Transcripts
1. Introduction: Graphic recording or visual note-taking is the process of creating a real time visual summary of a presentation or discussion, usually in front of a live audience. At its core, graphic recording is a tool, a working document for collecting, sharing and communicating ideas and information. Hey, I'm Leah. I've been graphic recording with my team since 2016, and learned a lot in producing hundreds of projects for clients like Nike, Starbucks, and the UN. Visual note-taking requires you to improvise and be creative, quick, and nimble without ado over. That part can be intimidating. But the work is also wonderfully simple and perfect and sketchy. Visual notes are a chance to let your drawing just flow and reflect a presentation or the organic nature of a discussion. Some ways to use low visual notes in your day-to-day are diagramming ideas for your team and meetings, retaining information from a class lecture, or staying in a moment, phone-to-phone with a friend. Think of this as your graphic recording 101. I'll share some of the foundations of the work and skills and tips to practice drawing visual notes live. We'll tie it together with your class project. Your own graphic recording of your favorite video lecture, said talk, or podcasts. While a lot of graphic recording is done at large scale, today will use supplies that you might already have at home. A letter size notebook and markers or your favorite iPad drawing app. I also share glance at my professional toolkit that I use when drawing at large scale in case you love graphic recording, and want to try that yourself. You don't need to be a fabulous illustrator to get started with live drawing. Just feel comfortable drawing simple things like icons and stick figures. My plan is that you'll come away from this class, knowing the foundations of graphic recording work, feeling more comfortable approaching live drawing, and with a solid understanding of what's a practice to improve your skills going forward. Let's do it.
2. Class Project: Our class project will be creating your own graphic recording of a favorite online lecture, TED talk or podcasts. But don't worry, we'll build up to it by working online together first. Then we'll use everything we talk about to have some fun. For now, just know that for your class projects specifically, you'll need a letter sized notebook or some standard letter sized white paper, and a few markers. Black and a couple of colors work pretty well. You can also use any iPad drawing app that you're familiar with and comfortable with using. That's all you'll need. In the next lesson, we will talk about the expanded toolkit. Then you can think about picking up if you'd like to keep practicing graphic recording, but at a larger scale.
3. Supplies: A Professional Toolkit: Let's talk about the professional graphic recorder's basic toolkit. For the most common form of graphic recording low-tech visual notes. The biggest piece, literally is your drawing surface. We typically use foam wood or similar recyclable panels because they're lightweight. They come in many sizes and they're versatile. Our go-to size is 32 inches by 40 inches. Because I can use this size modularly or connect a few together for a larger continuous drawing. Artists also use a three-foot or four foot wide paper roll or even flip chart paper. If you're just getting started, I recommend working on flip chart paper because it's a smaller investment and can be posted without an easel on any smooth wall in your house. Just make sure you protect your wall from marker bleeds with a few extra pieces of paper beneath the one you're drawing on. A visual note-taker as markers are just as important. We use a popular brand, noland markers because of their fade resistant bold colors that don't have a scent. Noland are professional grade and ship from Germany. But we also use a lot of classic black sharpies and the standard and medium sizes to write and draw. If you're just getting started, I recommend working with an inexpensive brand of markers to get the hang of thing. Pick up any range of colors and several extra in black. You'll lean heavily on black for drawing and writing. Other supplies in our kit include whiteout label stickers, which we use to make corrections on our live drawings. When we're working with foam core boards at events, we also use a portable metal flip chart easel with a top stabilizer. White artists tape, which can also be used for corrections, hang paper on a wall or fix a broken easel in a hurry. Those are the basic supplies while working low-tech. Of course, you can also always work fully on an iPad or a Wacom tablet connected to a display. It's all about comfort level and practicing in your medium, whether it's with markers on a small scale, like we'll do today. At a large scale for an audience or using technology to share with a remote audience around the world. A few optional additional items to take it to the next level are a marker holster. We use a gardener's belt to keep our markers close at hand while we draw. A smartphone to look up foreign or industry specific items on the fly and any references for the event you're drawing, including your visual vocabulary, notebook or flat sheets. We'll talk more about this in an upcoming video.
