too. One thing I love about America that nobody expects me to speak perfect English here as well, because so many—I meet people with from very different backgrounds here. And they're all working together, and that's fantastic. I think that something I also kind of learned in Estonia—

MR: Interesting.

KB: -not to expect like high professionalism in terms like—again, not to expect things to be perfect.

MR: More like functional. Yeah.

KB: Yeah. Just like a tool. Language as a tool. It's one of the tools I use for my graphic recording. I would say that.

MR: Yeah, of course. Now, I'm kind of curious, you said, so you're in Estonia, you're doing work locally. Now work in Scriberia, and then you decided to come to the States. What caused that decision? And then how did you get established again where you are?

KB: Okay. That part of the story might get a little boring, or not, I dunno.

MR: We get to judge that.

KB: I met my husband, John, in Estonia. He is a traveler. He used to be a travel editor for a publishing company. He wrote a book about travels himself. So I met that traveling guy in Estonia, and we started traveling together. And during the pandemic, we got stuck in Georgia country. I dunno if you know, it's not far from Tokyo—

MR: Country of Georgia. Yeah.

KB: -on the Black Sea.

MR: Yeah.

KB: Beautiful place, but we got stuck there for a year and a half.

MR: Oh, wow.

KB: 'Cause the pandemic and travel restrictions. And we were married, so I couldn't go to Estonia with him. He couldn't go to the states with me. So we decided to stay there and see what's going on with the world. During that time, I started working with Scriberia. So by the time we got back to Estonia, most of my clients were through Scriberia. I didn't have a lot going on in Estonia. Since John is from Kansas City, America, it's like a big market, big opportunity. Again, everyone speaks English, so I wouldn't have to be limited by like a very few English-speaking conferences like it was in Estonia. Working with Scriberia was fantastic, great clients. But I really wanted to leave that virtual space and start working offline. And that was just challenging because I was in Estonia, Scriberia is in London.

MR: Yeah.

KB: So moving to America seemed again, like an organic, natural decision we made. And about like two and a half years ago, we moved to America. Started from Kansas City and then moved to Chicago.

MR: And here you are. I looked in your LinkedIn profile. It looked like you've worked for the Sketch Effect in the past, which—

KB: I work with them still. They're a fantastic team.

MR: So I know both those guys.

KB: I love them.

MR: Yep. Alejo and the crew there is pretty great.

KB: Yeah, yeah. That's a fantastic team. And that was really one of the game changers in establishing my career in America, because it's one thing where you are on your own, and there is another thing when you started knowing people from the same industry, see how they work, talk to them in person. And I've been deprived of that while working for Scriberia remotely. And it felt really awesome to like, meet other artists that do the same thing and talk to them.

Here's a funny bit from my mother-in-law. She loves what I'm doing, and she refuses to believe there are other people doing the same thing. So every time I tell her that I met this artist, I met this artist, she just says, "No way. Nobody else can do what you do, right?" So that was great to find out other people doing the same thing and learn from them and be friends with them. That's huge.

MR: Yeah. That really makes a difference being involved in the Sketchnote community, and specifically the International Sketchnote Camp, which is basically a physical meetup of people in the community that started in 2017 in Germany and has continued organically now seven times. We, of course, had a skip during the pandemic. We were all going to Belgium, and, you know, it ended up being delayed about a year, and then they decided to go online and do the online version. So we did have something.

But other than that, it's been happening every year since 2017. And meeting those people that think like you and often are professionals and do it in some professional manner, but not all of them, you know, some people are just do it as a hobby. Or do it as a way to solve problems within the profession they're in, is really great to meet those people in person. It makes a difference.

KB: Absolutely.

MR: Especially, you know, when you talk to them online, because now you've got that physical, you've been with them and you know them. Yeah. It's great.

KB: It is different to learn from people when you look at their work on the screen and when you actually see them doing things.

MR: Making it, yeah.

KB: They just unlock something, just like understanding. And you mentioned a sketchnote community. I feel like I felt bummed that I missed the gathering in July in Texas.

MR: Oh, yeah.

KB: But my friends went there, and I couldn't go for a good reason because I had a baby in June.

MR: Oh, yeah. That's kind of important.

KB: I was very fresh mother and I could barely leave my apartment at that point, but I talked to my friends—

MR: We missed you.

KB: -who went, they loved it. They loved every minute.

MR: Yeah. It's happening in Birmingham, England this next summer. So going to the UK. One of the things we—going off on a little tangent. In the U.S., we sort of had to start over because so much of the community had been built in Europe. A lot of Europeans involved. Especially a lot of Germans, right? It's very popular in Germany. So, going to the States meant that a few came over from Europe.

KB: Right, right.

MR: And there were a lot of new people from the States and from Mexico and Central America as well. So it was good, but it meant that it was a smaller group. Which in its way was also good. But I guess now going back to the UK, we have the opportunity to kind of merge the two together. So hopefully, it continues to grow. It's pretty exciting to see it happening in Birmingham.

KB: Yeah. Hopefully, I can join one day as well. That'd be great.

MR: Yeah, we'd love to have you. You'd fit right in.

KB: That'd be awesome.

MR: I would love to switch to talking about tools that you like. I could guess what you probably use because you're doing it, you know, on boards, but you could be surprised. I would love to hear any kind of tool that you use. What are certain boards that you like? Are there markers that you like? Any other things that you use to do your work in person? And then you can talk a little bit about digital, too, if you like, after that.

KB: Sure. I don't think I am gonna be very original talking about the tools I like. I use Neuland markers. I think a lot of your guests use the same thing.

MR: Yeah, for sure.

KB: Yeah, I'm very happy now they have their store in the states, and I suppose we don't have to pay $45 for delivery anymore, but I haven't ordered from their local website yet. So, yeah, I just use Neuland markers. For my outline, I mostly use brush nib. That was a huge game changer for me because I'm not as good with the Chisel nib as I am with brush. I dunno why. I know a lot of guys and girls who do a lot of great stuff with the chisel, but for me, it just takes an extra second to think how to like turn it. And that second it's where I would prefer to use it to think, to understand, and to listen. So when I've discovered brush tip, that was a huge game changer for me and allowed me to work much faster. But I only use it for outlines. For my colors, I still use the chisel.

MR: For filling.

KB: Yeah. I guess another tool I never go on site with that is my notebook, but not because I make notes, but because I create a grid on my board with a little notebook. It's kinda this size.

MR: Oh, okay.

KB: So I go from top to the bottom, from left to right, making a quick grid with my notebook. I dunno if it makes sense. This what I'm—

MR: It's basically a template. Yeah.

KB: Kind of. I just don't wanna think about writing straight. So I use it just to make sure my lettering is—

MR: You've got some structure there, yeah.

KB: -it is not falling down because—

MR: It's easy to happen.

KB: I mean, my first boards, like everything started here and happened in the bottom right corner. It was not fun. So that's what I use most of the time.

MR: That's smart.

KB: So, whenever I'm on site without my little notebook, I feel almost like I forgot a marker, a color.

MR: Something is missing. Yeah.

KB: Yeah, yeah. Just one of the things I always do.

MR: That suggests to me, too, that if you're using this notebook as sort of a grid-making template, that it means you probably use the same-size boards most of the time because you would have to know that the book would make the grid fit on the board properly.

KB: We use different sizes. The grid is not that—it's very—how would I say?

MR: Say it's loose, maybe? That loose grip.

KB: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. How it looks most of the time. I have a paper here. I just put like my notebook like this. Like a little line under. So basically, the size of each square is the size of my notebook.

MR: I see. Got it. I hope it makes sense.

KB: Yeah. And I am assuming you're using pencil later if you wish, you can erase that pencil.

MR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I mean, those are just like little tiny lines. They kind of anchor me when I do lettering. It's mostly for lettering. Why I'm sharing that tip with everyone I work with because so many people, just like you said at the beginning, that you like how my work is like clean. A lot of people say, Hey, fantastic lettering, very clear, it's almost looks like printed.

And I say, you can do the same thing, don't worry about it. Just make a grid and you're good. Because one thing I don't like feeling when people think something is impossible to do, and I really try to communicate that in graphic recording, as long as you want to do it, things are possible. There is nothing that should stop a person from doing it. If you're not good at lettering, it's possible to improve without spending five years learning.

MR: Good. I like that attitude as well. Yeah. It sounds like you use pretty standard stuff for your physical and in-person things.

KB: Yeah.

MR: What about digital? It sounds like you're moving away from that, but I suspect it must come up from time to time. Is there a tool set that you like there?

KB: Absolutely. I mean, I use Procreate, I use Fresco as my two main tools for digital graphic recording. Some clients want to have like a big image. In those situations, I use Fresco because it's a vector. I love doing digital graphic recording, but I prefer markers on board, I would say, because I really like telling stories, and it was a huge part of my life since I was a child journalist. I was like writing stories for my peers, then when I was like just a journalist, a regular journalist, and I would tell stories to people.

And I like that being a graphic recorder still allows me to tell stories, share information, and I just feel like when I do it in person, on a board, it works much better. When people see you working on an iPad, a lot of people assume, I don't know, it's free drawn, it's done with like some kind of software, maybe AI.

MR: Magic. Yeah.

KB: Exactly. So people are like, oh, it's on iPad, okay, never mind. Graphic recording, in my opinion, loses a lot when people are not interacting with it right away or during the process. But when I do graphic recording on a board, people are excited about it, people wanna share their ideas, people excited seeing their ideas appearing on the board, and it just creates that real magic between people telling me their stories, and I'm absorbing their stories and sharing the stories with the audience. So I would say I love digital tools because they give us so much freedom. Any colors I wanna use, any shapes I wanna use, gradient, but real satisfaction from my work I get when I do stuff on board with markers.

MR: It's a different dynamic, I think, you know.

KB: That's my difference for me. Uh-huh. Absolutely.

MR: Like you said, people come up and there's really nowhere to hide when you have a board there because you got markers and a board and you, that's it.

KB: True.

MR: People watch it growing over the time, and they come and talk to you, and what are you doing? And wanna know? And like you said, there's more of an interaction than with an iPad, where, in a way, you're sort of hiding inside the machine.

KB: Absolutely.

MR: It can be difficult to share. I mean, you can show the screens and stuff, so, I mean, there's advantages, of course, on each side, but again, it sounds like depending on what you want to achieve with the audience, might determine which approach you would take, right?

KB: True, true. I have a little story about that if we still have time.

MR: Yeah, of course.

KB: I worked on one project with like very serious topic and very serious business topic, very serious business crew. All men, suit, very serious, like not a smile. I did I think four boards throughout the day. And I had my flight a little before the end of the event, so I had to say a quiet goodbye, and kind of walked backwards from the room. And I was closing the door. So I stared at them through like this—I dunno how to say between the door and the wall, just like one last look at the room. And I saw those very serious men wearing suits, looking at the boards and smiling and laughing.

MR: Wow.

KB: And like pointing things to each other, I wouldn't even say like kids, and that was fantastic to witness because that's exactly what I want people to feel. I just don't want them to feel that burden of the information they want to share with each other. I kind of want to want that burden to turn into something lighter and easier to absorb. And witnessing that image of like really serious team acting really silly and in a funny way in front of my boards, that was very inspiring. And one of the things I felt like I did something right here. I really like that feeling.

MR: You tied it all together in a lot of ways. I've often felt that when I do digital sketchnotes or whatever, that there's sort of a delayed reaction. I noticed this back when I went to Stake South by Southwest for many years. One thing I noticed was using Twitter at the time, I would do sketchnotes of a session, and I was pretty fast, so I would be done, but it was just black and white. It was in a little notebook. I would sort of capture the sense of it. This is when I first had a phone, I could immediately go out and take a picture and post it on Twitter. And the thing that I noticed was if you talked about being at South by Southwest, especially in the design community, some people would actually block people because they felt like, oh, I couldn't go, and I'm left out. Like there was this feeling of being left out, right?

KB: Okay.

MR: If you talked about it too much, you would get blocked by some people, right? And so, it was like a have, have not situation, but the thing I noticed is when I would go to these sessions and sketchnote them, and then take a picture and post it almost immediately afterward, that people really felt like they were part of it. It was almost immediate for them. They could react to it almost as fast as the people were in the session. So it sort of changed the dynamic. And I really liked that. And I noticed that over time as I would do projects where I would sketchnote and I didn't have that immediate sharing, whether it's in person with a board or posting someplace like, let's say you worked on it and I did all these typo fixes and such and we delivered a PDF, that you sort of lose the reaction, right?

That people are probably reacting to it and like, wow, maybe they're printing it and putting it on their office wall or whatever, but there's no feedback loop when you go that way because you sort of lost the moment in a way. So I can definitely see huge advantages to doing it in person, even though it's more challenging, and you know, all the different problems of it. There are some huge advantages to that physical in person work, for sure.

KB: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's what I learned from my art teacher. Again, I asked for feedback on some of my graphic recording works, I dunno, five years ago. And he said one thing I still keep thinking about when I'm trying to be like a perfectionist, he told me that you can work, you can do like perfect lettering and beautiful drawings, but nobody gonna care about them the next day. What matters it's to be done right there. I think that's very valuable to remember about that part of the process, feedback loop, that really with graphic recording, it is a part of the process. It's not something separate. It should be there. Otherwise, something important is missing.

MR: That's really good. Yeah, I think there's some immediacy component that often is—you know, it's understandable too that in some cases, like when you were working for Scriberia and you were doing these online things like that was a great service, and I guess I suppose you could build in something virtually where you could afterwards walk through and answer questions. You'd have to have an organizer who would build that in which, you know, on online it's sort of like you're sort of trying to avoid long-time on Zoom calls. Like in my head, there's like a two-hour limit. After two hours, you have to do a break. I don't like going more than an hour before a break because people just get fatigued, right?

KB: Exactly.

MR: Like, if you're trying to squeeze everything tighter, there's not really that time that in between that transitional time that you would have when you're standing by your board between sessions or after the thing, and the people that are drawn to it could come to you. And then there's a whole opportunity to discuss that. So, you know, they're in the place, it's immediate. They can talk now where with often with the digital side, it takes a lot more effort to reach out to someone and, you know, it does happen, but I think there's a lot more friction in place that you don't have to deal with in person.

KB: Absolutely.

MR: That's a good thing to remember for all of us, but there are definitely advantages, you know, as much as, you know, some artists may like to like hide in their iPad and, you know, hide in a quarter and do their work, right. There is an advantage to being seen and having that interaction if you're able to do it, so.

KB: Absolutely. And I can relate because like I have a baby now, and that would be so much easier to do most of my projects from home, digital, remote.

MR: Yeah, for sure.

KB: But I just don't like it that much as working in person. I mean, my husband is doing a great job babysitting while I'm working, while I'm traveling like crazy.

MR: That's good.

KB: But yeah, it's what I do because it just makes more sense to me. I mean, I'm not saying digital, I mean, just what you said.

MR: It definitely has its advantages. Yeah, for sure.

