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By Mike Rohde
4.8
2323 ratings
The podcast currently has 169 episodes available.
In this special episode, Professor Michael Clayton, the lead organizer of ISC24TX in San Antonio, Texas, talks to Mike Rohde about the event on August 2-4, 2024.
Hear more details about the event, the venue, and the city of San Antonio and what to expect if you attend, including continuing education credits for educators!
Running OrderYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.
Support the PodcastTo 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!
In this final episode of The Sketchnote Army Podcast season 15, we have compiled the tips from nine great visual thinkers into a single episode. We hope these tips will inspire and encourage you on your visual thinking journey.
Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.
Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework.
Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again.
Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting.
SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.
Running OrderYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.
Support the PodcastTo 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!
In this episode, Julian Kücklich shares his journey—from childhood, where drawing was an innate talent, to academic pursuits and his discovery of design. Julian discusses how creativity and innovation provide visual solutions that blend storytelling, graphic recording, and visual strategy effortlessly.
Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.
Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings, saving hours and hours of rework.
Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting.
SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try.
Running OrderAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Amazon affiliate links support 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 PodcastTo 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 TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Julian Kücklich. Julian, it's so good to have you on the show.
Julian Kücklich: Great to be here, Mike.
MR: Yeah, I've seen your work so much. Again, to guests I've talked to, LinkedIn seems like the place I'm finding really fascinating people posting things. And I've asked people, and I can ask you too, is there something going on in LinkedIn or is it just that I've trained the algorithm to give me what I wanna see? Do you have a sense of what's going on there?
JK: Well, I think, you know, LinkedIn has become much more popular in Europe in recent years. When I joined LinkedIn, which was 10 years ago, I was just reminded that it was my LinkedIn anniversary maybe three, four weeks ago, it was hardly used. People in Germany especially used a platform called Xing.
MR: Yes, I remember Xing. Yeah.
JK: Yeah. And so, that seems to have dropped off the radar and people are doing much more on LinkedIn. So that might be one of the reasons that you see more content from creators in Europe at least on LinkedIn now.
MR: Hmm. Interesting. I'm sure the algorithm must have something to do with it, but anyway, if you are listening and you're not on LinkedIn or you haven't really paid attention there, go check it out. It seems like there's lots more graphics. I think in a way, it's got a nice blend of visual capability. So like visuals attract people, but it crosses over with business. So, people who are looking for either some kind of impact or I guess getting work from it, it's a natural place to be if you're a graphic recorder professionally.
In my case, I just like to share what's going on, and I do some teaching so that it opens the opportunity for people to find out about classes I might be teaching. But it definitely seems to be more visual. Anyway, that aside, Julian, tell us who you are and what you do, and then let's jump right into your origin story right after that. All the way from when you were a little boy till now, tell us like, what were the key moments, what were the things you did as a kid? All those kinds of things.
JK: All right. That's gonna be a long story.
MR: Good.
JK: Just to get us started, I've been working as a graphic recorder for about 10 years now. Well, actually it's a bit longer, but I went full-time freelance in 2014, so it's almost exactly 10 years ago. Well, you know graphic recording is becoming less and less important in my business. I do a lot of strategy mapping or strategic illustration as I like to call it. So I work with clients on visual representations of their strategy or their goals or their values.
And those often have a basis in graphic recording. I often like to kick off these processes with workshops where I do graphic recording, but then I take the results of that back into my studio, and then I work on the illustration and fill up the details, and then make changes. So it's a longer and more involved process than the pure live graphic recording that I did for the first, you know, six or seven years of my career almost exclusively.
MR: Hmm. Interesting. A question that sort of pops into my mind as you talk about this. So do you find, so typically graphic recording, at least traditionally is a large board, foam board, paper, something, and it's in a room, so people are kind of immersed in it in a sense? So when you go back and do the strategy work, do you find it's important to reframe it in a more consumable size?
This is a very specific question. So in other words, do you come back with a report that's A4 printable or, you know, something like that? Or does it come back as a large board again, but maybe more like, you know, you boiled the stew and then now it's a really tasty kind of a thing?