4. Research and Prep: First let's talk about researching and preparing for your live drawing. For our purposes, I'll be referring to the Ted Talk, 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation by Celeste Headlee. I've included the link and info below and you can Google this talk to find the paragraph description and video in full. Go ahead and pull up the video now and let's do our homework. Note the title of our talk is there a subtitle, a description or abstract? What can you learn about what we're about to draw? Given our title, I'll guess our TED Talk is relatively straightforward with a clear structure. Ten ways to have a better conversation tells me I'll be listening for a list of 10 ideas. We can also almost always assume some introduction at the start of the video and a conclusive statement or a call to action at the end. Because this information is available to me for this talk, I'll sketch out a very loose format that I can lean on when I'm live drawing. I'll put the title in the center and then circle the content around it. We'll talk more about this a little bit later. I want to point out that most of the time, the content of your talk won't be as clear from the title as the content in our sample TED Talk is. We'll have to do a lot more improvising and that's okay. We'll cover tips and tricks for improvising in later videos. For now, let's also note the duration of our talk. Ours is just about 12 minutes. It will fly by, so we'll have to listen closely and we'll cover listening next.
5. Listening and Synthesizing: Let's talk about a super important element of graphic recording, listening and synthesizing. But first, a metaphor. Hold out your hand. Picture a perfectly finished dry. It's beautiful. It's sharp. It's well-spaced. It's creative. It's just perfect. Now, ball it up and throw it away. Perfect is not happening today or really ever, and it's all good. It's freeing, feel the freedom. As we've mentioned, live visual notes are by nature imperfect. The beauty of visual notes is that they're a utility. A working document that's meant to be more informational than Artistic. They flow and reflect what happens in the presentation, and discussion, or story. Even allowing yourself to expect imperfection, it's always a challenge to listen and draw quickly on the first try, or the second, or the third. But if you are prepared, and know what to listen for, you'll be on the right track. To serve this important information, practice listening for verbal cues. Typically, a speaker will include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion in their talk. In the introduction, you're listening for the speaker to name a problem statement, a thesis statement that sets up their point, or maybe set up a story. A speaker can take a talk in all directions, and it's our job to find their key points and capture those in our drawing. With practice, you'll start to get used to listening for certain speaking styles and cues, and you'll become even more grateful to watch really good speakers at work with wonderfully structured talks. In the description below, our sample TED Talk, we get a clue as to what the intro might be about, it's a problem statement. We learn that people have become bad communicators, and that we need to be better. Then during the body of the talk, we know we'll be listening for a list of 10 recommendations for how to be better at communicating. While you're listening, if you have time, it's okay to draw anything else besides those 10 items that you think might be helpful to capture as well. If it adds to the thesis of the talk or answers the question at hand, it's fair game. We've also guessed that there will be a conclusive statement before the video ends. It helps to keep in mind that we learned our talk is about 12 minutes, and we have estimated at least 12 items to draw. We will have to listen for and draw roughly one item for every 45 to 60 seconds. It's a lot to capture in a short period of time. In the next few sections will cover my favorite ways to make it all work.
6. Building Your Visual Vocabulary: Now let's get into some tools and tips because graphic recording is first and foremost a tool for communication rather than a work of art. The drawings you use do not need to be complex. In fact, think of semiotics or the study of signs and symbols. When live drawing, you want to lean on using simple symbols, drawings and iconography that are both quick to draw for you and easy to understand for your audience. Your visual vocabulary is your collection of these go-to icons and very simple illustrations for commonly discussed concepts. You want to practice these over and over until you can pull them up from memory and draw them quickly when you're working live. The idea is to be so comfortable drawing your visual vocab, that you can stay focused on listening and mapping the live discussion that you're working on. Overtime, your own internal visual vocabulary will grow as well. You'll be able to call up loads of icons from memory. Even with lots of experience, I create a collection of visual vocab into a flash sheet specific to every live event I draw. This helps me familiarize myself with events specific visuals, as well as more common ones that are likely to come up and warm up for the session. Let's work on creating a flash sheet for our example, TED talk together. To start, I'll research and collect icons around the concepts I see in the descriptive paragraph. For example, we see the words, conversation, speaking, listening, honesty, brevity, clarity, and being amazed. You can see that visual vocab can be used for more concrete ideas like speaking, or more abstract ideas like honesty. You want to plan and think through the topics of the talks as best you can. In a professional context, this can involve planning with a client, but that's for another class. Sometimes you have little information to work with and you have to make educated guesses. You can create your flash sheet around all kinds of topics, in industry, the subject matter of the session, a specific clients. To find ideas, I use anything I can get my hands on. I google a concept. I use sites like the Noun Project, books and book covers, magazines. It doesn't hurt to create more than one visual for a given term. Sometimes a term like idea comes up a lot at a session and you don't want to have to keep drawing a light bulb icon, so it's nice to have a few alternatives up your sleeve. Let's get started on the first half of the flash sheet by creating a collection of iconic references about conversation. For the second half of your flash sheet, let's pull in some more abstract concepts. What icons can you come up with for terms like honesty, amazement, and success? There may not be as straightforward answer to these questions, which is all the more reason to practice them before you find yourself stumped while you're in the middle of a live drawing. Your visual vocab is never really complete because you'll always be learning more visuals to use in your work. So keep adding to your vocab library literally and mentally, and be sure to upload your flash sheets to Skillshare. I'd love to see them.