KB: Absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of events are happening, like in hybrid space right now, when part of the team is remote, part of the team is in the room. So it makes sense for a lot of things, but I just personally like being out there more.

MR: Yeah. I think, you know, that's also an important consideration as a sketchnoter, graphic recorder, visual thinker, you need to find where do your best work and then lean into that. So there might be people that like doing the visual stuff digitally for their own reasons, and maybe they're introverted, they don't like being in the space with the people. Maybe that's actually a better fit for them. So everyone needs to find, you know, sort of your window and where you work. Obviously, it sounds to me like that interaction, that in-person part is very important for you.

KB: Absolutely.

MR: And that sort of drives what you do. Right? So it's gonna show up in your work, right? If you don't like what you're doing, it's eventually gonna show up in the work. So that's a good thing to remember.

KB: One hundred percent. I remember how, when I just started working for Scriberia, I was very nervous. Very nervous about things you can imagine. And I had a call with one of the founders of Scriberia, Dan Porter. And I think I was sitting there on the call, like bright, red sweating. I couldn't speak one word. And he said, "Remember, still the most important thing in this field is for you to have fun." And back then, palms were sticking to the table, and I thought, wow, what a stupid thing to say. Like, what kind of fun I can have. I'm about to have a heart attack. But, again the thing that it's very valuable thing to remember, and if someone asked me, what is my primary goal in this field? Like sharing information, storytelling would be one, but having fun would be almost as important as like telling stories, sharing information.

MR: That's really interesting to hear. That's good to hear. That leads me to sort of the final section, and that is tips. We love to be practical. I sort of frame the question as, imagine there's someone listening who's visual thinker, and maybe they feel like they're in a plateau, or they just need some inspiration or something like that What would you tell them? What would be three tips you would tell that person to kind of get out of the funk or maybe think of things differently? I would love to hear what your thoughts are on that.

KB: Sure. I do have conversations like that fairly often because people reach out online and they ask me, like, what to do. They show their work. And the first thing I wanna share with everyone, and we already touched it in today's conversation, I would say, stop overthinking. You are good enough. You're good enough to go out there. You're good enough to reach the client you want to reach. Just like you and the blackboard. It doesn't matter if you don't have like a big portfolio of big clients. Being courageous, being excited about what you do, understanding why you wanna do that. Those are the most important things you need to have.

And it's a really sad, again, when I see people who like their work is fantastic, just more practice, actual practice in the field would improve their work. They're just afraid to get in there because they think they're not good enough. And I wanna tell that frustrated person, you are good enough. You are better than good enough. So go for it. Email, whoever. Email or Google. Another great tip, it's probably the part of this tip is I told you that I started doing graphic recording in English in Estonia on my own. My first gigs were pro bono when I would just reach to the organizers, describe what I'm doing, and they would just let me on site, like do whatever kind of attitude. And they didn't expect much. And when they saw the results, they were fascinated.

Even though five, six years ago, my graphic recordings they didn't look as clean, nice. Grammar was all over the place, you can imagine, but people liked the result anyway. And it's how I started getting real clients from those pro bono, when I would just show up on site and tell everyone what I'm doing. And that's exactly what I started doing when I came to the United States as well. Because it's hard to establish yourself when you know nobody. Just my husband and his family and their dogs. That's it. So I started reaching out to like local libraries, pro bono events, volunteering opportunities, just to do what I wanna do for real, not in my little notebook where nobody can see it. And I think that's a huge part of it.

So that would be the first tip. Just go for it. You are good enough. The second tip I would say simplify your drawings. You don't need perspective. You don't need dimensions. You don't need a lot of stuff that can get on the way of you working fast. And it's not only about graphic recording, it's about all the illustration fields. It's important to know an anatomy. It's important to know where the shade should go, shadow, but you shouldn't overthink that kind of stuff. We had a great exercise at Scriberia of redrawing famous paintings with very minimal amount of lines. And it turns out people recognize Mona Lisa, if it is just three lines, people still see—

MR: Yeah, you don't need much.

KB: Exactly. So much we can translate through simple images. It's fantastic. So I would say if someone is struggling with drawing realistic people, I show those people examples of my work when I don't really count fingers, when I have ears sometimes floating in the air, when I draw hair as three lines. And that's enough. People see what they need to see, what I want them to see. And that's more important than being very accurate.

And again, of course, it's great to practice. And I try to do a lot of practice with my drawing, but mostly how to simplify my drawings even more because I value drawings on the board. I think balance is important, text and images. And I understand how hard it is to think about an image while you are drawing live, and people are talking, and you have to store the information they're talking about, think, how to put it on the board.

MR: A lot is going on.

KB: A lot. Yeah, too much. Almost. So it's important to be able to draw something real quick. Value of the drawing is huge. So that would be tip number two. And the tip number three, again, something I learned at Scriberia, you notice that I'm really thankful to that experience, even though it was remote and I've never been to the studio, to the office. And I've never met anyone in person from Scriberia, but it just feels like I know—I worked for them almost for two years, and yeah, never met anyone. But I learned a lot. And I value that knowledge and experience.

This tip is more for graphic recorders, visual thinkers. If your drawing can be a photograph, you are not pushing hard enough. That tip helped me a million times on-site. Means if you just draw and laptop when someone is talking about computer science, hmm, maybe—

MR: Yeah, move a little harder.

KB: Yeah. Do something more fun. It's such a simple filter. Like, can it be a photograph or not? And you can apply that one side within seconds to the drawings you're about to make. It can work super simple. You don't have to—again, I understand pressure of time, and it's hard to think about deep metaphors often because, since you said so much is going on, but you can draw a little arm added to your laptop, little face, and it's already gonna do more than just an image of a laptop. You can put a person on the screen doing something. And you just can do so much to make your image more rich and try to communicate more through the image. So yeah, think of if something can be a photograph, do something more fun so it's not just a photograph.

MR: And maybe for someone who's new, let's say a new graphic recorder, and you're facing that and you want to incorporate that, maybe the solution is you're doing a pro bono thing, that's where you test this stuff, right?

KB: Absolutely.

MR: Where if you fail, they're not gonna take their money back 'cause there wasn't any, right?

KB: Yeah. First of all, another discovery I made while working as a graphic reporter, it's so hard to fail, and people would really understand that you fail.

MR: Right.

KB: A lot of people say, "Man, I failed here, my frame is not straight."

MR: Nobody cares.

KB: Absolutely. I've done, I think over the last five, six years of active work, I dunno, 200 gigs, maybe more. I've never counted, but never anyone would walk to me and say, "Hey, this is not good. This drawing is not good." So people dunno if you think you did something wrong.

MR: Yeah, definitely.

KB: It would be tip now number four.

MR: There you go.

KB: You are doing everything right. And it's also good for mental health because I understand the pressure is insane.

MR: A lot going on.

KB: And if something can take that pressure off, I think I do it from my sake. Like, otherwise, as I told you from that call with Dan. I would just melt of stress. And yeah.

MR: Yeah. Lately, I've been trying to change this mindset with people to think of the work you do at Sketchnoting or whatever as an experiment. Every time you do an experiment, you're gonna learn something. You know, scientists don't go into the laboratory and it fails, They never do the experiment again.

KB: Exactly.

MR: That's actually the reason to do it again and try something else, and totally keep exploring. 'Cause every time you do it, you're learning. But I think it sort of changes. I notice in my own self, when I think of things as experiments and I'm playing, I loosen up and I ha take more chances and have more fun. And it feels like the results are more successful. Even if there's failure, because I've learned something, it changes dynamic, the relationship to the work, when I think of it that way, then, oh, I have to deliver this amazing thing for these people and if like you said, the border isn't perfect, they're gonna see that. Like, nobody cares.

On the podcast here, I've talked to many people like you, who when they look back at their first work, like, oh my gosh, how did they pay me for that? That work is terrible from my perspective, right? But that what's that saying is look how far you've come from where you began, and you were still good enough. They still paid you, they still loved it, it's still caused them to think in a different way.

Like, that's what we're here for, right? Like, we get so hung up on the perfection of the production that we forget that the movement forward in ideation and conception and retention, those are really where the value comes for these organizers. That they remember that event, and they had that lady who was doing that stuff on the boards, remember they talked about this, and you've now been a success, right? They don't even remember what the drawing looked like anymore.

KB: Exactly.

MR: So, it's pretty exciting that we get to do that.

KB: Also, good thing to remember that you are not gonna one day just create your perfect board. It's not gonna happen. And even if it happened, like then what? To walk around to do perfect boards? So, where is fun? So I like thinking about that every next board is gonna be better in some way.

MR: Even better.

KB: Maybe it's something is not gonna go exactly right, but it's just that fun, creative process that I chose to deal with daily. And that's what I really love.

MR: Small wins, you know, look for small wins.

KB: True. I mean, maybe they're not even small. I consider every win as a big win.

MR: Yeah. Right, you can frame it however you like. Yeah, for sure.

KB: Definitely. Every new climb.

MR: Well, Katya, this has been really wonderful to chat with you, and thanks for sharing your tips. What's the best place for someone who wants to reach out to you to do so? Would you send 'em to a website, to LinkedIn, to somewhere else?

KB: We just learned that LinkedIn is a place to find me. I think I'm Katya Balakina there, if I remember right.

MR: Yeah.

KB: B-A-L-A-K-I-N-A, spell it right. And also Instagram. I post a lot of on Instagram. Also, on my Instagram, I post some of the creative stuff outside graphic recording. I do canvases. And it's Xrenobl. I dunno, maybe you can put it in the description, but also if you search Katya Balakina on Instagram, you're gonna be able—

MR: You'll see it. Okay.

KB: Yeah, I have a profile picture of a screaming coconut.

MR: Okay, cool. Well, Esther is my person who does the transcripts and does all the show notes. So she'll find you. She'll hunt you down and find you, and we'll have links in the show notes for you.

KB: That'd be great.

MR: So people can connect with Katya and reach out and say hi or see her work. Her work is really excellent, so.

KB: Thanks so much, Mike. Thank you.

MR: Yeah, thank you so much for being on the show. I just wanna thank you for doing the work you do, for continuing to push forward and do work and share it so we can see your work and we can admire it, and it inspires other people to do great work too. So thank you for the work you do.

KB: Thanks so much.

MR: It's appreciated.

KB: Thanks for having me, Mike. And I hope this conversation inspires young graphic recorders to go for it, to be perfect.

MR: Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, the beauty of a podcast is it lives on for a long time, and you never know who it might influence. So that's why we do these things.

KB: Awesome.

MR: So, well, thank you everyone who's watching or listening, until the next episode, this is another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until then, talk to you soon.

YouTube:

Through graphic recording, Katya Balakina transforms information-sharing into an engaging storytelling experience that’s both fun and insightful - S17/E02

In this episode, Katya Balakina shares her amazing journey from starting to draw in her early years, to becoming a journalist in Russia during a very hard time for the country, discovering graphic recording while in art school, and gaining the confidence to pursue art full-time after winning an art contest. Along the way, she offers valuable tips and insights from her career as a graphic recording artist.

SPONSORED BY CONCEPTS
The Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil.

In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:

• The Infinite Canvas as a sketchnoting power feature
• How vectors give you complete control of brushes and sizing as you create sketchnotes and
• How vector elements let you size and repurpose your drawings for ultimate flexibility.

The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts.

Watch the workshop video for FREE at:
https://rohdesign.com/concepts

Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop!

RUNNING ORDER

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Katya Balakina
• Origin Story
• Katya's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Katya
• Outro

LINKS
Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Katya on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katya-balakina
• Katya On Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/xrenobl

TOOLS
Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Neuland Markers - https://www.neuland.com/en-us
• A little notebook - https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Basics-Notebook-Hardcover-8-25-Inch/dp/therohdesignwebs
• Procreate - https://procreate.com
• Adobe Fresco - https://www.adobe.com/products/fresco.html

TIPS

1. Stop overthinking. You are good enough.
2. Simplify your work.
3. If your drawing can be a photograph, you are not pushing.
4. You are doing everything right.
5. It's good to remember that you are not going to one day just create a perfect board.

CREDITS

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro

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SUPPORT THE PODCAST
To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

He reflects on his journey from the analog days of graphic design to the digital era, drawing comparisons to what is currently happening in the AI space. Dan also reveals the origin stories and ideas behind his bestselling books and how they came to life.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Dan Roam
• Origin Story
• Dan's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Where to find Dan Roam
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Dan's website
• Dan on LinkedIn
• Dan on Intagram
• Back of the Napkin 2.0
• The Back Of The Napkin
• Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work
• Show & Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations
• Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind
• Pop-Up Pitch: The Two-Hour Creative Sprint to the Most Persuasive Presentation of Your Life

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Dan Roam, the Dan Roam calling to us from his studio. You can see he's got whiteboards and he's got paintings. He's drinking tea, it looks like.

Dan Roam: Absolutely.

MR: So welcome to the show. Thanks for being here, Dan.

DR: Mike, it is always, always a pleasure. You and I've been talking for a long time, and every time we get to, I enjoy it. So this is fabulous. Thanks for having me.

MR: Same here. Same here. So our history is in 2016-ish, I recorded a podcast with you, and I lost it. Something happened with the audio, and that's bugging me for like forever. And so, having Dan Roam on the show is like a huge get for me. So I feel really excited to have you here. Even though you know, I've been on your sessions and stuff and we've done stuff together. Like, it's always bugged me that I lost this, and we had a really good discussion, which I can't prove. So now we're just got to do it again.

DR: Oh, we'll just do it again and we'll take it into completely different way. And the other thing, Mike, just if I might, is just the fact the nature of our careers and our passion is so interwoven, if you will. Like we keep popping up.

MR: Yes.

DR: I just keep seeing you everywhere. It's like, hey, there's Mike, you know.

MR: Same thing with you.

DR: Yeah, exactly. So it's a pleasure.

MR: So, the couple things I wanted to talk about were your books, of course. I'm kinda curious about your painting.

DR: Hmm.

MR: But we always sort of start the show off with origin story. So I think we all know what you do, but you can start with what you do and then go right into like how did you end up here? Like as a little kid, what drew you into this visual thinking stuff? I think we're both also user experience people. So maybe that had some impact. I'm really curious about that trend. Like how did you get here?

DR: Wow. Well, that's a fantastic question, Mike. And what a great place to start. And the simple, simple answer is, I actually drew something out in anticipation of this.

MR: Nice.

DR: As a little kid, you know, there I am like everybody else, I'm looking at the world and it's awfully confusing.

MR: Yeah.

DR: People are telling you to do things and here's how to act and here's what to learn. And a lot of it was very confusing. And I've spent everything, this is the entire summary of what we're gonna talk about. How can I figure out a way to go from that to that so that things are clear. So, like every kid I drew a lot, but like many kids, I never stopped the drawing part. So I've learned to draw badly really, really well. And I'm sure that people who follow you probably have similar types of stories.

MR: Yeah.

