April 19, 2025

#141: Jono Hey – Build a Creative Practice That Sticks: Mastering Visual Thinking, 900+ Sketches, Deep Simplicity and Collaborating with Bill Gates

1 hour 2 minutes

Jono Hey, author of Big Ideas Little Pictures and creator of Sketchplanations, shares insights from over a decade of explaining the world through sketches.

We discuss:

The power of visual thinking
Building a new identity when changing careers
Knowing when a piece is done and ready for publishing
Tips to get started with sketching
& lessons from long-term creative projects, including illustrating for Bill Gates.

ABOUT JONO HEY
Jono Hey is the author and illustrator of Big Ideas Little Pictures, a collection of the best of Sketchplanations—his decade-long project dedicated to explaining complex ideas through simple sketches. With a background spanning academia, business, design, product development, and engineering, Jono has helped build two successful companies and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been featured in Bill Gates’s book How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, and he co-hosts Sketchplanations – the Podcast, where he and two friends dive deeper into the ideas behind his sketches. Find his latest work at sketchplanations.com.

RESOURCES

📑Interview Transcript
Sketchplanations.com
A Sketch a Day journal
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham
Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam
Big Ideas Little Pictures by Jono Hey
Blurb (Book Printing)
Jono’s Patreon

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Lulu. If you're interested in self-publishing, Lulu has free resources such as helpful tutorials, templates to help you layout a book, design for print, and they have a very watchable YouTube University channel. Our community anthology is in fact published using Lulu. Check them out at lulu.com.

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By Parul Bavishi, Matthew Trinetti

5151 ratings

April 19, 2025

#141: Jono Hey – Build a Creative Practice That Sticks: Mastering Visual Thinking, 900+ Sketches, Deep Simplicity and Collaborating with Bill Gates

1 hour 2 minutes

Jono Hey, author of Big Ideas Little Pictures and creator of Sketchplanations, shares insights from over a decade of explaining the world through sketches.

We discuss:

The power of visual thinking
Building a new identity when changing careers
Knowing when a piece is done and ready for publishing
Tips to get started with sketching
& lessons from long-term creative projects, including illustrating for Bill Gates.