7. Organizing Information: Chunking: Let's chat about our next element of live drawing, information chunking. Because we want our drawings to be legible, logical and useful. We organize information, we draw by visually chunking or clustering ideas and information into bite sized pieces. Chunking information keeps ideas clear. Plus studies show it's easier to remember information when it's collected in chunks. Working live, this means capturing keywords, short phrases, icons, or other simple visuals, and working more vertically than horizontally. Be sure to leave lots of white space in between each chunk so that you can add to it as necessary in the course of your drawing. You can vary textiles to show information hierarchy. Section headers might be larger and then details might be smaller. Outside of physically spacing clusters of information, other ways to chunk information are use color, line or shape, or all three to boxing concepts or connect one concept to the next. The key for using these is to aim for hierarchical consistency. For example, when I think about our Ted Talk, I might plan to put a colorful bubble behind all ton of the ideas that the speaker offers. A different color behind the intro and still a different one behind the conclusion. If I decide to highlight a call to action so that it stands out as the most important thing about the drawing or the key takeaway. I might use a bright color like yellow to do that at the end. If I want to connect two related ideas when they're across my page, I might use a line or find another way to connect them. I usually try to chunk as best I can while I'm working real time. Then again at the very end of my capture, after everything is written and drawn, I go back in and make sure my info is grouped and connecting cohesively. If it isn't, I layer in structure by chunking. For me at the end of the talk I'm drawing, it's always helpful to take a moment, take a breath, and decide what will make my drawing feel as clear as it can be without adding in too much shape and color and making it too cluttered. As you practice, you can experiment and find a balance that you like.
8. Timing and Using Space: The last elements of lab drawing that I want to cover, are timing and using the drawing space you have effectively. Here are some tips that can put you on the right track. First, use your planning to pace yourself. For example, a keynote speech might be 60 minutes. A workshop might be two to four hours. Our TED Talk video example is 12 minutes. From here, make some educated guesses, and a loose plan. Note again what we learned in our earlier planning phase. That we can loosely plan on drawing an introduction, 10 key pieces of information and maybe a conclusion, or a total of 12 chunks of information. Beyond those 12 chunks, I also need to allow space for the title and the name of the speaker, and size my information accordingly. Also importantly, it's good to leave extra white-space for yourself. Just in case the speaker has a surprise plan in their talk. Finally, plan your space to drawing tool to time ratio accordingly. I find that I can fill a flip chart with marker in 15 to 20 minutes. If I draw a smaller, I can fit 30 minutes of content on the chart. If I draw a larger, I can fill it in 12. Using our standard sharpie on a letter size notebook, that we're working with today, will easily fill our page and 12 minutes. If we wanted to fit a longer talk on the page, we would work with a finer tip marker or a pen. As you gain experience with different formats, and links the presentation, and fill out your live drawing style. You'll start to be able to make similar guesstimates about how your timing will be. Before the session even starts. I recommend drawing in the title, subtitle, and speaker name, and maybe an odd theme illustration or a simple icon. It's taken care of, and you can focus fully on the live content once it kicks off. I can use my rough layout that we did earlier as a reference for spacing. A good rule of thumb, when you're just getting started. Is to put the title at the middle, and work outward so that your white space looks artful, and intentional. You can also put the title at the top left. You have a wide open Canvas and lots of flexibility. When I kick off the TED talks session, as we noted in an earlier video. I'll plan to draw one of the 12 chunks of information every minute or so. Because you'll be listening and drawing simultaneously. You'll be drawing a few seconds behind what you're listening to in real time. If you're feeling rushed, capture ideas, and short keywords and phrases wherever possible. You can always go back and add drawings in detail. One quick note on timing. It's always easier if you are able to be close to finish with your drawing by the time you're talk completes. This is especially true in a professional or client setting. If you're doing multiple live drawing back to back. But in truth, it's unlikely that timing will line up so well during your first several recordings. In fact, even after doing this work for years, I almost always need to take a few minutes after the talk completes. To add additional graphics, add colors, tighten up the flow of the drawing as a whole. Generally ensure everything makes sense. Just don't get caught up spending hours after your session trying to make your recording perfect. Remember, graphic recording is a tool for sharing and communicating ideas. If it's doing that effectively, you're doing it right. The details and aesthetic flare will come with practice. Also, as I've said, most of the time, the content of your talk will be a little more ambiguous. You might not know what to expect from the content. Until the speaker's introduction in the middle of the talk. In other cases, the talk you're drawing maybe more of a story with a plot, than a lecture with an outline structure. You may not be able to plan your spacing much at all, and that's all right. When that happens, do your best to listen for any structure that you can hear, and feel out the speaker's style and timing. Play it by ear, be comfortable working organically. Use your chunking efficiently, to give yourself plenty of space and keep yourself flexible. Layer, and color, and shape, to bring it all together at the end. For your first few recordings, if you do all that and run out of space, it's okay. Just move onto a second page. Alternatively, it is also totally okay to have unused white space at the end of your drawing. Some artists do choose to fill that space with a large theme to illustration that helps tie everything together. But you can also just call it finished. You'll start to fill out sizing, timing, chunking, and creative ways to fill your white space. Eventually you'll feel you have just enough space for each recording. Advanced artists will build on some of these tips, and go on to do beautiful things with the layout and flow of their drawings. In the next video, we'll bring all of this home.