JK: I must say I find it really hard to produce something that's printable on an A4 paper because there's usually so much detail that—you know, a lot of that gets lost when it gets printed in such a small size. So I try to encourage my clients when they share it, either view it on a big screen or print it in a large format so detail is really there and they can, you know, focus on specific areas of what they're interested in at that moment.
I think size is really an important and often undervalued aspect or quality of, you know a graphic or an illustration. It really adds to the quality if it is large and if the viewer can actually immerse themselves into the graphic.
MR: Right. Yeah. It seemed to me like that would be a curious, with this opportunity to compress, there might also be a desire to reduce size, but it sounds like that's not the case. Maybe it's slightly smaller, but still, quite a large scale because I suspect in that strategy work and the amount of information you're taking in, it would be difficult to fit it in a small size. You need the space to really represent all the components and the interactions and interrelationships, I suppose.
JK: Absolutely.
MR: Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, so that's just a curiosity as we—I guess in this episode, it seems like I'm interrupting you to kind of ask for more details, which I guess is okay, but continue.
JK: Perfectly. I guess the next question is how did I get there?
MR: Yeah.
JK: And that's really a very long and complicated story because I didn't start out as an illustrator or a graphic artist like a lot of other graphic recorders do. In my experience, you know, they either come from a visual background or from a coaching background, and I have neither. I started out studying German and American literature in university. And then I kind of switched over to media studies and I did a lot of research on video games.
MR: Hmm. Interesting.
JK: Actually published a lot of papers on video games and gave a lot of conference presentations on video games, and actually did a PhD about global production networks—
MR: Wow.
JK: - in relation to computer games. So, you know, that was a big part of my life up until my mid-30s. And then I had a teaching job in Berlin actually teaching game design. And then I decided that you know, academia wasn't really my thing. I mean, I liked the teaching, but I didn't like the bureaucracy. I didn't like the hierarchy. I didn't like the way, you know, you had to ask a thousand people before you could do something.
MR: Yeah, yeah.
JK: So I then started to look for different work. And what I found was a job in an NGO which was doing training for journalists in mostly the Middle East. But then when I joined in 2012, they were just creating a platform for North Africa, for Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. So the Arab Spring countries as they were known at the time.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
JK: And so, I was able to join that team that built up that platform and work as a kind of technical editor. And I think the roots of my visual practice really are in the process that we then followed in creating a magazine. It was an online platform, a journalism platform, but we wanted to have something printed. So we started making a magazine called Correspondence, bilingual English and Arabic.
And the process of actually conceptualizing that magazine is where I started taking visual notes. And you know, pulling all these ideas together and seeing how they would interact and what would be visually appealing. It was just a way for me, well, first of all, to make those meetings more interesting for me. But also, I noticed when I shared those visual notes with my colleagues they really liked them.
And they really thought that the process of putting this magazine together became much more engaging in a way than just, you know, having minutes of those meetings. And then coming to the next meeting and working on the same stuff. So, you know, I mean, for me, it was really the first time that I saw that you know, my doodling would make a difference.
And I did always draw. When I was a child, I used to draw in my notebooks. In school, I used to draw in my school books although I wasn't actually allowed to, but, you know, it was really what I like doing to embellish and change the pictures and find new ways of contextualizing them. So that was something that I also carried over into my academic, research practice. I always found it really useful to visualize ideas or to organize my ideas using visual tools.
So in a way, visual thinking was always part of my life and of my different professional roles. But I think at that time, at MICT, when we were putting together that magazine, it was the first time that I saw that it could actually add something valuable, not only to my own process but to other people's processes as well. So that was an important moment, and it was encouraged by the organization.
So I think that was also important that it was not, you know, seen as something that was beside the point, or that was really only a way of passing the time. But they saw the value in it. And the expression of that was that they also asked me to do graphic recording at their conferences. The first conference that I actually did a graphic recording for was in South Sudan because that was one of the countries that the organization was working in.
It was a very new country at the time. It only became independent in 2011. And so, you know, it was exciting to go there and see what it was like after a brutal civil war and lots of very unfortunate events in the history of those two countries, South Sudan and Sudan. And we asked journalists from both those countries to come to Juba, to the capital of South Sudan and, you know, try to find ways to build up the media landscape in South Sudan. And I was asked to do the graphic recording for that conference, which was a challenge.