DR: Like the visual thinking side, the visual storytelling side. Maybe can I have, you know, mom, dad, school teacher, maybe could I have a few less words and maybe a few more pictures. And so, that's really the origin story. Nothing particularly unique there. But I would add one thing, Mike, if I could, because that kind of powered me up through university, but I had this kind of critical catalytic moment when I was at university, maybe my second year of school. So I was studying out here in California in Santa Cruz, and I thought that I wanted to be a doctor at that time. So I was on the pre-med track.

MR: Interesting.

DR: So I was taking biology and lots of chemistry. And if anybody's ever taken, you know, organic chemistry back in the old days, pre-digital, anything, you know, you'd build everything out with these models of molecules. And so, organic chemistry was entirely visual. And as a model builder, which I've always been to plastic models, airplane models, that kind of thing the idea of trying to understand what the professors were teaching us about these fundamental concepts of how do atoms bond to create these molecules, And you can model it out. Because there are very specific rules of how each of these different types of atoms is gonna bond with the other ones. So that was really cool. And so I'd be in chemistry class and learning that.

And then I'd go over to painting class 'cause I was also taking painting, and our professor would be talking about you know, fundamentals of really good composition. And he'd be talking about the golden mean and the Fibonacci numbers. you know, you don't have to paint that way. But if you look at the works of Leonardo, or if you look at the works of Michelangelo, if you look at really, really outstanding classic beautiful artworks, the Parthenon, they seem to follow these kind of beautiful harmonic mathematical formula.

And I thought, wait a minute, this is crazy. I'm over there in chemistry, and they're teaching me like visually, how things fit together so that they work. And now I'm over in art, and they're teaching me ways to visually put things together so that they work. And it's like these rules are the same. Isn't that amazing? And so, I kind of created this path happily, as I mentioned, I went to a school called Santa Cruz, part of the UC system, down on the beach in California.

MR: That's Santa Cruz.

DR: And at Santa Cruz, even in the 80s, or especially in the 80s, it was a pretty funky school. And they were like, hey, design your own major. So I designed one that was an intersection between fine art and biology slash chemistry. Because I really found that, you know, an interest—and you can imagine my parents, I get a degree in painting and degree in biology, and you're functionally unemployable. Like what are you gonna do with that, other maybe than do scientific illustration? Which was a potential path.

MR: Yeah, that's true.

DR: But I did not really have a talent at that, which is a side note as to why. And so, what I did instead is I became a consultant. I had worked my way through school doing graphic design, like basic, fundamental pre-digital pay stuff, like Exacto knives, wax machines, Galley of type on paper.

MR: I've done that.

DR: Like all that. So that was a skill that I had. So I was able to get a job with a newspaper in San Francisco. And I was working in the advertising department, like doing longhand analog advertising design. And I realized I was really interested when I would talk to the advertisers to custom build for them an ad, you know, for their furniture store, for their car wash, or so for their dance party or for their theater production. Talking to the people who are buying the ad to find out what is it that you're really doing? Like what? That's cool.

You know, what is your theater production, or tell me about the strategy behind your car wash. Like how does that overlap? Because I really wanna make an ad that's going to appeal to what you're trying to achieve. And long story short, Mike, that became really the career path, is talking to people who have an idea, asking them what they're trying to do, and then translate it using these visual skills and, you know, abasta, that's the story. So does that make sense?

MR: Yeah, that totally makes sense. That's really interesting. You talk about this connection between painting and biology and you know, debating if you should be a medical illustrator. So I mean, what did your parents think when you went through this whole degree and then you're doing, you know, like layout at this newspaper, like where they bummed out? Obviously, it's worked out pretty well, but what did they—and maybe the lesson I'm asking for is sometimes you make these decisions to go and do things that don't always make sense in the moment, but if you still have a vision for it, that it makes sense in the long term.

And then the other thing that I was commenting to someone on Substack the other day where they talked about, they did this weird job that if you thought about it, it would make no sense in your future career, but in the context of looking back, it totally made sense. And I have one of those experiences too. I was a wash rack kid at a car dealership. So I got to negotiate with salespeople and learned who were the good guys and who were not the good guys and how to kind of do stuff. And that's really influenced my whole career. So now I'm like totally off on this question, but you get a sense what I'm thinking. Yeah.

DR: Everything only makes sense when you look at it backwards. Like, how did any of us—and I'm talking about you me, anybody who might be watching this or listening to this, anybody—you know, you ask someone, how did you get where you are? And everybody will say, "Well, it was a long and winding road, but I ended up here." And it all kind of makes sense when you look at it backwards. And it's really interesting 'cause just the other day I have a friend who's a school teacher who teaches 10th grade and he asked me to come online and we do it a virtual session with his 10th graders. And they had similar questions.

'Cause hey, you're a published author. You, you know, you've, you managed to have created a career of things that you seem to have been passionate about your whole life. How in the hell do you make that happen? And you know, the 10th graders, I'm like, kids, you know, I wish I could tell you, but the, the fact is, you gotta think between what is a kind of applicable, practical part of what you wanna do because you are going to have to eat. Like that's true.

MR: Right.

DR: There is an applied practical element to life. You have to put Cheerios on the table every single day. And so, in order to do that, you've gotta make some money. So you have to have some practical side. But on the other side, let's not forget the aspirational side because if you're just eating breakfast and you're not dreaming, why are you even living? So you've gotta be able to do the practical and the aspirational. So you gotta eat and you gotta dream. And you're lucky, you're lucky as heck if by building upon the practical and loving your creative side, your dreaming side, you can weave them together into something that will get someone to pay you a dollar to do that.

And kind of explaining it—and again, same thing Mike, you're saying, is it only makes sense looking backwards. Something you were starting to ask me, how did my parents think about this sort of weird mishmash education? Well, they were delightful. Maybe it was a little bit of a different era, but by the time I left home and went to college, like you're out of the house, you know, parents are like—

MR: You're not my problem.

DR: "You've got agency now. You're self-propelled. Godspeed, good luck. We're here if you need us. But you know, we're moving and not leaving the address behind." So they were just delighted by the fact that I was able to earn money doing graphic design.

MR: Cool.

DR: And then I'll tell you though, and this is gonna be relevant to where this conversation right now might take us. The really critical moment when I was working for that newspaper, doing that advertising design, perhaps there were two. One was learning to ask people, I can draw you the picture, but to what end? To what purpose is your ad? If I know what you're trying to achieve, I can make a whole lot better creative advertisement. So one was learning to ask good questions and listen, then convert that into a visual or a story.

The second one is just by virtue of luck. Being in the right place at the right time. the newspaper I was working with was one of the first in San Francisco, which was kind of on the bleeding edge at that time, given proximity to Silicon Valley to move to digital layout tools. This was in the late 1980s. And so, at that newspaper we got the first Macs, we had the first Adobe PageMaker, we had free hand. These are tools that to folks today are the ancestors, the legacy—

MR: Yeah, archaic, too.

DR: -to what Adobe is. Now, Adobe barely even existed at that time. There were other companies.

MR: Right. Right.

DR: The trick there, why I think that's important is not only are you learning to be creative and tell a visual story using tools analog or traditional, but now you're meeting at this intersection of this arrival of new technology that is scary as heck and seems to put a lot of your skills out of work. Because if PageMaker is gonna set up literally the page for me and run the right line length for my text and do the letting and suddenly gives me options for, you know, in the early days, 75 different fonts.

Well, a week before I was running that through a Linotype machine. And this is, you know, old man telling stories that don't matter, but that was a trade. Like you had to know how to spec things by eye. And now the computer's doing it for you. And it's like, well, it's putting me outta work, but it is enabling me to focus on the parts of layout that were compelling anyway. So we're gonna get to that 'cause This is where I think we're at another inflection point right now.

MR: I think so too. Yeah, it's a great discussion.

DR: If I might share one more story, this was learning and it's gonna be relevant for today, is I was working at a small scrappy newspaper here in San Francisco. And at that time The San Francisco Chronicle was the big daily newspaper, former Hearst Newspaper, you know, William Randolph Hearst, all the stories. Big money, long history. And it was really interesting, and I don't know how this is gonna land with people, but we went over to visit the Chronicle production room and they were a union shop. And it was really fascinating 'cause we came in to say, these are some of the digital tools we're bringing to bear. And they were highly resistant. Because looking at it, if we move to those digital tools, a lot of our journeyman production people are gonna be outta work.

MR: Yeah.

DR: Well, I have no particular opinion about that. I know what I'm gonna do. I'm not part of a union, I'm not part of a labor force to the degree that I know, but I'm gonna go ahead and use these tools 'cause they amp up what I do and we're in a scrappy little shop, da da da da da. And you know, it's kind of interesting how that played out 'cause None of those people—if you didn't make the move to digital, you were out of a job. Within a couple of years, it was done. And then a decade later, I found myself in New York working for a very fancy design firm right at the beginning of the internet, boom, 1997, 1998. And I was working for a very famous former magazine designer who'd been smart enough, a guy named Roger Black.

MR: Oh yeah, Roger, yeah.

DR: Who had been the designer of Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, Smart Magazine, Vanity Fair. I mean, he was the original art director for Rolling Stone Magazine under Dan Wener back in the glory days for them of the 60s. Suffice it to say Roger was very smart, and he's like there's this thing called the internet and all these publications are coming to our design studio and they're saying, can you help us make a website out of our magazine? And he's like, let's do that. So again, by the luck of being in the right place at the right time, technology revolution, one, digital or rather analog paste up to digital paste up, been there, learned a lot.

Transition two, let's go from print media to online media. And so, we were there, we were designing, again the original time.com. We were doing ibm.com. We designed the original Barnes and Noble.com before even anybody knew what Amazon was. And again, forgive me for the old man stories, but it's relevant in the sense that once again, how many of those magazine design people are even around 10 years later. This is the nature of this beast that we have. And you know, we're in another inflection point right now, which you can imagine where we might wanna talk about. I'm gonna stop there. But that's the origin story. Looking back, how does that land with you?

MR: That sounds great. And we have so many parallels because I was fortunate, I was a student coming into the industry when that analog, the digital transition happened. So I learned how to use a Haber rule, and you probably know what that is.

DR: I do.

MR: This weird yellow plastic thing to measure typewriter type. You could calculate it and send it to a typographer who would then send you the galley of type, which then I would wax and cut and layout. So I immediately saw when the Macs started coming in. Like that was a huge leap forward in what was capable. And it favored me, again, being there at the right place at the right time. Same thing with the internet. Kind of, almost the same story shifting away from graphic design. So I feel those stories. And for a long time, I felt like, you know, the AI stuff that we see happening in a similar way presents us with a challenge and an opportunity. And the question again is how do we as curious people that think visually adapt to this situation. So maybe that's a good place to—

DR: You said it first. You said AI first, but let me tell you, I got a backside to this whiteboard, which I've already prepared. So that's where we're gonna go. And it's gonna get contentious as all heck, but why not?

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

DR: I just came from a remarkable presentation last night. Again, I live in San Francisco, so I'm just across the bridge from Berkeley. And there is an organization at Berkeley in their computer science school called the Simons Institute for the Future of Computing. And every month they'll put on like a symposium about something that's related to obviously the fundamentals of computing. And last night they had three leaders, one from Google Deep Mind, one from Anthropic and one from not OpenAI, but was one of the founders of OpenAI. And they were talking about why are we so surprised by the sudden arrival of AI and where are we gonna go next and when are we gonna hit AGI, you know artificial general intelligence.

MR: Right.

DR: And it was a fascinating, fascinating conversation. We'll get there, but that is the technological transition that we're in right now that's gonna impact every one of us that draws for a living or writes for a living. And it's a challenge and an opportunity and we gotta nuance that, so.

MR: Yeah, it's definitely a mix. I mean, you know, just last week we're recording this in April, we got the Studio Ghibli feature in ChatGPT where you can drop an image in and it'll turn it into a, is it Miyazaki is the—

DR: Miyazaki. Absolutely.

MR: Miyazaki, it'll take that style, which, you know, I have real mixed feelings about it, honestly. It's cool what it does. My son did a picture and sent it to me and he thought it was cool. And people are posting it. And at the same time, I feel really strange about someone scraping all of Studio Ghibli's stuff and turning it into just another filter in a tool, right? Like it's sort of like both at the same time. I dunno how to describe that. It makes me uneasy and excited. How do you deal with that? I don't know. I dunno if I have the answer for that, but it is an interesting time that we find ourselves in.

DR: We don't have the answers, but I've been spending, like you, a lot of time trying to form some opinions and I have some. And they're always open to shift. But if we want to go there before this hour is up, I'd be delighted to flip this whiteboard over and talk it through. And in fact, you know, your show, there is a bit of a through line that I could throw out there. You'd said, let's talk about your books. So I did a—yeah, it was a really good exercise for me because like, you, you write your books and then you move on. And it's interesting sometimes I think to go back and reflect on how did I write that one? What was it about, what did I learn and how did that affect the next ones? And again, the same thing we're talking about like these life stories.

MR: Yeah.

DR: In hindsight, there's a through line at the time there's not, but it's interesting. I mapped them out, identified a through line and I would love to share it with you if you think that's appropriate.

MR: Yeah. I think we should do that. And then we can tie it to AI and sort of wrap up on the AI discussion and just sort of state where we're feeling 'cause I think like you, I don't have any hard and fast opinions. And then I do have a couple, I guess. So it'll be interesting to see where we fall on that. And I'm totally open to being, you know, convinced of different ideas too, so.

DR: Oh, well, that's the way we have to be.

MR: Yeah, yeah.

DR: Yeah. Well, you remember what F Scott Fitzgerald said of, you know, great Gatsby fame. He said the sign of a good intelligence is someone who's able to keep two competing ideas in mind at the same time and not lose their shit. That's a paraphrase. But that's close to what he said. So let's hope we're all intelligent enough to keep the two. You know, life is a balance.

MR: Yeah, it is. Definitely.

DR: Let's try to keep both sides moving. Yeah.

MR: Yes. So start with Back of the Napkin. That's the one that I was introduced to and it blew my mind. I was like, wow, people are writing books about visual thinking. I was just starting to get into it. I'd met Dave Gray, I went to one of his events and it was starting to like form in my mind and like, I looked backwards and I was doing it in college and doing it in my work, but I didn't know what to call it. And so when your book came out, it was like, wow, okay, this is cool. So let's start there and then work your way through the books and how they tie together.

DR: Mike, let's do it. Okay. So on the whiteboard, here we go. Let's grab a red pen. And we'll do through, it's really, really quick. And again, this was a useful exercise for me just before this call. I went and mapped things out. So back in 2004 I thought, let's write a book about thinking with pictures 'cause nobody else had done it that I could find. So it took four years for that to happen. So that book finally came out in 2008. And that was number one, and it did really well. And I was more surprised than anyone. My publisher was surprised too. It sold a million copies, it's in 27 languages. It was like—

MR: Wow, that's awesome.

DR: That literally allowed me to quit my day job 'cause I was still working for an agency at the time. We won't name any names, but I had gotten to the point where I hated it. And this was the thing that enabled me to say, I'm gonna go out and do my own thing. So that was the genesis of it. And the idea was how do I kind of codify the tools that I've developed on my own to try to take this complexity and make things clear by drawing it out. So there was a lot of cognitive science, there was a lot of triangulations with what was going on in people who were studying, how does the human visual mind work?