9. Tying It All Together: This is the part where we bring everything together. I'm going to demo everything we've just learned as I live draw our sample TED Talk, 10 ways to have a better conversation with Celeste Headlee. I'll note what I'm doing as I go. Here we go. I want to see a show of hands. How many of you have unfriended someone on Facebook because they said something offensive about politics or religion, childcare, food? How many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don't want to talk to them? It used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, stick to the weather and your health. But these days with climate change and anti-vaccine, those subjects are not safe either. This world that we live in, this world in which every conversation that has the potential to devolve into an argument where our politicians can't speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it. It's not normal. Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized, we are more divided than we ever have been in history. We're less likely to compromise, which means we're not listening to each other. We make decisions about where to live, who to marry, and even who our friends are going to be based on what we already believe. Again, that means we're not listening to each other. A conversation requires a balance between talking and listening, and somewhere along the way, we lost that balance. Now, part of that is due to technology, these smartphones that you all either have in your hands or close enough that you could grab them really quickly. According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than a hundred texts a day. Many of them, almost most of them are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face-to-face. There's this great piece in The Atlantic, it was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. He gave his kids a communication project. He wanted to teach him how to speak on a specific subject without using note. He said this, "I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach." Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communication skills. It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves. Is there any 21st Century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation? Now I make my living talking to people, Nobel Prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. I talk to people that I like. I talk to people that I don't like. I talk to some people that I disagree with deeply on a personal level, but I still have a great conversation with them. I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen. Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this. Things like look the person in the eye, think of interesting thing, topics to discuss in advance. Look, nod, and smile to show that you're paying attention. Repeat back what you just heard or summarize it. I want you to forget all of that. It is crap. There is no reason to learn how to show you're paying attention if you are in fact, paying attention. I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. I'm going to teach you how to interview people and that's actually going to help you learn how to be better conversationalists. Learn to have a conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored and please God, without offending anybody. We've all had really great conversations. We've had them before, we know what it's like. The kind of conversation when you walk away feeling engaged and inspired or where you feel you've made a real connection, or you've been perfectly understood. There is no reason why most of your interactions can't be like that. So I have 10 basic rules. I'm going to walk you through all of them but honestly, if you just choose one of them and master it, you're already enjoy better conversations. Number 1, don't multitask. I don't mean just set down your cell phone or your tablet or your car keys or whatever's in your hand. I mean, be present, be in that moment. Don't be thinking about your argument you had with your boss. Don't be thinking about what you're going to have for dinner. If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation, but don't be half in it and half out of it. Number 2, don't pontificate. If you want to state your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument, or push-back or growth, write a blog. Now, there's a really good reason why I don't allow pundits on my show because they're really boring. If they are conservative, they're going to hate Obama and food stamps and abortion. If they are liberal, they're going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney, totally predictable. You don't want to be like that. You need to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. The famed therapist, M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself and sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. Again, assume that you have something to learn. Bill Nye, everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don't. I put it this way, everybody is an expert in something. Number 3, use open-ended questions. In this case, take a cue from journalists. Start your questions with who, what, where, when, why, or how. If you put in a complicated question, you're going to get a simple answer out. If I ask you were you terrified, you're going to respond to the most powerful word in that