I mean, it was, you know, politically very charged. And it was an uneasy situation because I think nobody was really sure that the peace would last. And as we've seen, it didn't last, but at the time when we were there at the end of 2012, it was that brief period where it was actually peaceful. But you could feel the tension in the air and it was also in the conference rooms and, you know, there was a lot of distrust between the different parties attending the conference. So it definitely wasn't an easy first graphic recording job that I did there.
MR: Trial by fire, it sounds like.
JK: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. But the interesting thing that I remembered when you asked me to come on your podcast was that one of the journalists from Kenya who attended the conference, he saw what I was doing and he said, "Hey, do you know this guy Mike Rohde? Do you know the Sketchnote Handbook?" And I said, "No, I've never heard of it." And so, when I came back to Berlin after the conference, I went onto Amazon and tried to find the book, and there it was, and I ordered it. And so that was the first time I actually saw your work.
MR: Oh, interesting.
JK: And it's interesting that you know, it came to me in South Sudan from a Kenyan journalist.
MR: That's crazy. That's crazy.
JK: It only speaks to your worldwide fame, I guess.
MR: I guess so. Wow. That's interesting. And I'm kind of curious like you were asked by this organization to do this graphic recording. Obviously, you felt comfortable enough to do it, probably because you had knowledge of the area, you had knowledge with the organization, but had you done graphic recording ever before? It sounds like no. And also, were you like, aware of it being like a thing, like a profession or a practice before you did that work to kinda look and say, "Oh, okay, this is the way you do it. Okay, I'll copy all the things that I see and then replicate it." How did all that part of it work?
JK: Yeah, I think I wasn't really aware that it was a thing. I had seen it once before, at a, well a lecture, you know, in Berlin at a cultural event. And someone did a graphic recording on a blackboard with chalk, which is kind of unusual. But, you know, I watched it and I was fascinated that somebody, you know, was able to draw what was being talked about in real-time.
MR: Yeah.
JK: And, you know, I saw the potential in it because it was so interesting. I tried to take pictures, but it was very dark and the pictures didn't really come out very well. And that must have been, oh, I don't know, maybe 2008, 2009. So it was a few years before I actually started working as a graphic recorder. But yeah, I mean, I felt confident, I guess, because the organization, MICT trusted me to do it and to do it well.
And, you know, I started this process in preparation for the publication of the magazine. And so, I thought, okay, I have kind of like a visual vocabulary for this because a lot of the themes that came up during the conference were the same themes that had come up right when we were conceptualizing that magazine. So I thought, okay, I have a couple of icons or images that I can use and that I can, you know, change and re-contextualize to find a way to represent this conference. And I guess that for me at the time, that was enough. And I also wanted to go to South Sudan and see what it was like.
MR: Yeah, of course.
JK: Yeah.
MR: You had sort of lived it, it sounded like by making the magazine you'd sort of lived in the space, not only the content part of it, like what you're talking about and understanding and how to represent, but also the practice of doing it probably helped you to feel like, "Okay. We just—" I would assume the notes you were taking were not large scale for the planning, or maybe they're medium scale.
JK: No, they were actually quite small. They were in an A5 notebook.
MR: Okay. Quite small then.
JK: Yeah. Yeah. Only later I moved on to larger formats.
MR: Yeah. I know that's always a challenge. I know it's been a challenge for me in some cases because I do so much in a small scale, A5, A4, U.S. letter. You know, jumping to a large board, that proportional shift you have to make can be a challenge. I found that it was just a matter of acclimating myself to the size. Like you sort of have to almost scale in your mind everything up a little bit.
And then once you get into the rhythm, you're okay. But the first transition is the toughest part, I guess until you get sort of in the flow of that size. Once you establish your icon size, you then, "Okay, this is now my new orientation. Now let's continue from there."
JK: Yeah, I mean that was a challenge for me as well. And I think for me it was also a matter of experimenting with different markers and different techniques. I mean, also just in terms of the medium I was drawing on. I remember the second time MICT asked me to do graphic recording, we were in a peasant hut. A Polish peasant's hut that has been transported to Berlin and its main use is to tell fairytales to children. It's called Fairytale Hut.