And then the outcome was, sort of, the key to The Back of the Napkin is there's a formula at a macro level for neuro mechanically, how the human vision system processes the world. And when you understand that, you can hijack it. So the idea of The Back of the Napkin was if you seek to deconstruct something really, really complicated with your visual mind, here is a formula that you can do, use that. That was the big breakthrough.

And then the second book was, well what about words? So I wrote a book called Blah, Blah, Blah. It took me two years to get out that. And it was really about combining the pictures and the words. So here's, I've got the pictures and the words, and we came up with something—I came up with something I called vivid thinking. Which is really verbal plus visual, move them together into one notion. So let's be vivid. Let's use both our words and our pictures. And then I was doing a lot of public speaking and people were saying, well, how do I present effectively using those words and pictures? So that was the book Show and Tell.

And then the publisher was really happy 'cause the books were selling and they said, hey, it's time for you to do a greatest Hits album. So I came up with a book called Draw to Win. This I think was about 2016. And what this is, is it's a short series of maybe 12 very simple, very fast lessons on just how to really quickly use your visual mind to solve things, sell things, teach things, understand things. A lot of the same principles that you talk about in Sketchnoting, a lot of the same things.

And then I started to become really enamored of the work of Joseph Campbell. And you and I were talking about Star Wars there and the hero's journey, like the classic story. So I said, well wait a minute. We've got these pictures, we've got these words, we've got this ability to present, we've got all these skills now. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could figure out how to make a very persuasive slide deck that's just 10 slides long because if you really break the Hero's Journey down, you can break it down meaningfully into 10 very discreet beats.

You know, and for those who are not familiar with what we're talking about, the Hero's Journey is exactly the storyline that George Lucas used, line for line when he created Star Wars, number one. And he had discovered it from a guy named Joseph Campbell who passed away several years ago. But Joseph Campbell lived through almost, you know, from 1910 to 1990, something like that, and traveled all over the world and was a collector of great stories from all the myths and all of the great stories from cultures around the world that had withstood the test of time, whether it was like Indian Upanishad or whether it was stories from the Old Testament or whether it was great myths from Southeast Asia, what have you.

And he realized that these stories that stand the test of time and get told over and over and over and become these cultural touchstones for humanity, all follow a virtually identical storyline and it moves along these beats. And so, what I did is I wrote a book called The Pop-Up Pitch, this is three years ago now. That really took everything and put it into a kind of a formula of saying, look, if you want to create a pitch in a PowerPoint deck or Google Slides or on a whiteboard, and you're trying to share an idea with someone with the idea of convincing them, or well, more persuading them, gently persuading them to at least understand your perspective and perhaps to take action, the building of the slide order has already been done. This problem has already been solved. And so, I just codified it. So that's the through line. Does that makes sense?

MR: Yeah, that's sense. I love the way it's sort of builds. So you see it's starting with these componentry and over time it's building up into—eventually you're getting to the point of like, how do you use all these skills to then convince people or get people to open their minds to a different idea or an idea that maybe they didn't consider and move them forward into that direction.

DR: Yeah, exactly.

MR: That's pretty cool.

DR: Yeah.

MR: Yeah.

DR: Well, and again, it's like where we started, Mike, it's like this all makes logical sense now, but that's only again, looking back. Is you can kind of see, oh, that came from that which came from that. There was nothing that said, here, let's start in order to achieve that.

MR: Mm-hmm.

DR: No, it didn't work that way. And I don't often think that it does. Our life is always a meandering journey and it has a direction. You know, the direction is always back to this original one. This makes me uncomfortable, this gives me some comfort. And I'd rather be comfortable than not. And just expanding sort of the scope of that processing of complexity and confusion to understand it, to clarify it, and then to be able to share it with someone else, so that hopefully you then pass the baton to them pass. And they can do the same thing. So that's up till now. With your permission it ain't over. I'd like to flop the board.

MR: Go for it.

DR: Here we go.

MR: Let's do it.

DR: Drum roll. Okay. So let me tell you for a moment about the consulting work. All those books lead to three types of businesses that I do. For anybody who wants to pursue this path and how do you make money doing this? Well, number one is if you have an opportunity to do work for a client, we'll call that what I would call the consulting side of the work. Someone pays you by the hour or by the project to use your tool sets or your talents or your skills to help them solve a problem. Cool. So I make money doing the consulting side. Then the second thing is, if you're paying attention to what you're doing, as you do that, you might have a couple of interesting ideas, which could become a book. So you could write a book.

Now whether that's published traditionally or self-published or a series of blogs or posts on LinkedIn, they're all cool. But the idea is you're creating content. You're creating a book, a corpus of knowledge based on the things that you've learned from your consulting work. That's cool. And once that's out there, you get recognized as a bit of a thought leader, hopefully. And then people will ask you to come in and talk to them or train them for making money. So now you've got three ways to make money. You do the work, you write about the work, and then you get to talk about what you wrote about.

And the beauty of those is they then are also a self-fulfilling cycle because then you're out there in front of people talking about the book, about the work, and someone says, "Can I hire you to do some more work?" And on you go. So over the last 10 years, the consulting work, I started to map this out. I have been blessed with the opportunity to do a fair amount of consulting work with people in cloud computing companies like Snowflake. I've been doing a lot of work with Snowflake. So they're a ginormous multi-billion-dollar cloud computing company.

Cybersecurity. So companies like Mimecast and Proofpoint and some of those companies that provide cyber protection for all of the data and whatnot. So I've been doing consulting work with them. I live in the Silicon Valley, so I've been doing technology-focused work forever. And these are both tech companies, as you can imagine, work with Microsoft, work with Google. All of those are focused on innovation, you know, a real thing. And then over the last two years, interestingly enough, I got a consulting gig to work with an electricity company.

MR: Interesting.

DR: Yeah. So, I never expected that to happen. So a consultancy that's here in California that works primarily with our three big utilities in California, so PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric. So if you think about it, I think California by itself is like the world's fifth largest economy just in the State of California. And those three utilities are together, far and away collectively the largest of electric and gas utilities in the country. And what's been interesting is to have a chance to work with them. And I didn't know anything about the electricity industry, but I sure as heck do now. And it's fascinating 'cause Mike, everything, every single thing comes down to power.

MR: Yes.

DR: Everything comes to power. It's amazing. Without energy and specifically for the way we live, without electricity, nothing else happens, right? Like you talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like baseline, you gotta power this stuff. And I was unaware of how it works, how is it monetized, how is it evolving? And the fact that electricity, while theoretically infinite, which it is, the sun, is an infinite power source for us. An infinite, giant thermonuclear reactor that's right there in front of us. Not 24/7. You know, 12 and maybe five if you will. It's not always visible to us, but suffice it to say we are surrounded by energy. And yet using it, finding a way to generate it, store it, transmit it more often than not, becomes as contentious as anything else in human life.

So it's fascinating and I wanna wax too poetic about it, but suffice it to say cloud needs more of that, cyber needs more of that, all tech needs more of that. And along the way, I still continue to work with a lot of different businesses and I continue to work in the realm of creativity. Now, if you were to look at an intersection of all of these, are you ready for the unveil?

MR: Go for it.

DR: There she is, ladies and gentlemen.

MR: Right in the middle.

DR: Right in the middle. This is it. This is the revolution of the day. And AI in particularly generative AI, which is the one that has the ability that, you know, large language models, the fusion models have completely captivated my interest, completely captivated my interest. The good and the bad. The challenges is the opportunities. Like you said, your son getting to use you know, ChatGPTs, new diffusion model to generate studio Ghibli style drawings from a stick figure drawing. Well, good for him, and tricky.

So that's where I'm putting my attention. I'm digging deep into—specifically I'm interested in the image generation AI, so tools like you were talking about. We can dive into all kinds of detail. And I do have some opinions about sort of the ethical side of it, which may or may not be of interest to anyone. But for me, here it comes, my friends, sometime within the next year to two, expect a new book called The Back of the Napkin 2.0: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with the Robot. So the Robot is Here, and earlier I'd mentioned, you know, the production teams at the newspaper who didn't want to upgrade. My perspective is that if we are in the creative industry, we have to.

MR: We have to pay attention. Yeah.

DR: Not more than that, Mike. More than that. We have to learn how that thing works. We have to learn, it is a tool set. That's what it is. Maybe it's paradigm shifting, maybe not, I don't know. We hit paradigm shifting technologies all the time. This is a big one. And it was pretty fascinating being with that panel last night over at Berkeley, where they were talking about when does AI become sentient, if you will, and lots of debate. One of the guys said not for 20 years, one of the guys said never. And the woman on the panel said, "I think it's gonna take place within the next 12 months." So, and these are the experts. So fascinating stuff.

I would love to talk about it more, but that's where I'm going. How does all the stuff you saw on the other side of the board, how do I use my visual mind to declutter a complex world? How do I use my visual mind in concert with my words and my verbal mind to understand what I'm talking about and convey it to someone else? How do I do that beautifully, effectively, efficiently, thoughtfully? All of that's gonna change with this, and I want to try to figure that out.

MR: Hmm. Yeah. That's a big question.

DR: Yeah,

MR: Part of me thinks a little bit about both using these tools, but also remembering that the way we operate still requires people to do some of it. Like going back to the transition from say, analog to digital and then into internet, I would—let's go back to the one that's more analog to digital. I was there for that. I was a student, so I was more on the digital side because I didn't have any old habits necessarily to unlearn. I was pretty new to it. I could do all those things. The beginning of my job began that way, but ultimately, I could see the benefits. My dad had computers to get us ready for the computer revolution. So when the time came, not only was I an art director, but I was a system manager and I managed the network and ran the backup tapes. And like I was into it. Like I've always had sort of this blend of the two.

So on the one hand, I'm excited about the capabilities and I've certainly used the tools. And on the other hand, my concern is, how we use them, how we fit them in so that we don't lose the thing that makes us unique. So in other words, rather than sketching and thinking, if I'm just asking the tool to generate it for me, like where does that line cross and where's the machine doing the work that maybe I should be doing? And then the other thing that I've seen being in technology is knowing that you can become dependent on the way a thing works. And we know that technology never stays the same. So what happens when that thing changes if you've offloaded too much of your agency to the system and you can't do it on your own, like the power goes out or something like that, what do you do?

The last thing I'll say is, so in this time period when the new technology came on, I was in a small design firm, system manager, designer. When the power would go out in the area we were in, because it was growing, everybody would just be sitting around with twiddling their thumbs 'cause Cork Express and their Macs were off. Nobody could work. And you know, not to brag or anything, but I had been trained in the old way. So I just got sheets of printer paper out and started sketching and kept moving and had stuff. By the time the power came up, I was ready to go and I just brought it in the machine.

So I always thought of the machine as a tool. And I think maybe that's what I'm kind of getting at is how do you remember that it's a tool and not give away too much of your skill to the machine or selectively give it to the machine when it makes sense. Maybe that's kind of where I'm sort of sitting. Not even talking about any of the ethical things about you know, learning, which I think probably could be a whole nother podcast. And maybe it doesn't make sense for us. It's kind of foregone conclusion probably at this point. So, anyway.

DR: How are we doing on time, Mike? 'Cause I've got a little model that I think I could draw out that's evolving in my mind. I've been putting a lot of cycles into this and I'd love to share a little bit of a thought exercise. It's gonna take maybe five minutes. Are we good for that?

MR: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, let's do the five minutes.

DR: All right. So, let me just kind of map out here starting from some basic principles and some data, how I think a story starts to emerge that could be interesting not to answer those really good questions you had, but just a way of thinking about them. So I just wanna start with some research that I've seen lately that says that one third—and this is research that's been conducted for people who are interested. Adobe every year does a creativity survey and they go and talk to thousands of business people across the United States, and I think around the world. And they ask 'em things about creativity.

So it turns out the Sharpie and Papermate, the company that own them. Interesting. They also do a creativity study. Mckenzie does a creativity study. So I've gone through them and one piece of data that emerges, which I think is quite fascinating, is one third of adults think that they're as creative as they could be. So one third of adults think are as creative as they like to be.

MR: Kinda of satisfied where they're at, or?

DR: Yep. Which makes the two thirds have said, I want to be more creative than I am. Only one third are saying I'm as creative as I'd like to be. And I'm given the opportunities at work and at life to be creative. Two thirds of adults most wanna be remembered for their creativity. Like, when you die, what do you wanna be remembered for? I wanna be remembered—my legacy to be my creativity. What did I put back out into the world? What did I write? What did I paint? What did I share? So we've already got a creativity disconnect, so something's up. But here's the truth is there is a way to span this. And that is AI generative tools.

Now there are lots of ways, there's a thousand ways for people to expand their creativity. There's a thousand ways for people to meet this. But one of the ways that is true, especially for people who struggle with their creativity, I don't know how to be creative. I'd like to be, but I don't know how, I don't know how to draw all the things that we've heard forever, generative AI tools actually offer a solution because they are a relatively straightforward. Assuming you have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection and you can pay, you know, individually, I'm going to just say AI generative tools represent a solution to empower creativity.

But to your point, there's a big downside. Number one, they steal. They steal other people's work. They scrape the whole internet and they use that as the models from which they're gonna feed you. It is awful that there is now a way to turn anything into my Miyazaki style. Because he of all people who has thrown away all technology, get it out. He is the one animation studio on earth that still does everything longhand, but they steal. The second thing they do is they generate an incredible amount of crap.

MR: Yeah. I think I've heard slop used as—yeah.

DR: Oh my God, just awful, awful stuff. Number three is they displace people. And number four, they burn a tremendous amount of electricity.

MR: Electricity. Yeah.

DR: So there's probably other downsides. But here's the thing about creativity. So all of these by themselves, AI steals, AI generates crap, AI displaces people, and AI consumes a lot of electricity is non-sustainable. All right, so here's the way creativity works. Creativity thrives against constraint. If I say I need you to get to the moon and here's the thousand dollars, you're gonna be a lot more creative in your thinking than if I say, get to the moon and there's an infinite amount of money. Okay, creativity thrives under constraints. So let's just say that these are our constraints. So how do we reframe every one of these constraints into a positive?

Well, you know, Austin Kleon. Our good friend Austin Kleon. How? Steal like an artist. Steal with honor. There are good ways to steal and there are bad ways to steal. So if you're gonna steal, do it well. How? Acknowledge your sources, be open, steal primarily from yourself, be thoughtful, acknowledge where things come from. Read Austin's book, Steal Like An Artist. Picasso was the one who said it. Steal like an artist, steal with honor and amazing things are gonna happen to your creativity. So what you've done is you've taken a negative and turned it into a positive.

