Austin was lucky enough to have a pre-sxsw workshop on visual note taking put on by two of my favorite industry folks, Dave Gray and Sunni Brown. The class was put on by MJ Broadbent the current brain behind the VizThink community. Here’s a bit of what I learned, which certainly doesn’t hold a candle to being there in-person, but it’s a taste.
- Dave Gray: ‘The human brain is better at images…much harder to forget them.’
- Visual alphabet (top section of the graphic on the left) is a point, line, angle and so on. If you can draw those 12 things, you can communicate anything.
- Get the meat of the speakers’ intent down, then you can go back a work on the visuals to tell the story.
- Drawing and note taking is a critical part of the learning process not simply an artifact.
Each note taking session, we sketched the pull points and visualized the speaker’s message. Then we walked around the room to see how others had expressed the same story; individual style and the different content others derived was fascinating. It certainly showed how much knowledge could be gained by having a few people recording and integrating graphics and text.