And the walls were made of rough wood as you would expect from a Polish peasant's hut from the 19th or 18th century. I don't know how old they are, but they are traditional huts, small houses made from wood. And I thought, "Okay, I mean, I can't use paper on these walls." So I got some cardboard, but it was the corrugated kind of cardboard.
MR: Oh, texture, yeah.
JK: Yeah. Textured cardboard. So whenever I put the marker on it, it created little ripples in the lines. I mean, it was an interesting visual effect, but it wasn't what I had expected so I was really struggling with it. At that time when I was just starting out, I didn't know anything about materials or markers or how to, you know, make something work in a space like that because that's something that comes up a lot in graphic recording. You know, you never know if you have smooth walls or if there are—
MR: Can you tack on the walls, right? They might—
JK: Yeah, Exactly. Can you put tape on the walls? And you have to try to find out, but there's always surprises. So you have to kind of work around that.
MR: Yeah. You have to be pretty adaptable, I would guess.
JK: Absolutely. Yeah.
MR: Really, and it sounds like you like these trials by fire. Your first event is in another country and you've never done it before. The second one is in a Polish hut and you're using corrugated cardboard. It sort of speaks to me the varied nature of your history, like kind of the different places you've been. Also speaks to your adaptability I think as well. So that's to be commended, I think. The fact that you were willing to kind of proceed anyway and figure it out sort of says that maybe it was a good move and a destiny to kind go in that direction, maybe. I dunno.
JK: Oh, I think so. And I think, you know, I mean, that's a quality that has served me well over the years, this adaptability and, you know, the willingness to just try things and see what works. Because yeah, as I said, you know, for all those years that I did mainly live graphic recording on paper or on phone board, so many things can go wrong. And you always have to be able to adapt to that and find a way to make it work. And, you know, I always did find a way and I think it's also part of the challenge and part of the fun of doing it.
MR: Right. Yeah.
JK: You know, it's a live situation, all eyes are on you, so you kind of have to find a way to do it and to make it look good, make it look cool and easy.
MR: Yeah. Yeah. It makes me think of the old TV show MacGyver, which as I understand is quite popular around the world. You know, where he is, you know, making things out of bubble gum and, you know, shoe leather or something like that to make things happen. So it's MacGyver's moment, I guess. But I find it fascinating that you came from, you know, very academic background, right? German and American literature. And then you jump in the game design, but from an academic perspective. So you've got this academic structure and rigor and discipline, and yet you're a very adaptable person.
So I could see where at some point that structural stuff that you talked about would be frustrating because I'm sure you adapted around it as much as you could, but at some point you're like, "Okay, maybe I'm just done. Maybe I don't want to adapt anymore. Maybe I just want to do something new where I don't have to adapt so much, or I can adapt in different ways." That's kind of interesting. It seems like the where the way your life sort of unfolded in some ways. Is that a fair sort of characterization?
JK: Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, academia was never really the perfect match for me. I mean, I really liked doing critical theory in university. And I really, you know, needed something to get my teeth into, you know, these hefty tomes of theory. And really try to extract meaning from it. I mean, that was also a challenge that I enjoyed, to try to read philosophy and critical theory and try to understand what it was actually about and how it would apply to my life or the life of the people around me.
But I found the practice of being an academic quite frustrating because I felt like I was—I ended up almost plagiarizing myself. You know, I would write paper after paper after paper, and it felt like, you know, each paper was less innovative and less interesting than the previous ones. And so, yeah, I mean, that was the one part that I found frustrating.
As I said before, working in the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure of a university wasn't really my thing either. So I think, yeah, going freelance and being my own boss was really one of the best decisions that I've made in my life. And yeah, I'm really happy that I was able to experience that life and to make decisions for myself and build up this business, which is also, you know, a source of pride for me.
MR: Yeah. For sure.
JK: So I don't think I would've been happy had I stayed in academia.
MR: Yeah, I would guess so too. So we've got, as far as your first two graphic recordings. Talk about that shift from the company you were working with that was doing this training of journalists and traveling to countries and doing graphic recording inside Polish huts to going independent. Where did that shift happen?
JK: It happened kind of gradually. The organization I was working for, MICT, they had obviously lots of partner organizations that they worked with, and they saw what I was doing and they said, "Okay, that's cool. We want that too." And so I, you know, started working for these partner organizations and oh, I was gradually growing my network of clients while I was still employed.