All right. If it generates crap, well how are we gonna do that? Let's be very, very thoughtful. Let's not generate crap. Let's make things that matter. So let's be very thoughtful about what we create. Don't accept that it's shit. You know, I don't need another AI generated image of dogs playing poker that looks in the style of Van Gogh. I mean, look, the fact is that's gonna burn itself out very fast. If you look at the home screens from most of the visual AI tools, the excitement, we get over it really fast. And we get overloaded and begin—

MR: Pretty faddish. Right?

DR: So be thoughtful, displace people. Okay, the only answer I can give to that is become irreplaceable. Become one of the people that can't be replaced. And how do you do that? Because you figure out how to take advantage of this thing. And then the third one, and this is a stretch and this is what I've learned about the electricity piece. This is absolutely fascinating. And at the risk of like over pontificating, the trick with electricity is that for the most part it can't be stored. I never knew that.

MR: Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

DR: Yes, there are batteries, but they are highly inefficient.

MR: Inefficient. Yep.

DR: They're incredibly expensive and they don't even come close to one percent of what any functioning society needs. The trick with electricity is that it has to be consumed as it's being generated. You can't store that stuff. You have to figure out a way to consume it. And here's an amazing thing. I never knew this install until I started working with PG&E, you know, Northern California electric utility. Every time I plug this in, every time I turn on a light, every time I turn on my water heater somewhere in the world, a turbine spins up to generate electricity in real time to account for the action I just took. The fact that it works at all is a miracle.

You know, there's a lot of downside. California, we've been having a lot of fires that have been, you know, most likely, in some cases completely likely generated by poor electric infrastructure or poorly maintained electric infrastructure. There's a lot of downsides. Specific Palisades fire. We're gonna see how that came out. Northern California fires. Anyway, the idea is this, bear with me 'cause it's gonna be a stretch. One of the ways to store electricity is you can store it in a battery. Another way, and let's say that's a battery, is that you can actually convert the electricity into data, store the data, which doesn't require electricity to be stored. Store it somewhere. And let's assume that that data is valuable, that that is insight or data or information has value. Later on, you pay money for that data and you reconvert it back to electricity.

Now this assumes that electricity is abundant and it will be abundant again. Safely? We don't know. But there's a really interesting notion here that says if you're gonna burn electricity, what possible use could be ever better than being able to use it to realize your dreams? So the idea is if you're gonna be burn electricity for AI, be thoughtful. Recognize that every time you put in a prompt or draw a picture, you're burning electricity. But if you are generating something of value, you're actually converting electricity into storable value.

It's a stretch, but I wanna work on that because there's something there. If you are creating valuable work that someone else is gonna look at your AI generated images or texts or ideas later, and they will be valuable enough down the line for that person to say or that robot to say that's valuable. You're actually gonna be retaining the energy in the form of data. Anyway, that's my pitch. I don't know how that lands, but that's where I'm going.

MR: It's funny when you talk about the last one, I think about, well the poster behind me, Back to the Future, he says, "You made a time machine out of DeLorean." And he said, "Well, if you're gonna make a time machine, you might as well do it with style."

DR: You might as well. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I don't know. I think, to me—-

MR: Interesting,

DR: -I wanna learn how to steal with honor, I wanna learn how to be thoughtful about the things I produce, I wanna become irreplaceable, and I want to be able to dream big and understand that my dreams are burning electricity, but what else would I do with that electricity that's more valuable than dreaming big. Not me, everybody. Why not? So anyway, that's where I am on it.

MR: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, you know, like I said, I don't have a hard fast thing. I'm sort of torn in between, and I think maybe a lot of people are in the same place, or maybe they're now coming to that. Like if they start digging into it, like, oh, there's some problems here, but there's some promise here. And I just keep going back to both these transitions you talked about and you know, the old timers had a lot of boogeymen around these technologies and I just looked at 'em logically and said that that doesn't totally make sense because we're eliminating the part that's takes the most time in design, the laying out the boards.

I mean, I used to draw boards out with my Rotring pens and blue line pencils. And you know, it was tons of work, right? I mean, I could do it. But when we switched over to, I think we were in Cork Express, you know, that took that whole process out of the loop and I was now focusing on, well, what kind of interesting layouts can we do? I think you think about like David Carson and other Californian, like some of the crazy stuff he did. And he came from a not design background. He did some really crazy design stuff that probably pushed people in other places to go in different directions than they might've.

Like where would we be if—I mean, I don't know what he would've done if there was no technology. Maybe he would've found a different way to do it, but he's a pretty resourceful guy. So yeah, I just think there's an opportunity to do something with it. And then the question is what do we do with it? And how do we do it in the way you're talking about in a thoughtful, honoring way that makes what we're doing useful for other people that we're working with or we're serving, right?

DR: Yeah. Hey Mike, can I give it a one more? Are we outta time or we got 30 seconds more?

MR: Yeah, we got 30 seconds.

DR: I've been thinking this through and I want like make another thought model illustration for those of us who are maybe struggling with how do we deal with this revolution that is coming about because of AI. And the fact that the AI revolution is contemporary to other revolutions that are taking place around us, is just notable word, a very interesting inflection point. You know, it's funny 'cause just the age I grew up and you as well and you know, there was this kind of notion-like back in the 1990s, the Cold War's over, the Berlin wall is done, history is over. It's all easy from here on.

Well guess what? History and over history comes back with a vengeance and history is looking at us right in the face right now and saying things are upside down. There's a lot of revolutions going on right now, and one of them happens to be AI. The fact that they're all coming at the same time is quite fascinating. I mean, academically fascinating. May you live in interesting times? We sure do. But to give myself a little bit of solace to give myself a little bit of calm, I think through the following thing. Imagine this. Imagine Music. Are you a music person?

MR: Oh yeah.

DR: I see it. Looks like a turntable back there, you've got? You've got some vinyl.

MR: Yep.

MR: Okay. So think about this. That's a perfect example. In the world, in the entire history of humanity, up until about 1890, so roughly 130 years ago, the only way any human could ever hear music was to have it played live. Either you played it yourself or you hired a band. Or if you're really rich, you hired a court composer, a Mozart or a Bach or a Beethoven. And then if they wanted to perform their music, they would, you know, build a big concert hall and people would come and hear it because there was no way to record that music. None. The gramophone is invented.

Imagine the moment prior to 1890 entire conservatories universities, cultures, industries were created around the creation of live music because everybody loves music. There was no radio, there were no iPads, there were no earbuds, nothing. Think about the revolution that represented if you had dedicated your life to studying harp because you were in demand, because at every wedding someone needed a harpist, and they're gonna pay you. And now it can be recorded. Holy smoke. I'm at my next wedding and I have a gramophone vinyl recording of a harp. I put that on. How many harpes have I just put outta work?

MR: Yeah.

DR: All of them except the one who was recorded. But here's the deal, why I can find some sort of comfort in this. Music isn't over. We actually now after these multiple music revolutions of technology have more music, more availability. And I think the same thing's gonna happen. It's a scary inflection moment, but it ain't gonna kill us.

MR: Yeah. Well, and you know, live music is now coming back with a vengeance in a lot of ways because digital music is, eh, normal, right?

DR: Exactly. And now with the sheer amount of crap that gets generated. Even in these early generations of, of image generation AI, actual paintings become even more valuable, not less.

MR: Yep.

DR: I've got a painting show coming up here in San Francisco starting on May 1st. Live paintings. Can't wait to do it. I love to paint in large part as a remember your roots. And if you're gonna steal, steal honorably, even if it's from yourself. So what I've done is I've digitized all my paintings. I've fed them in to my own diffusion model, which is the type of model that an AI engine does. And now I'm trying to teach the robot to paint like I do.

MR: Like you. Like a student.

DR: Not to replace me, but because it's frigging cool and I can feed in ideas and see what it does. It's like I never would have thought of that.

MR: Yeah, it's crazy.

DR: I've got a sidekick now, it's awesome, which I never had before, so.

MR: Wow.

DR: There's a lot there. Thanks for letting me share so much, Mike. I really appreciate it.

MR: Yeah, this has been great. Thanks, Dan. Is the best place to go find you is danroam.com, I'm guessing?

DR: Yeah, absolutely. So just good old danroam.com. Instagram is dan.roam. And then LinkedIn of course. And I'm gonna start posting. All of this is gonna go up on LinkedIn as I ramp up to working on the next book. You know how it is. You gotta feed the beast, so.

MR: Well, thanks so much for being on the show and talking about this. We didn't really didn't plan this, but it turned out really great. So I'm really happy you were on to talk this way. So thanks so much.

DR: Well, you're a great interviewer, Mike, and I really appreciate you giving myself and other people you're talking to the time to, you know, let us go off on our weird tangents. I appreciate that.

MR: That's my job.

DR: And you're good at it. You're very good at it.

MR: Well, thanks Dan.

DR: You got it.

MR: You have a great day, and we'll talk to you soon. For everyone listening or watching, it's another episode. Talk to you soon.

Tips from: Emily Mills, Joran Oppelt, Kelvy Bird, Javier Navarro, Blanche Ellis, Peter Durand, James Durno, Diana Ayoub, and Justin Hamacher.

Sponsored by Concepts

The Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil.

In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:

• The Infinite Canvas as a sketchnoting power feature
• How vectors give you complete control of brushes and sizing as you create sketchnotes and
• How vector elements let you size and repurpose your drawings for ultimate flexibility.

The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts.

Watch the workshop video for FREE at:
https://rohdesign.com/concepts

Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop!

Buy me a coffee!

If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at https://sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee

Running Order

• Intro
• Emily Mills
• Joran Oppelt
• Kelvy Bird
• Javier Navarro
• Blanche Ellis
• Peter Durand
• James Durno
• Diana Ayoub
• Justin Hamacher
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Emily’s website
• Joran on LinkedIn
• Kelvy's website
• Javier's website
• Blanche's website
• Peter’s website
• James' website
• Diana on LinkedIn
• Justin on LinkedIn

1. Emily’s Tips

1. Keep on experimenting.
2. Try something outside your practice but still creative.
3. Be careful when sketchnoting becomes work then find something else to supplement that joy factor.

2. Joran’s Tips

1. Own the problem.
2. Break down the big thing into smaller digestible pieces.
3. Ask for help.

3. Kelvy’s Tips

1. Experiment and try new tools/approaches.
2. Preserve a sense of mystery and beauty in your work.
3. Prioritize self-care both physically and mentally.

4. Javier’s Tips

1. Don't be obsessed with perfect illustrations.
2. Work around your strengths.
3. Improve your craft one step at a time.
4. Ask clients a lot of questions before the onset of a project.
5. Prep a lot.
6. Always remember that it is all about the audience.
7. Train your mind to be visual 24 hours.

5. Blanche’s Tips

1. Try different ways into the same activity.
2. Keep experimenting to find your style.
3. Keep a Sketchbook with you always.
4. Only show the kind of work you want to do.
5. Don't underestimate the background of being an entrepreneur as an artist.
6. Appreciate the part that you do well.
7. Drawing on public transport.

6. Peter’s Tips

1. Create custom color palettes for each client/event.
2. Manage self-negative talk and nerves through preparations and rituals.
3. Approach your work as a gift to share rather than something to be self-conscious about.
4. Being positive and supportive of each other's work.
5. Look for inspiration from artists and eras that are not closely adjacent.

7. James’ Tips

1. Slow down to speed up.
2. Abandon the idea of perfection. Practice, but practice makes proficient, not perfect.
3. Learning the rules, principles, and elements of what makes a good art.
4. Listening to understand.
5. A drawing is not just what we intend it to be but also how it's understood. Make sure that we get it right in terms of what we pack into a drawing.

8. Diana’s Tips

1. Just doodle. Just let yourself go with the pen.
2. Keep a sketchbook on you all the time.
3. Talk to people. Find a community, a group of people who inspire and motivate you to think outside the box.
4. Join the Think Visual Meet-up.

9. Justin’s Tips

1. Draw where you aren't conventionally permitted to do so. Push your boundaries of drawing.
2. Have the easiest materials possible that you will use.
3. Try to have you and your tools as close to each other as possible to develop that relationship and open those channels of expression and communication with yourself.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Sponsored by Concepts

The Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil.

In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:

• The Infinite Canvas as a sketchnoting power feature
• How vectors give you complete control of brushes and sizing as you create sketchnotes and
• How vector elements let you size and repurpose your drawings for ultimate flexibility.

The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts.

Watch the workshop video for FREE at:
https://rohdesign.com/concepts

Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop!

Buy me a coffee!

If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at https://sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee

Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Justin Hamacher
• Origin Story
• Justin's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Justin
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Justin on LinkedIn
• Jungian work
• Justin's Upcoming book:The Visual Jung
• Justin's Art Work
• Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G.Jung
• Knowledge In a Nutshell by Gary Bobroff
• Ego and Achertype by Edward F. Edinder
• Inner Work by Robert A. Johnson
• Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• 0.5 Steadler fine liner marker pen
• Fabriano pad
• Neuland markers
• Copic markers

Tips

1. Draw where you aren't conventionally permitted to do so. Push your boundaries of drawing.
2. Have the easiest materials possible that you will use.
3. Try to have you and your tools as close to each other as possible to develop that relationship and open those channels of expression and communication with yourself.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey, everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here today with Justin Hamacher. Justin, good to have you here.

Justin Hamacher: Hello. Very happy to be here.

MR: So you're an interesting guy. We've been connected for years and years, and you popped back up in my life recently. You've come from the design background a lot like me, but you've done a shift, which I found was really interesting. And it seemed like it could be really fascinating to bring you on the show, not only as a designer and what you're doing now, but you're also a visual thinker, and you've done something interesting in this new direction you've gone by integrating visual thinking into the training that you've taken. So rather than me try to explain it, 'cause I don't know the details, tell us who you are and what you do, and then if you'd like, go right into your origin story, like from a little boy, how did you end up to this moment now?

JH: Oh man. How many hours do we have? Oh, I'll do my best. I'm so happy to be here. This is a wonderful base for the community to learn about individuals and how they use visual thinking.

MR: Yeah.

JH: It's striking to me how relegated it is by the educational system and by our employers and other places, really into a background or kind of novelty identity. For some of us, it's the way our brain works, you know? And it's so hard to have to put things into writing or words or other things without being able to be visual. So I'm really happy this is taking place. Let's see. So, I'll just kind of pop back to when I was little, and then we can work our way forward. Is that okay?

MR: Yeah. Sounds great. Yeah.

JH: Okay. So, one of my very first memories, I swear I'm not gonna talk for hours, I was just joking, is I remember being in preschool and drawing a bird and sitting there and not knowing any other kids. Actually, it was kindergarten because I knew the kids in preschool and, you know, feeling some anxiety, and the room seemed really big and there was a lot of other people around me, I didn't know. I wasn't afraid, but I was a very extroverted kid, you know, but cautious and a little shy.

And I was drawing this bird, and I knew how to draw feathers on a bird. If I look back at the bird now, it's rather comedic, but at the time, for other little kids, they thought that was really cool. And I remember this one little boy coming over and he didn't know me, but he saw me drawing and he said, "Whoa, you can draw feathers on a bird. Oh my gosh." And he knew the other kids 'cause they'd gone to preschool or something. He ran over and grabbed like four kids and brought 'em to the table where I was sitting alone. And they were all like, "Would you show me how to draw feathers on birds? I wanna draw feathers on birds. Oh my gosh."