sentence, which is terrified and the answer is yes, I was or no, I wasn't. Were you angry? Yes, I was very angry. Let them describe it. They are the ones that know. Try asking them things like what was that like? How did that feel? Because then they might have to stop for a moment and think about it and you're going to get a much more interesting response. Number 4, go with the flow. That means thoughts will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind. We've heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and then the host comes back in and asks a question which seems it comes out of nowhere or it's already been answered. That means the host probably stopped listening two minutes ago because he thought of this really clever question and he was just bound and determined to say that. We do the exact same thing. We're sitting there having a conversation with someone and then we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop. We stop listening. Stories and ideas are going to come to you. You need to let them come and let them go. Number 5, if you don't know, say that you don't know. Now, people on the radio, especially on NPR, are much more aware that they're going on the record. So they're more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure. Do that. Err on the side of caution, talk should not be cheap. Number 6, don't equate your experience with theirs. If they're talking about having lost a family member, don't start talking about the time that you lost a family member. If they're talking about the trouble that they're having at work, don't tell them about how much you hate your job. It's not the same. It is never the same. All experiences are individual, and more importantly, it is not about you. You don't need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are or how much you've suffered. Somebody asked Stephen Hawking once what his IQ was and he says, "I have no idea. People who brag about their IQ are losers." Conversations are not a promotional opportunity. Number 7, try not to repeat yourself. It's condescending and it's really boring and we tend to do it a lot, especially in work conversations or in conversations with our kids. We have a point to make, so we just keep rephrasing it over and over. Don't do that. Number 8, stay out of the weeds. Frankly, people don't care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you're struggling to come up with in your mind. They don't care. What they care about is you. They care about what you're like, what you have in common. So forget the details. Leave them out. Number 9, this is not the last one, but it is the most important one. Listen. I cannot tell you how many really important people have said that listening is perhaps the most, the number 1 most important skill that you could develop. Buddha said, and I'm paraphrasing,"If your mouth is open, you're not learning." Calvin Coolidge said, "No man ever listened his way out of a job." Why do we not listen to each other? Number 1, we'd rather talk. When I'm talking, I'm in control. I don't have to hear anything I'm not interested in, I'm the center of attention, I can boast my own identity. But there's another reason, we get distracted. The average person talks at about 225 words per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. Look, I know it takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone. But if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. You're just two people shouting out barely related sentences in the same place. You have to listen to one another. Steven Covey said it very beautifully. He said, "Most of us don't listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply." One more rule, and number 10, and it's this one, be brief. All of this boils down to this same basic concept, and it is this one, be interested in other people. I grew up with a very famous grandfather and there was a ritual in my home. People would come over to talk to my grandparents, and after they would leave, my mother would come over to us and she'd say, "Do you know who that was? She was the runner-up to Miss America. He was the Mayor of Sacramento. She won a Pulitzer Prize. He's a Russian ballet dancer." I grew up assuming everyone has some hidden amazing thing about them. Honestly, I think it's what makes me a better host. I keep my mouth shut as often as I possibly can. I keep my mind open and I'm always prepared to be amazed and I'm never disappointed. You do the same thing. Go out, talk to people, listen to people, and most importantly, be prepared to be amazed.Thanks. So now that you've seen it done, it's your turn. You can either record the same TED talk or find another one or a podcast you are interested in listening to. Be sure to include the title and speaker or speakers names in your drawing so that we can find these talks later. Relax and go for it. Know, it will be imperfect and focus on listening, drawing, and having fun. When you're finished, head to the final video.
10. Next Steps: By now you've learned tools and tips for drawing visual notes in real-time, including researching and preparing, assembling your visual vocabulary, listening and synthesizing on the fly. Capturing by chunking information and effectively using timing and space when you're drawing and you've witnessed a graphic recording in real time. I find it helpful to practice one of these elements at a time, such as chunking or visual vocab, alternated with the challenge of pulling up a new TED talk or podcasts at random, and practicing everything at once. Remember, all of what we've learned will feel more fluid with practice. Plan to let your recordings be imperfect, keep it loose, have fun. See what comes out. After you complete a recording, review what you like, note what you didn't like and work on that. You can come back to the same TED talk and try it again. But I also recommend improvising a new one whenever possible to get comfortable with the feeling. After all this, I hope you had some fun and feel a bit more confident about building your skills in live drawing. I look forward to seeing your recordings and your visual vocab flat sheets on Skillshare's project gallery.