And then at some time in 2014, it became clear to me that, you know, it wasn't really possible to develop that further while I was still employed. So I decided to go freelance and go for a full-time graphic recording career. And the network that I had built up made that possible. But what also made it possible was the network of other graphic recorders, other people that I met in Berlin at the time, who were incredibly generous and friendly and really, you know, embraced everyone joining the field.
I really so immensely grateful that I was given this environment that really helped me flourish because, you know, they made sure I could go onto jobs with them, they made sure that I found new clients, they made sure that, you know, if I had a question, they would answer it. And so that was an incredible boon, an incredible boost to my career at that time.
MR: Sounds more like a community than an industry in some senses, right? That when you start moving into that kind of space, those kinds of care concerns.
JK: Very much a community. You know, I mean, I still think the German graphic recording community is quite friendly and tight-knit and a lot of people know each other and also are friends with each other. It's definitely become more competitive over the years.
MR: Sure.
JK: But at that time 2014, '15, I didn't feel any sense of competition. It was more like, there's so much work, we need more people to join this field.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
JK: That was the spirit at the time. Yeah.
MR: I would think the other thing too is that at that time, maybe now there's organizations that have multiple graphic recorders and facilitators and coaches and stuff where they can come into a company and have options. But I suspect in 2014, it's mostly individuals. And if you're an individual and you have two jobs, you know, you can take one job, but if it's the same day, you can't take the other job. You want to present a good reference to this client for the future, right? That they will continue to buy the services.
So it makes sense that you direct that to someone you know and trust that can do the work because it keeps the flow going. You know, if you start thinking longer term, you're kind of convincing people not only to hire you, but in general that graphic recording is a valuable service that makes our meetings better, which means they'll come back to you and keep hiring you for their events, right? It sounds like that was sort of a thing maybe happening in that community as well.
JK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was part of the spirit of community and the spirit of collaboration. That, exactly what you said. If I had a client call me and I couldn't do the job, then I would try to find somebody to fill in for me because it was important to me to be seen as a professional and to be seen as someone who would try to help their clients because that would in some way come back to me and it would also elevate the entire field of graphic recording, which was still, you know, quite young in Germany at that time.
So it was important to me and everyone else working in the field to make sure that the clients perceived it as a professional service that would make their meetings better and more interesting and more memorable.
MR: Right. I would think that one of the goals that you wanna try and do is when you look at the budget for the event, you don't want the graphic recording at the bottom because that's the first thing to cut, right? You wanna move it up the chain. Maybe it's like, you know the punch bowl is the thing at the bottom of the list. The punch bowl will be cut, but we'll keep the graphic recording because it's so valuable, right? So with some of that as well.
I'm kind of curious then, since we're talking specifically about the German, maybe even Berlin, I suppose those are one in the same in some sense, but what is the community like now? You'd mentioned that it's a little bit more competitive, I would imagine there's some firms that have started to form as well as individuals. Is there still more work than you can handle? Is it sort of settled into a pretty good rhythm? What's it like now 10 years later?
JK: Oh, those are a lot of questions all rolled into one.
MR: Yeah, that's true.
JK: I'll start with the situation as you know, I saw it when I entered the field in 2014. It was really mainly individual freelancers, and there weren't really a lot of us so, you know, it was easy to collaborate. And I learned a lot from these collaborations. So that was also important at that time. It was very Berlin-focused. You know, I knew a few people in Hamburg and there were people in Cologne. Maybe in Munich, but just one or two. And so, that also meant that I traveled a lot.
At the beginning of my graphic recording career, I was always traveling going to different places. And that has changed a lot because now, of course, there's graphic recorders in most major cities and also in some smaller cities. So, you know, there's not as much need to travel as there was10 years ago. And as you said, yeah, I mean, there are now companies that employ graphic recorders or, you know, form a network of graphic recorders and who can react to clients' needs differently than a freelancer because they can basically guarantee that they will have somebody at a given date.