It felt so good to be expressing myself in a way that was personal. I wasn't holding up the bird feather drawing or something, but to have it resonate with people and to have people wanna learn and share. And then I was able to look at what they were drawing and stuff. It was just a really wonderful start to kindergarten.

So, you know, I knew from being really young, my main identity was an artist. I drew a lot for myself. Scribbled on the interior walls of my closet in my bedroom as a little kid. My mom didn't know about that until we moved when I was around 10, and she was like, "Oh my God, what did you do in here?" There's just, you know, a whole cosmology on the interior. Yeah, it was just scribbles and stuff though.

Yeah, so going through school, it was not easy. I went to parochial schools, so little Catholic grade schools, and they hated drawings. I'm not, you know, universally gonna say they all did, but most my teachers specifically would tell me to stop drawing and to take better notes and to write down what was being said exactly as it was being said. Not to elaborate or have an imagining come off what I was recording.

And that was really stifling because you as a creative guy myself, as a creative guy, other creative people, you have lots of ideas and you wanna kind of suss out the tendrils and see where they go and what they might become. You don't have to follow all of 'em, but that's how you keep your mind alive, you know? So that was really challenging going through all parochial school and pretty much continually being told, "Don't imagine, don't do those things."

I do remember in third grade, there was a big contest for the grade school. The grade school is called Our Lady of Fatima in Seattle, Washington, Magnolia. If anybody out there happens to be from that grade school, what's up. We had a contest for the city of the future. And it was all the students in each grade, eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, fifth grade, you know, down to first grade.

Each student was gonna do a drawing. And then the class would elect one big representative drawing, and then we would make a big drawing and put it on the exterior of our classroom door. Then the teachers would walk around and vote on which class they thought did the coolest one. I was in third grade, and my thing was a city of the future that had, you know, sky cars and floating houses and gardens where people could eat and solar stuff.

It was good surprisingly 'cause most kids like to draw battleships and Star Wars kind of stuff, but for some reason, I laid off that and I drew this. Well, it won for the class, and then it won for the whole school. I remember that feeling so good to see seventh and eighth graders walking by our little third grade classroom and looking at the drawing and being like, "Wow. All right, who did that? Oh, Justin, you did that? What's up kid? Like, dah, dah." I was like, "Oh, man, this is—"

MR: Good job, man. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. This feels good. Some of the other ones were battleships and, you know, big space wars and stuff. I think the teachers wanted to go with a more holistic kind of view of the future. Maybe we could share it with our politicians or something. Anyway, so yeah, grade school, high school, coming more comfortable with an artist's identity, but, you know, at the same time really kind of becoming not—well, there were moments of misanthropy, but like, just, you know, angry at the society and becoming a punk rock musician out of that.

Then my identity in Seattle after college was a punk rock musician for like 10 or 15 years. But in college, I majored in woodblock printmaking. My parents wanted to kill me, but I was inflexible on that point. They made me promise to minor in something they saw some utility in.

MR: Something practical.

JH: Yeah. So, English and psychology were the minors. Then fast-forward to life, just young musician, art teacher teaching kindergarten art, which was fricking awesome and my favorite job of my entire life. It was just wonderful how broad their imaginations were. And also, the little boys and little girls, they hadn't quite been pushed into emotional regulations associated to gender.

So there were some really caring little boys that would give each other hugs when they came to class. It was just great. It was just like such a free wild little group of people. Did that for a few years. And then, let's see I was having trouble paying my bills. As you can imagine, traditional woodblock, printmaking in the year 1999, not really—

MR: Hiring per demand. Yeah.

JH: No. Also, it was really hard to get access to presses, like to do litho. There were a couple good places in Seattle, but those presses are huge, and they're expensive, and I didn't have the money to join those memberships to participate in them. So I went back to school, became a designer. Went to Cornish.

I didn't actually wanna become a designer. I wanted to go back and study sculpture and video, but the head of the art department was sick the day I went in to do interviews. The design chair was there, and she said, "You can take sculpture and video as electives. I'll give you a scholarship if you join design." I was broke. And I thought, "Well, okay, let's do it." So did that for two years, got out. All my classmates were in—this is a while ago. There was no Amazon in Seattle, I mean, at all.

MR: Yeah. Microsoft back then up in Redmond, right?

JH: Yeah. That was about it. The big design companies people were interested in, if you're a designer, were Starbucks and REI. Those were the two places young designers wanted to work. I wanted to have nothing to do with that. I still was, you know, pretty central in my punk rock ethos.

MR: I was gonna say punk rock would be resisting all that stuff, right?

JH: Oh my God. Yeah. I'll drink a Starbucks now, but back then you'd have to pin me down and pour it in my mouth. I'm not kidding. So, started my own small design studio and worked with small businesses and I loved it. So coffee shops, bakeries, massage parlors, therapists, artists, websites, boutiques. It was great. That was really what got me interested in user research too. So having those conversations with business owners and really hearing about their needs, and like having to unwire my brain.

In design school at the time, we didn't even talk about UX. That wasn't a thing. We were trained as—I know you love comic books, like, what was gonna be our superpower and how were we gonna be the authority that came and solved in a heroic way, you know, whatever it was we were trying to solve. I really had to unwire that from my brain. I was doing small business stuff for a few years, then I took a UX certificate course.

Well, then the market crashed, right, in 2008. I had a small business. It was doing pretty well. The market crashed. I lost all my clients. I had a lot of real estate development clients in Seattle, like Paul Allen, some of his projects and stuff. I tried to return the deposits to the people, and they wouldn't even return my calls. I don't know if the, you know—

MR: Just, puff, disappeared, huh?

JH: Yeah, were just gone. So I had to go downtown to take a job, which I really did not want to do, but I had to. I'd borrowed some money from my sister to buy a motorcycle, and she was about to have a baby. I was like, "I gotta take care of this." I went down and worked for a consultancy called Slalom, which was a small at the time. Now it's pretty big.

Then they had a educational program where they'd pay you to take some classes. So I took some at UDub, got into UX certificate program. Really liked it, really liked the people, the instructors. That program used to be called Technical Communication, so it had more of a scholarly HCI orientation. Understanding how more humans' interactions.

MR: Academic. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. And I really appreciated that. So anyway, got a master's in that. Then I started switching companies, worked in gaming—went from consulting to gaming, and then from gaming I joined a small Indian company, and that was a crazy ride. That started getting, acquired, like 1500 people, 8,500 people, 16,000 people, 33,000 people.

MR: Wow.

JH: Yeah. And finally, Samsung bought it, and I was along for that ride. And I was the UX director, then. I was a creative director, then. I was a global creative director. And I was going to India and managing a team there, flying there and stuff. But I was not happy. So if you have a line for career trajectory going like that, and you have another line for like, my spirit and my creative soul just like that.

MR: Yeah, was going way.

JH: - Yeah. That led to crisis. You know, not like a explosion or an implosion, but a lot of nightmares at night. Kind of archetypal nightmares about not expressing the self and feeling lost. Anyway, luckily couldn't stick with that. I went to Spain on vacation, and while I was there on the Island of Menorca in a cave, actually, which sounds crazy, I realized I had to just quit that job. I came back, and my boss wouldn't let me quit the job. He kept canceling all our meetings.

MR: Wow.

JH: I wanted to quit, and he kept canceling. I wanted to do it nicely, you know? And he kept canceling all these meetings for three weeks. And finally, I was just like, "Dude, you gotta meet with me." In my head, I'm like, "I'm not gonna be here Monday unless you do this." That led to me going to the University of Washington and becoming a full-time professor there teaching human computer interaction and design.

And while I was there working with graduate students, I really tried to form a bridge between design and the computational realm and the fine arts. That was kind of my personal mandate. They weren't super excited about that. I think the art department was, they were like, "Oh my God, a designer's actually coming over here and talking to us. We love to talk to you guys, but you never do." But for some reason, design was pretty insular and kind of at the time, trapped in a typography spiritual realm or something where they thought it was like the end all be all for all forms of visual expression, right?

MR: Mm-hmm.

JH: But I loved that. I was there for two years, and then I was in an experimental program, so it was funded by departments, and then we free-floated in the middle. They re-orged that, and the director left and I left. Then I went and started training as a Jungian analyst. So that was the big pivot point for me. It was like, all right—

MR: Yes. Yes, that's what I wanted to get to. Yeah, for sure. Make sure we covered.

JH: Yeah. So doing the self-inventory, it was like, what lights you up? What are you most excited about? It was like, I like helping people, working with people, having a chance to hear their personal stories and using creative means to help people self-actualize or, you know get to other levels of their consciousness or other spaces in their consciousness. So that kind of brings us to today. I think I just talked for 20 minutes.

I've been training for seven years as an analyst. First in Boston for two years, then for five years in Zurich. Now I'm what's called a diploma candidate. So I have a small practice here in Portland where I do analysis with folks. I'm also a licensed psilocybin facilitator. I do both those things here in Portland, Oregon. How the visual stuff ties into all this is, you know, as I became a creative director and stuff, luckily you get to set the tone for a lot of your projects. And the clients do—the more high-end and imaginal clients want wild ideas and they want sketches. They like that.

If you're a B-rate consultancy, you're gonna give 'em wire frames. If you're an A-rate consultancy, you'll give 'em those wire frames, but you're also getting 'em storyboards, and you're gonna give them some imaginal stuff and really push the boundaries. The people that really love that the most are the CEOs. My experience has been a lot of CEOs are pretty imaginative and do think big.

Some aren't, but you know, some get a bad rap for not being visionary enough. But if you can get 'em in the right context and break them away from all the VPs and everybody else, and do some workshopping with them, they're in incredible. Some of 'em are very imaginative people. I was able to do more and more drawings, but as I got into my training—would you like me to just kind of start into that, or do you wanna break off and completely—?

MR: No, I like the flow.

JH: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I'll share some visual artifacts with folks too, if you want.

MR: Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great.

JH: I left the UDub and University of Washington, and I had—my dad had an RV for his business, and I knew I needed to be in Boston to interview at the Union Institute there. I think it was in late June. My dad was a kind of hard ass character, not always very friendly. He called out the blue, and he said, I was expecting to fly there, probably though I woken up like three months earlier in the middle of the night, and I'd done this drawing with a map of the United States and all these different towns and places, and I drew my cat on it.

It kind of became a joke for my students that I was gonna leave the University of Washington to go on this big RV trip with my cat. They knew I was gonna interview to be an analyst, and some of 'em were excited about that, or to train to be an analyst, but I didn't have a way to make that happen. So suddenly my dad calls, and he is like, "Hey, do you want the RV for a month?"

MR: Oh, wow.

JH: At the exact timing I needed, I hadn't mentioned the trip, I hadn't mentioned anything about it. I was like, "Are you kidding? Like, that's insane." And he didn't make offers like that very much. So it was the first bit of synchronicity around that training. I drove across the country, and as I drove, I really wanted to have an open-hearted and imaginative experience going. I decided the best way to do that was with people and meeting people. So each place I went that I met an interesting person, I drew them as a card.

MR: Oh, wow. The same thing.

JH: Yeah. I kept these with me, and then each next town I would go to, at night, I would go to a café or a pub, and I would journal all the people I met. This was so awesome to have done this because I met more and more people, right.

MR: Yeah.

JH: I started with five drawings, and then I'm at a pub drawing, and suddenly more people are coming and being like, "What are you drawing? What's your story?" So I'm meeting all these really cool people by doing these drawings. I did this big deck of all these people. It was really fun. That one's super funny. You can see the guy's crack there with a kid keep going cream at some coffee shops. So I made this big deck.

MR: Wow.

JH: One of the funniest things about it was I got back to—this young woman, was so cool. She was in Rockport, and she had just started a jewelry business and was really making a go at it and out on the end of this pier. So I bought a ring from her and some other things. It's just a great way to remember trips and journeys. Then when I got home, I think the most fun thing about it probably was sitting with my friends, and they were like, "How was your trip?"

And I'd lay these out on a table, like a big tarot deck or something, and go, "These are all the people I met, who would you like to hear about?" And they were like, What?" Then they'd put their finger on one, and I'd be like, "Oh, yeah, that's Josh in Woodstock. He was super nice. When I parked my car, and he gave me some help, and dah, dah." You know, it was just kind of really fun.

I started with that, and that was a great tone setting for the start of my Jungian studies. I was accepted to that institute, and then I came back to Seattle and I got a job at a startup. And I made the startup agree that I could have the first Thursday and Friday of each month off because I had to fly to Boston Friday, Saturday, Sunday of each month. The first part, we had classes there.

MR: I see.

JH: So I was doing that training. So they were into that. This is kind of what I'm super excited about, is to share a few of these.

MR: Yeah. Another big stack.

JH: Oh my God. The very first day I'm in Boston, I fly out there, and I've got my Fabriano Bristol board style drawing pad, you know, it was crisper, cycled nice paper. I was gonna go to Cambridge and draw some of the churches and the buildings at Harvard and other stuff. And I had that, and I had my laptop, and I'm super into this training. I'm like, "Oh, dude, this is gonna be life changing and this is the path forward for me. I'm all in, dah, dah. I'm committed to this. I can't believe I got in." So excited.

The first lecture stands up to start to teach. And I have my laptop open, and I'm like, "I gotta capture everything they say. Oh my gosh, there's gonna be so much here, and we had to read these things beforehand, and I don't wanna miss anything." And I happened to have my sketch pad there with you know, a few architectural drawings, and it was really like this kind of two roads diverged in the wood's moment. It was like this Robert Frost kind of moment.

He started talking, and I took—I hadn't thought about it. I wasn't like, "I'm gonna draw the lectures." It was such a natural decision. I just closed the laptop and I picked up my sketch pad and I just started drawing. And I hadn't ever really sketch noted. I'd always had this distinction. I'd write my notes and then on some other pages, I might draw some wild drawings like, Ooh, here's whatever, and now, I'm not gonna mention—

MR: Separate from each other. Yeah.

JH: Yeah, yeah. Almost cognitively. Like, here's the purely imaginal realm. Here's a pollen air, you know, thinking function realm where all that's being captured. So I sat down and I just did it, and I didn't stop. So for seven years I've drawn all these lectures in real time. And they you know, they're—

MR: Pretty detailed.

JH: - they're done with—yeah, they're really detailed and they're done with crisp—you know, I use a Staedtler architectural pen, and then I use a Copic marker. And I've got just a ton of them.

MR: Wow.

JH: Yeah, and they're each really specific to that lecturer on that date and that topic we were talking about. So we're trying to make a book of these. I have about 180 pages, and it would be—this one's kind of cool, shows you how to analyze dreams.

MR: Oh, wow.

JH: Got like a body scan methodology we learned about and some other things. Yeah. So this will be a book and also my thesis when I finish my training. The book is about how people—well, it has all those artifacts. So it's kind of like autoethnography art space research, looking at myself, but then there's a companion portion, which is how do people creatively process psychically rich material, or heavy material? What are the means we do that by?