And that has changed the landscape to a certain extent, but I wouldn't say that it has changed dramatically. What has changed is that graphic recording is much more diverse in terms of the clients, in terms of the styles, in terms of the approaches of different people. You know, when I started out, me and the people I worked with in Berlin, we had a fairly clear idea of what graphic recording was and what it would look like. And we kind of tried to also establish that, the Berlin graphic recording style.
MR: Right.
JK: I mean, it was never very clearly defined, but for us it was very important to, you know, have clear lines, clear shapes, crisp colors. For example, you know, most of people I work with agreed that we would never use chalks like Pestel chalks. We were like, "No, no, that's, that's not for us ."But of course, you know, I mean, there are hundreds of different styles of graphic recording and, you know every single one of them has its use. And I'm sure that, you know, many people saw our approach as quite arrogant at the time.
MR: Or at least maybe rigid, right? Like you sort of developed a standard.
JK: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
MR: Which I guess, you think about the context of that situation. If you're all sort of in the same community and you might swap, someone might say, "Oh, I can't do it, John, can you do it?" You'd know that their style's gonna be consistent to the standard and the client wouldn't be surprised, which at that time is important, right? Maybe now with variety of people and perspectives, you almost maybe come to someone because of their style and you wanna try something different, I guess. I would imagine. Hmm. Interesting.
JK: Yeah. And the other thing I think that has changed is that the client base is very different. When I was starting out, I was working mainly for corporations. I mean, you know, in Germany we have the DAX kind of like the NASDAQ, and those big companies like Mercedes-Benz, and BMW, Bayer, BASF they would hire us to record their conferences, their meetings, their workshops. And it was very rare that we would work for smaller companies.
That's something that has completely changed. And the client base is now much, much broader. And it's sometimes very small companies that need our services. And yeah, I'm kind of fascinated that, you know it's really become something that is much more well-known in the German market compared to what it was like 10 years ago. But at the same time, I still meet a lot of people who have no idea. Never what graphic recording is and have never seen it. Yeah.
MR: Yeah. Yeah. I would suspect, at least some portion, maybe not all of it, when you talk about small companies hiring, would suggest that the value is apparent that even a small company's willing or wanting to make that part of the experience. I mean, some part of it might be, oh, it's trendy, right? Like, Adidas shoes are really trendy, so I wear them. There's gotta be some aspect of that, but like, if there's no value in it, it wouldn't be sustainable. Eventually, the trend would go away.
So I think it seems to suggest there is a value component that's being seen and achieved. So that's encouraging actually, really, that it's moving down to small companies and not only in the hands of large corporations who could, as we said before, say, "Ah, item number 77, graphic recording, he's off." Right. And suddenly you don't have a job anymore, you know, and you gotta scramble for a new project. So that seems to suggest health in the opportunities available to the community. That's the way I would read it anyway, but hopefully.
JK: I think there's a lot of opportunity and I mean, there's still opportunity for graphic recording to grow. At the same time, I find it really hard to talk about the value of graphic recording because I mean, obviously, I see it, but I feel like often especially new clients who don't have much experience with graphic recording don't actually see the value. They might see it as something trendy, as you said. They've seen it somewhere else and they kind of want to incorporate into their events or their processes as well. But then I have to explain to them what the value is.
And this is a conversation that I've been having for more than 10 years now. And it doesn't really change. I mean, a lot of times I have to explain to them that, you know, whatever they talk about will be embedded in the minds of the participants to a much larger degree than if they only have written minutes. I have to explain to them that they can use this as a tool for communication. That they can, you know, use this to spread new ideas through their organization.
I have to explain to them that, you know, they can use graphic recording on social media or that they can even put it in their videos. There's so many ways of extracting the value of graphic recording. And I think, you know, it's actually a value that lasts for a long time. I've had clients who came back to me two or three years later and they said, you know, "We've taken a look at this and the content is still relevant and we're still working with these images."
And I think that is fantastic feedback to receive. But as I said, for new clients, it's often very difficult to grasp that value. And yeah, I find myself sometimes a bit frustrated that I still have to explain it and that I still have to explain what the quality is in a graphic recording and what the value is.
MR: I would guess that you probably should probably get ready to do that for the rest of your career. I don't see that changing.
JK: No, probably not.