I'll interview a bunch of Jungian analysts to talk to them about how they, in their training, learned all the stuff that was required. Like, how does a choreographer or a dancer get through this material? You know, how does an architect, how does a painter, how does a designer, how does an artist, a musician, accountant, you know, how do people handle this material?

You know, it's a matter of how do you embody it? How do you retain it? How do you comprehend it? How do you spark other areas of your imagination with it? And then how do you socialize it? How do you come back to the community and enrich your learning and their learning by talking and sharing it? Yeah.

MR: Wow. Wow. There's so many questions I have after you kind of revealed this. Maybe I'll just sort of go in with the first one on the top of my head. It seems to me that your decision to choose between the laptop and drawing was really critical for you, now looking back. Also, it seems to me like the preparation before, like doing those little single squares over your trip out east almost primed you for that moment. And it's an interesting choice because right now personal knowledge management is this huge space really valuable, right?

Using these text editors, like Roam Research or Obsidian, there's all kinds of tools out here, but it's very text-based. I think sometimes even through the exclusion of attachments, although that these systems do handle visuals in some basic way, and that you could have gone in that direction and had this searchable database, but you chose to go in this other direction and that you were primed there.

Would you say that all of this travel and that—I think the other thing that's fascinating, is that you limited yourself to this square, which to me says that you kept yourself from being overwhelmed by having this small space to work in. So you knew you could handle it, right? I could do this, like I could take a lunch and I can draw a square. I can handle that. You had reasonable minimums.

But then you had the option to, later on you talked about going to a pub or something, or in your hotel or whatever, and then reflecting on that experience after having drawn it and then writing in more detail. Which then led you to when your friend said, "Tell me about John and Fargo or whatever." That you could look at that image, that it would bring back all the memories, and then it would kind of tap back into the writing that you had probably done, whether it's long or short, that sort of sparked all these memories that you could then tell a whole story out of these seemingly limited artifacts.

Even if you were to read the writings and look at the picture, there's way more in you that's tied to that, that only comes out when you're asked, right. So it's almost like you have to turn on that memory bank and then that stuff comes flooding out, and you probably remember things as you're talking, and it gets broader if you could probably keep going, right. It's really fascinating.

And it's sort of, I guess for me, in this big long ramble, reinforces this idea that visual thinking in this way, sketch noting, if you wanna call it that, using visuals as a way to remember is really powerful, right? I think you're sort of living proof in a lot of ways that this is actually doable and it's not—and I think the thing I love about it is there's not a huge expectation or extra work that you had to do to enter into it.

JH: No.

MR: Is that fair way to kinda?

JH: Oh, yeah, totally. You know, if we think about a divergent energy and a convergent energy and things that are defined and things that are undefined, you know, if we think about things in that way, these kind of panel drawings and sketch noting are so wonderful because they are really are launching points for more divergence. If we have an AI capturing all the text, or we have a volume from the philosopher or person we're interested in reading, that's concrete, you know?

MR: Mm-hmm.

JH: Thoughts and ideas can come off of that. Often, we're so devoted to the physical artifact and what it contains, that we don't allow our minds to go beyond that container. And that's why I love these kind of things 'cause every time I tell the story, it's different. If I had written down three paragraphs, "Josh and Fargo worked at such and such place. He wore these clothes and he helped me park my car. He seemed—" If I were to do it, you know, then I come back. My friends also don't really want to hear that, like, as a story. That's not a story. That's like there's something else, you know?

MR: Yeah.

JH: So they're great for story building. And then if we're trying to have a living knowledge rather than a fixed knowledge, we need to feed the process somehow. Images are great for that 'cause images often lead to more images. If you have a dream or you meditate, or you do psychedelics or something, and you have an image, it's like a river going by. Very naturally. Next comes another image, next comes another image. Some you might wanna grab others, you just let float by. But they seem like a very divergent and rich starting point for narratives.

MR: It's really fascinating when I compare, like that work that you did, the travel, the panels, the writing, and then sketchnoting, basically your whole education, and I compare that back to you started out by saying, I went to this parochial school, and all the teachers at least in that location, were sort of trying to beat that out of you. And it focused toward a known, structured, rigid, listened to what we tell you and remember the things, you know, very rote, stuff would almost be like, in some ways the opposite pole of like what you ended up doing with this work, right.

Because the stuff that you captured, I almost think of it as like, these things you did are the essence of the concept, and they can be endlessly generated from, right. So those squares, I would think—the other thing I think that's interesting is context, right? So you draw a square of this person in this place, if one person asks you to tell the story, you would consider their context and maybe tell them a different story. And then this other person has a different context or interest, you would tell the story differently. It would probably reveal other details or things you were thinking that because that person asked you in their context that would come up, that might not have come up in the other story.

So in a lot of ways, it's like this inexhaustible resource. I dunno, it's probably exhaustible, but I mean, it's generative, right? It's like we think of generative AI, and it can only work with the stuff that exists, and it's often not very good. But we as people are like the original generative, you know, thinkers. So this sort of provides these generative starting points that you can just keep on, you know, using them in an interesting way.

JH: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We have our unconscious. You know, we have that working for us. So if we start with an image, you might not know why or how, but a few other images that are associating with it. And you might mention one of those to a friend as you're telling the story, or just even more empathetically, you might know they're a gardener, and you're like, "Oh, dude, I got a shoot. I met so-and-so at the Bread and Puppet theater in Vermont, Olivia, she was so cool. And she showed me her pictures of her sunflowers." There's no sunflowers here, but I know—

MR: It's embedded. Yeah.

JH: - my friend is a gardener, you know?

MR: Interesting.

JH: Yeah.

MR: Probably for those who don't know, l would include me, what are the basic tenets of a Jungian approach to analysis of people? What are the components? And then I'm really fascinated, like, how do visuals kind of fit into that? It seems like they were open to you doing this. Did they have a reaction to you sketch noting every lecture and having this collection? What's the reaction from the Jungian space getting exposed to this visual thinking thing?

JH: Yeah. I've just been doing it for myself, and I was kind of that dude sitting in the back of the room constantly drawing. Then a couple people were peering over my shoulder and they're like, "What are you doing over there, man? Like, that's wild." I was like, "Oh, thanks. This is just how I process and remember things. I have to do it this way. There's no other way." I would've quit if I wasn't allowed to do this 'cause I would've been bored out my skull.

I think if you're an artist too, you have to generate. We don't wanna sit in a class and have a unidirectional podium delivery. We're not there to catch the confetti from what other people say. We wanna be a part of the process and co-generate and co-create. So that's the other beauty of these kinds of notes, is they're co-creative. So the person's giving you information, you're adding that part of yourself to it, and then you come out with this melded thing, which has so much more energy for me, and for probably for you, and for people like us than just sitting there and writing things down.

MR: Right.

JH: Man, you put me on the spot with, what are the foundations of the Jungian stuff?

MR: It's probably huge, right? That might be a podcast of its own, right?

JH: It is actually, or a series, but I'll do my best.

MR: Okay.

JH: Images are foundational.

MR: Oh, really interesting.

JH: Yeah. Because what Jungians are trying to do in analysis is take the unconscious elements of it, bring it into consciousness, observe it, understand it, see where the blockages are, which we would call complexes, and where the opportunities are and where people wanna be in their future selves, and then integrate it. So bring it all together.

Well, we know the unconscious is just full of images. It's a cauldron being stirred and bubbles come up, and you know, dream, or you know, you're on a long drive and your mind wanders, and you're dissociating. You're like, "Where on earth did that memory come from? Or that image come from?" So it's all image based and it's pre-language. If we go back through biological anthropology, before we had the spoken word and language, we had image. So the basis of this psychology is image based.

We do that through a lot of dream analysis, working with fantasies, creative practices, sand play is part of the Jungian realm where you take figures, little kind of action figures even almost and in a sand tray, you will recreate a scenario or describe it there, and then the analyst will work with you to understand what it's about. It's really super image based, but there an issue in the Jungian realm.

Particularly, there's such a strong intellectual component, and the educational environments have trouble letting go of the thinking function and really wanting to create taxonomies and categorize and microscopically dissect and understand things with so much intentionality that they can lose that divergent free-flowing engagement with personal narratives and the unconscious.

So that's a thing. I think if somebody doesn't get this book that I'm working on, you know, they're kind of like, it's a parlor trick, or it's like a gimmick or something like, "Ah, that person just sits and listens to things." Then people that get it though, it's like, "No, that's how they embody it." We all have our own ways of doing that.

MR: Right.

JH: You know, a child in class, they need a break. You know, if they're learning to spell words or something, they might prefer to go out on the playground and do jumping jacks while they spell words. You know, orange, O-R-A-N-G-E. That works for them 'cause there's a somatic pathway into retention and embodiment and learning.

The biggest challenge for all of us, I think in the world, is calling a time out from the conventional realm and from the pressures and the voices and the demands, and beginning to understand individually how we learn and how we grow and how we can master this life experience, you know, in a healthy way. That timeout is probably the hardest thing 'cause we know there's so many demands from society, family, and finances and things like that.

MR: Wow. That's really fascinating. If someone was wanting to go a little deeper, is there like a primer that they could look at or something to watch that might give them a little bit more depth? Because I would imagine it's a huge ocean of resources that you could get easily swept away in and lost in without some—and maybe that's something you give me a show note link. Like you'd have to think about and give me some links if someone wanted to look further into the Jungian space and understand what it means.

JH: Yeah. I can give you some links to some books and some other things. Yeah, because it is really heady. I think what happens is people might pull the book off the top shelf and go, "Oh, dang. This isn't for me because I can't intellectually grasp it." But there's an entire other way to get into this knowledge, and that's what I'm trying to do here.

MR: Yeah. You're sort of coming at it from a different perspective.

JH: Yeah.

MR: Let's come back to the Jungian space and those practitioners and the other ones like you that maybe aren't as visual, or maybe they just haven't released the visual capabilities because they haven't really thought about it that way. They just came to it from, you know, schooling, right? You learn how to type stuff or, you know, you write things. What has been their reaction to the sketch notes?

You talked about people, you know, being surprised. How has that continued as you've—because obviously you have been dedicated, I see that stack of sheets, and that's a significant investment. Obviously, you needed to do it 'cause that's the way you work. But like, there had to have been a reaction by not only students, but professors. How do they react to that? Do they want copies of it? Do they wanna know how to do it? I'm curious about that side.

JH: Yeah, absolutely. I have had professors request the sketches of their lectures because they were gonna deliver additional lectures on that topic and they thought that would be useful and good to share. I think a lot of the analysts that are running the institute in Zurich are pretty forward thinking and imaginative. They really do want to shift more into a feeling and artistic and visual space. So that's great there. There's a real health around that.

I think there's a lot of people—I love what you just said about "maybe they haven't discovered that capacity yet" because, you know, if you've ever taught little kids art and then watched them go through school and seen them as adults or our friends or ourselves, people have tremendous capabilities which get shut off by society.

So it's important to have those small classes. I know you do a bunch of these and they're fantastic. To just help people get back in touch with that, to oil the machinery, and with, you know, no sense of shame, no sense of deliverables or a timeline just in a very open way, go into it slowly and try to build that capacity. And folks are interested in that. You know, when I began my training, I told a friend that was a poet and another friend at the university that I was starting this, you know, switch into this part of my life. They didn't like it. They were very dismissive.

MR: Really?

JH: Yeah. They were like, "Carl Jung, that that's crazy stuff, or that's a cult, or that's weird, or dah, dah." And I was like, "Man, oh, that's so strange my good friend just said that. Conversely, one of my bosses in the tech space who was a VP business guy, MBA, one of the most boring people you can imagine on the surface, but had a lot underneath going on, told him out at a coffee, he just lit up.

MR: Wow.

JH: And he was like, "What? That is so incredible. Oh my gosh. That's so cool." And then you, you learn, he majored in art history in college. He had this whole other side, an undeveloped part of himself. There's an opportunity for all of us to look at those underdeveloped parts of ourselves and through this kind of activity or another activity or something else, begin to open those up. Yeah.

MR: Well, and I would suspect so, the book that you're trying to produce here and that you're producing, I would guess the consumers of that are probably two, at least that I can think of off the top of my head. One, are Jungian practitioners of some level, right. Because it would be a reference. "Let's go look in the index. I wanna learn about dream interpretation and the body thing you talked about." You could find the page and look at it. "Oh, that's right. Yeah. I remember learning that."

That would just like your little squares, it would spark their memory from probably learning similar things in their education that's maybe easier to enter into than to read like a really dense book about the process where you could actually look at it, just be reminded and, "Oh, that's right. Okay, let's try this. Maybe we'll put a little spin on it and do this other thing and experiment a little bit." So that would be one space.

JH: Yeah.

MR: I think the other space would be maybe someone like me, I don't know anything about Jungian thinking, it might be really fascinating to think of this as a primer in a way. Of maybe it's a little deeper than that, but to be able to look through and understand like, oh, okay, this is kind of, you would form an opinion off of it, but it's more approachable and accessible than a very dense, you know, tome in in German or something. Where you'd have to learn German to read it and understand it in the original language or whatever, right. Because Jung I think he was Swiss. I think. He was a contemporary and a little bit of a—I always remember that he and Freud were sort of like frenemies, I guess. I dunno. Like they—

JH: That's a good way to frame it.

MR: Is that the right way to describe them.

JH: He was a protege and then they were arch enemies after really falling out.

MR: Really.

JH: Yeah, unfortunately, or at least Freud exiled Jung from the realm because their theories diverged in places that were irreparable apparently.

MR: Interesting.

JH: But no, you're right. One thing is this book is not an explainer text. 'Cause we have to remember these are all live drawings. These were done in the classes. There's a lot of stuff that didn't make the drawing.

MR: Oh yeah, sure.

JH: You know, it's in the hour it's me going, "Oh, that's cool. Oh, that's cool." Like you said, they're just sparks. You could look at the page and be like, "Oh, that's a reference to such and such writer. Maybe I'll go read that person. Oh, here's this thing, maybe I'll go explore that." So there's that. You know, the other thing for me is it's a memento. It's a milestone of the training. It's like, "Dude, here's seven years of your life. You gotta turn this into a book." Because someday when I'm like 83 and I'm talking to my grandkids or whatever, I wanna be like, "See, I did a thing. You kids never listen. And I actually did a thing, whether you wanna believe it or not."

Then for lay people, I think there's also kind of this mystique around if people even know what Jungians are. There's probably people listening to this podcast that are like, "I have no idea what this particular episode's about." But for people that do know the history of psychology and the different methodologies and ways you can work on your psyche, they may be very curious about what the training is. It's kind of this Hogwarts sort of thing with a big door, you know, and you, how do you walk through the subway portal in the brick wall? What goes on in there?