MR: And I suspect maybe there's something that the community could even do. I don't know. But taking all these, like you mentioned, there was a company that came back, two or three—that could be an example for a young company that doesn't understand. So you could actually have your previous clients give you statements as to what the value is. So it moves from you just explaining the value to your clients that you've worked with who are willing to be named saying this was valuable and here's why.
And that would be, in some ways, maybe even more effectual for someone who's like, I don't know, with spending a lot of money on this thing. Like, is it really valuable? Well, BASF said it was really valuable, or this company said it was really valuable. That's the social proof kind of angle that gives you the additional, I guess, gravitas beyond just you saying that it's valuable. Like the proof that someone else verifies it as maybe useful.
So anyway, that's really fascinating. Apparently, this is my tangent episode and I've really enjoyed every minute of it. I hope our listeners have too. I think, you know, our listeners are really into this space and it's an interesting discussion because we're really just talking about what's the current and the future. Like, where are we going with this and where could we go with it?
That probably could be a whole discussion of its own, which we're not really getting into. But it helps you think like, you know, what is the value that I'm bringing? Like to really think about it and then defend it and promote it, right? To be proactive about it is a valuable thing to know because you're gonna eventually be called to answer that question by somebody sooner or later. So it's good to have an answer ready, and some examples ready, so you can, you know, be ready for that.
All right. Well, let's see if I can hold my tangents to a minimum. Let's shift to tools now. So I'd love to hear what tools that you like to use. We'll go analog first and digital second, and that includes pencils, pens, paper, boards, corrugated cardboard, paint, I dunno. Any kind of those things that you might use. What kind of things are in your standard tool set?
JK: Well, for analog recordings, I still use mainly Neuland markers on either paper or foam board. I noticed that now that I've been in this field for a while. Sometimes clients come back to me and they say on foam board, the markers fade over time. So that's a bit of a headache. I try to find ways to make them last longer, but for that reason, I actually prefer paper over foam board. Well, in recent years, I've done more kind of experimental work especially on black cardboard or black foam board. I like to use acrylic markers, and I use a range, POSCA, MOLOTOW.
MR: Two good brands.
JK: Yeah. And, you know, I really enjoy working with them because they have really beautiful, vibrant colors. When you put them on black cardboard, they really—
MR: Pop. Yeah.
JK: Yeah. So I think that's a wonderful way to work. Although of course, it's much slower than working with the regular marker, so, you know, depending on the context, you can do that. But if it's a fast-paced discussion panel that you're recording, you don't want to use acrylic markers.
MR: Yeah. Probably not a good idea. Yeah.
JK: Yeah. You probably want to use something water-based that flows fast.
MR: Interesting. What about personally? So you said when you began this, you know, the notes you're taking for the magazine, were A5. Do you carry a notebook around? Are there notebooks you like and pens that you use in that small scale?
JK: Yeah. When it comes to notebooks, I don't really have a preferred brand. I kind of use everything. For personal drawing, I do ink drawing. Japanese brush pen drawings. And for those I like to use Amsterdam notebooks because it's nice smooth paper and it's great to work on with ink. But that's really the only thing that I can mention that I really like using for that specific purpose.
MR: What kind of brush pen is your preference when you do that kinda work?
JK: The Pentel.
MR: Oh, yeah.
JK: I've bought one and I've never gone back.
MR: Same.
JK: It is really great. It's a wonderful tool, fantastically versatile, and the ink cartridges are easy to use. The ink is wonderful. The color, the black is just so deep.
MR: Intense. Yeah.
JK: Yeah. It's really a great tool.
MR: Yeah. I carry one in my pocket with a gel pen everywhere I go, so I can second the motion there.
JK: Yeah.
MR: You mentioned digital. I assume you must be using an iPad. What kind of tools do you like to use? And maybe the along with this is, is there a call from your clients to go digital in some cases? Or do you present them with like, "Hey, we should do this digitally because of X, Y, and Z?" How does that work?
JK: Well, I mean, I usually give my clients a choice unless, you know, there's really pressing reasons to go digital or analog. And I explained the pros and cons of both methods. I think, you know, both of them have their drawbacks and their advantages.
MR: Sure.