This is a nice snapshot into, these are the courses that were taken, this is the material that was covered. The book also has reflections. So it has 180 pages of this, my personal reflections, dreams. So I found key dreams from my training, and I can put those in there. And then exercises. So it has exercises I developed over those seven years people can use. This one with the travel is one of those exercises I talk about.

MR: Yeah, I that would make sense. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. I want it to be more fun than just, "Here's these drawings." You know, I want it to be active. Yeah.

MR: Yeah. Yep. You wanna have some practicality out of it as well with, you know, actions that you can draw from it. So that, you know, explaining that, it seems to me like maybe your primary audience are Jungian practitioners, and maybe they could be people in college who are considering picking a Jungian path and wanna know, like you said, there's a big dark door and lots of thick German writings that I don't have to like—you know, unless you're a German reader, which there's a fair amount of German people that listen to the podcast and watch it.

So but like, you know, there's lots of opacity to getting an idea of it. If you were in a point where you're like considering maybe one approach versus another, this could be a good way. Maybe you check it out at the library, right. Maybe you see this at libraries, right. So that's your gift to the world. And then some kid in the future who's considering this path could get at least some kind of a sense of where this might be headed, right. That could be another thing, right.

JH: Totally. Totally. And maybe if people are going into heavier thinking function-oriented trainings, they can understand, you know, via you and your work and your podcasts and your classes and this book and other things, can see like, oh, it's okay to process in other ways. I'm not bad. My second grade Nun which I had, is not hitting me with a ruler because I'm drawing in the margins of my spelling journal or whatever, You know?

MR: Yeah, yeah.

JH: Yeah.

MR: Well, that's really interesting. We just got back from the International Sketchnote Camp in San Antonio, and there was a little bit of talk afterwards. I mean, one of the sessions was about how to make this a business. And I think that's a valid thing, right? Is how do you take these visual skills you have and then use them as a way to share with companies to hire you to do this work for them. I think I'm most fascinated by more like this stuff where people keep their day jobs, but they find ways to integrate visual thinking into the work they do.

They don't have to leave the thing that they're good at. Like say you're an accountant, or something like that. That's really fascinating is how do you integrate this visual skill in your unique context. And I think that in some ways can be powerful 'cause I think it can reach a lot deeper inside of organizations and reach to individual people, maybe more than a professional coming and doing visual thinking on demand, which has got value, right Especially if it's interactive, but it feels like it can reinforce this idea that, oh, only the professionals can do that.

You know, "I'm not a good artist. I could never do that." And it kind of reinforces. A lot of the work that I've done has been trying to break down those ideas and then just set the bar really low. Like, you don't really have to be a great artist to do this work. Now, if you're really good at it, you could elevate to that level. It's really interesting to hear this and think the work you're practically doing is could impact the Jungian space in a way that maybe hasn't been done since the beginning. I don't know. This seems pretty unique to me.

JH: No one's ever drawn all their classes. It's the first. Either I'm a madman or I'm onto something. I don't know. Maybe both, but per your comment, think about how much rigid thinking there is in society.

MR: Oh yeah.

JH: How, just in terms of politics or arts theoretical spaces or other things where people are either here or they're here. Having just a civilization that has more plasticity in our thinking and a way to look at things from different directions, doesn't mean we have to agree with them, but we can at least examine 'em, open up, feel things through. I mean, that would be so wonderful to have scientists thinking that way, to have mayors and people leading towns, politicians, you know, teachers, everybody just kind of drawing as a way of thinking. 'Cause it is so divergent, you know? It's really like that. I mean, at some point it comes back in, but it's just a wonderful, rich external exploration, you know?

MR: This has been really fun to see. We'll definitely have to have you take a couple shots of maybe a couple of pages and, you know, some samplings of these little squares so we include those in the show notes, maybe throw 'em on your site or something or social media or wherever so people can see, if they're listening, you can click on the link and see those images.

JH: Oh yeah.

MR: We'll do that as for you. So that brings me to—typically, this is where we talk about tools. I'm really curious about the tools that you chose here. It seems like you went really simple, right? You had a pad, you had you had a fine liner and then a Copic for shadows. And that was pretty much it. Tell me a little bit more about the tools you chose and why.

JH: One trick you know well, and I know and others that have been drawing for a little while, is if you're gonna do a set, find your most comfortable tool and stick with it throughout the whole set. Probably don't switch. So I just happened to have my architectural drawing tools on that day in Boston. And it was a 0.5 Staedtler.

MR: Yep. Fine liner. Super popular.

JH: Yeah. And a Fabriano pad, which I'll get it, it's right here.

MR: I think I've had Fabriano pads in the past more like a spiral bound notebook?

JH: No, it's this recycled paper and bleached and it's so—

MR: Oh, wow.

JH: I love this. I you may have trouble ordering 'em 'cause I ordered so many 'cause I—

MR: You cornered the market.

JH: I wanted to make sure—yeah. But these are great. It's this really crisp white paper. It's sort of between paper and Bristol.

MR: It's something like a sticker card stock almost.

JH: Yeah. 94 pounds.

MR: Okay, so somewhat heavy. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. Those, and then for other illustrations, I do, I use the Neuland markers, which I —

MR: Oh yeah. They're great. Yeah.

JH: - learned from you and like that gives a thicker line like that. And then I use a Copic N2 grayscale.

MR: Adds some tone.

JH: Yeah, and that's it. Just keep 'em real simple. The book will not be digitized. So this is gonna be a print-only book which I do that for a number of reasons. I might have to self-publish it. I've had some good conversations with publishers, but the response has been basically, "We don't know how to handle 180 pages of—we don't do that." You know, "That's beyond where we're at." Some of the graphic novel publishers, it's not really in their—

MR: Yeah. It sort of falls in this middle space in a way, right?

JH: Totally. So if anybody's listening and they wanna gimme a holler about a book deal, if there's any agents out there or anybody, please don't hesitate.

MR: Wow.

JH: Yeah.

MR: And then for the little squares, did you just take that same pad and pull them out of the book and then cut them in quarters? How did you produce your little squares? Or are they—

JH: Those exact?

MR: Okay.

JH: No, totally same. So they're six two-page, they fit. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And I draw them in here, and then I cut them out.

MR: And then you cut them out. Got it. Okay.

JH: Yeah.

MR: You probably use your maybe a pencil to stroke the break points for the six panels, and then work your way through them and cut them out at the end. Probably good for managing, like, on that trip. Right. You would keep them in a central place so that they wouldn't get lost 'cause I would think with loose squares like that, like ordering them then becomes more complex than if they're bound into a book. At least maybe while you're doing the production.

JH: Well, I actually cut 'em out every night because the payoff was like, if you spread like 55 squares on a table, it's pretty visually impactful. And I wanted to talk to people. I didn't know anybody as I drove across the country. So if I arrived in Minneapolis and was at some cool cafe, you know, oftentimes another artist would come up and be like, "Oh dude, what are you doing? Like, that's really cool." And I was like, "Hey, who are you? What do you do?" You know.

MR: Make another square.

JH: Exactly. Exactly.

MR: Interesting. It's like the thing beget more things in a way.

JH: Yeah. Kind of is.

MR: That's funny. So we'll definitely have to—we'll get some links specifics for you guys out there listening if you wanna check out these pads. Let's shift into practical tips. So this is where I invite people to do tips for listeners. And the way I frame it is, imagine there's a visual thinker listening. Maybe they've reached a plateau or they're just feeling a little bit burnt out, or, you know, they just wanna see a change. What would be three practical or theoretical things, tips that you might offer them?

JH: Yeah, totally. The first is gonna be draw where you aren't conventionally permitted to do so. Like, push the boundaries of drawing. So if everybody else on the bus is on their phones, they're staring out the window at the raindrops, draw. If you're at a lecture, if you're at the symphony, if you're at a very boring social function with your in-laws, you've gotta be careful there, but just draw. Start to push the edges and in the massage of that boundary, you will start to loosen up your own expressive capacity. So that would be one is, is draw where you're not really encouraged to draw.

The other would be have the easiest materials possible that you know you will use. You know, sometimes people wanna get into photography and they think that means buying the, you know, four-foot-long telescopic lens and dah, dah, dah. That's not true. The best camera is the one you're going to use.

So find tools that feel good in your hand. The pen should feel really good. You should have a relationship with your pen and then paper that feels really good. For some people that's gonna be more granular. Other people, it's gonna be smooth. For some people, it'll roll up nicely. Others will be really firm. I just love thick card. I don't know why. Maybe it's my printmaking background or something.

MR: Yeah. It could be.

JH: So that would be the second one. And the third would be the way I learned how to play guitar when I was a punk rock musician—I've had other younger guitars say, what advice can you gimme on learning guitar and stuff? What they expect is you to tell 'em some scale technique or something. That's not it. This sounds so weird, but to fall asleep with my guitar. So to actually at night play it—this is a long time ago, I learned to play guitar. You're watching like David Letterman on TV around midnight or whatever it was on, playing guitar. Always was in my hand.

As in college, in my apartment, that guitar was in my hand. I'd fall asleep and that guitar was with me. I might wake up in the middle of the night and kind of remember a melody and I'd pluck it out. I'd kind of fall back asleep. It was always there. So, related to that, try to have your drawings and your materials with you as often as possible. Another reason these are the size is because one of my favorite coats has an interior breast pocket right here.

I capture my dreams too. I'm a Jungian, I draw various dreams I've had. And then I will take those dreams. And this is an exercise in the book actually. I will put 'em in the breast pocket of that jacket in the winter with my big scarf on. I'll walk around the city and I'll sit at cafes and then I'll pull the deck back out. I'm not trying to meet people or socialize during this exercise, but I'll reflect on things, put it back in my pocket, walk some more throughout the city. Might take an hour or two to walk. I walk a lot. Go to the next place, pull 'em out, look at 'em, shuffle 'em around, have a relationship with them.

So it's the third bit of advice is that like, try to have you and your tools as close to each other as possible to develop that relationship and to open up those channels of expression and communication with yourself 'cause that's really what's going on, right? You gotta talk with your deeper self to get in touch with these processes.

MR: You want the tools to kind of step out of the way and be there when you need them and perform enough to do that.

JH: Yeah.

MR: I've been bullet journaling for years. I just recently bought a leather—I could show you this leather thing that I had made.

JH: Nice.

MR: So just a leather wrapper for my Neudstram. I had my little logo put here in the corner.

JH: Oh, cool.

MR: And then I decided to get a Lamy safari fountain pen.

JH: Oh, nice. I love those.

MR: It feels great in my hand. It's got weight to it. I actually just shifted the tip from a fine to a medium 'cause I wanted more juice out of my ink. I like juicy inks. They need to flow. I've noticed that it's changed my relationship with writing. I really enjoy the writing a little more. All I did was change the tip, which is really easy on a Lamy, you put scotch tape and you pull it off and you just stick the other one on. You can even do it with ink inside. It's crazy. So it's a really good trick.

JH: Wow.

MR: Yeah.

JH: I didn't know that. I love Lamy. What kind of tip did you put on it? Like a more fine one, or?

MR: Yeah, I bought it with a fine tip on it, and it felt scratchy to me and it kept bothering me especially when it would run out of ink. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna do it. The ink is low. This is the time to do it. So I looked up a video and it showed do, you could do it when it was loaded with ink 'cause the tip sits on top of, whatever, the feed, and you just use some scotch tape and you put it on and you pull out and down and it just pops off. You take the other one and just snap it on there and start writing. It's a really ingenious design from Lamy with their tips.

JH: Oh, I gotta look at that. I gotta look at that. Do you use Noodler's ink? Are you a Noodler's guy or what are you like?

MR: I have not tried Noodler's yet. For this one, I bought the Lamy ink. I kind of wanted to go all stock with it. I've heard good things about Noodler's. I haven't tried it. I think it's water resistant or if not waterproof. So, yeah, I think I just have found going back to this tool, which, you know, I mean, I think the pen was like $40 for this heavy pen. But it changes my relationship with my writing. I've noticed that Neuland markers do the same thing, like the quality.

Like there's something to be said by using cheap pens that are available at the grocery store, and the truth is, is that you get really excellent pens at a grocery store or a corner drug store, like, you know, Energels or G2s really amazing. Like the technology is improved so much that they can also be, you know, something that you like. But it seems like my relationship with writing and reflecting in the bullet journal context has changed by switching the tools that I use. And it makes me more expressive. It's little, it's a small friction, but it's definitely works.

JH: I hear you. I think their stock tips, especially for the fine ones can be really scratchy like you're saying.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

JH: Yeah, yeah.

MR: So, you know, you gotta find—I think it goes back to you finding what are the tools that are right for you? And don't feel like, just 'cause everybody uses this tool that I have to, you can break from the pack.

JH: No.

MR: You know, be a punk rocker like Justin was. You know, find the thing that works for you. Well, this has been really fascinating and fun and enlightening and I'm looking forward to seeing your book published. I'd love to see it when it comes out and have a print copy.

JH: Oh yeah.

MR: Tell me a little bit more about where people can find you. This is especially helpful if someone has ideas—If you're in the publishing space and you have ideas for Justin about how he might go about it to reach out to him. Do you have a website? Are you on socials? How would you like people to reach out to you and see your work or chat with you?

JH: Yeah, yeah, totally. I have a few things. For my Jungian work, it's cascadejungianservices.org. So if people wanna learn about Jungian stuff or psychedelics in Oregon and how we support that as well here with licensure in the state, they can go to that. For the book. I just got the Instagram handle, The Visual Jung, J-U-N-G.

MR: Good.

JH: So that's that. I'm gonna just start posting stuff there. Then for my work as an artist Justin_hamacher_artist on Instagram. Those are the three best places to get in touch about all those things.

MR: We'll put those in the show notes along with all the other resources. So if you're curious, you can go in there and dig in there and follow your passion and find out more. Well, thanks so much, Justin. This has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed the discussion. I know a little bit more about Jungian concepts. Not enough to practice, but enough to play Jungian on TV, I guess. I don't know. Not really. Not really.

But it's been really fascinating. It's makes me want to dig in a little bit more and understand Jung and like how we got to these ideas and maybe do some research on how could it apply to me? What are some practices that could help me? So it's interesting.

JH: Oh yeah. Yeah, active imagination is a big one. That's the most visual. I'll send you some links and some books if folks are interested in.

MR: Yeah, we'll put 'em in the show notes for sure. I think as visual thinkers, this audience might be well suited for this kind of work, these kind of practices potentially.

JH: I think so. It really resonates. So much image basis in the unconscious in the Jungian space too. Yeah.

MR: Interesting. Well, thanks so much, Justin. Thanks for being on the show and thanks for the work you're doing. Thanks for helping people in the way that you do. I think it's important that we each find that way and you found the way, which is great. Listening to your story and how you got to where you are, all that background's gonna help you, I think. So thank you for your contribution.

JH: Thanks so much, Mike. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for hosting this podcast. It's really fun to see all the folks out there doing visual thinking.

MR: I'll never run out of people to interview, which is really great.

JH: Cool

MR: Well, everyone, if you're watching or listening, this is another episode. Until the next one, talk to you soon.