JK: So, you know, I mean, a lot of my clients choose digital over analog just because it's easier to handle. You just get a JPEG or a PDF at the end of the session and then you can send that out. There's no conversion needed et cetera. I understand that it's easier to handle for the clients. So I do a lot of digital work, especially, you know, since the pandemic, a lot of things obviously went online and there was a lot of pressure to do digital work. So that was really the moment where I changed over from doing mostly analog work to doing mostly digital work.
And yeah, I'm really boring when it comes to tools. I use an iPad Pro and a Apple pencil. I draw in Procreate mostly. When I do vector, I usually do it in Concepts. Which I think is also a wonderful tool. It has a few little bugs that I struggle with sometimes, but for drawing in a vector format, it's really a great little app. I've been using it for, I think, yeah, close to 10 years now as well.
MR: Yeah. It's definitely had some—just like Procreate, it's had improvements over time for sure.
JK: Yeah, absolutely.
MR: But solid tools.
JK: Both of those are really up there. And I don't think there's a lot of other tools for the iPad that can compete with them.
MR: Yeah. I think that's two sides of the same coin in some sense. That's pretty interesting. Well, let's shift into practical. I always ask guests to give three tips to listeners who are typically a visual thinker. Otherwise, why would you be here? Or maybe you're curious about visual thinking. What would be three things you would tell someone who maybe feels like they're in a rut, or maybe they just need a little inspiration, can be practical, it can be theoretical, whichever you'd like for those to kind of encourage them.
JK: Let me think about that for a minute.
MR: Sure.
JK: I think for me, one of the greatest inspirations is to work with shapes. And to change the shapes of things because I feel that it often has a huge impact. So if you always draw round heads, then, you know, if you start drawing triangular heads or square heads, then that makes a huge difference. And obviously, you can also stack shapes and combine them, and that doesn't only go for people, but also other things, you know.
What I find interesting is that the shapes also communicate a certain quality. So triangular is often a bit more aggressive, and square is more stable, and round is very harmonious and kind of centered. And, you know, to play with that I think is just a wonderful way of experimenting whatever you're drawing.
MR: I like that.
JK: So I can only encourage everyone to, you know, work with shapes and mix them up and find new ways of combining them.
MR: That sounds good.
JK: So that was my first tip. The other one is kind of a standard that, you know, I probably mention whenever I talk to people about how visual thinking works. It's about shifting from noun to verb. So when you're trying to draw something and you find it for some reason hard to draw, it's often easier to draw a verb that goes with it. Like, for example, if you were going to say you hold a meeting. Of course, you can draw a meeting. You can just draw a bunch of people sitting around a table. But it's not a very interesting image. And it's also a lot of work to draw, especially if you put a lot of detail into the people.
MR: Yeah.
JK: Instead you could just focus on hold and you could draw a hand that holds either the table or just the word meeting. And so, by shifting, I find it's a trick that I use in graphic recording often. And, you know, also when I'm trying to come up with new ideas, it's often such an easy way of shifting your mind into just a slightly different track. But it makes a huge difference. So I really like doing that and can only encourage people to do it.
MR: Great. What about your third tip?
JK: Well, my third tip is always to carry a pen and some thread. Because if you need to draw a really large circle and you want it to be a round circle, that's the easiest way to actually make that happen. You just attach a pencil or even a marker to the thread, to the string, and the other end to the pin, and you push it into your bomb board or your paper or the wall, and then you go around, and voila, you have a big circle. And I think it's wonderful that it's so easy, yet, you know, many people struggle with drawing big circles.
MR: It's pretty adjustable too, right? Because you just wind it around the pen and get a smaller circle on. And so, you could do a target pretty easily. You just keep the pin in the same place and keep winding it up and get your radiuses down until you get it just right.
JK: It's super versatile and you know, it's easy to just put in your bag with your markers. It won't add much weight. It's super useful.
MR: Hmm. That's a great tip. I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, that's a wonderful one. Very practical.
JK: Yeah. I like practical tips.
MR: Me too. Well, Julian, this has been great to have you. Can you tell us what's the best place to find you? Websites, social media, what places do you hang out in?
JK: Well, the best place to find me is my website, playability.de. And I'm also quite active on LinkedIn. If you google my name or if you just put in LinkedIn slash graphic recorder, it's a very easy URL, you will find me as well. I'm not so much on Instagram anymore, but if you want to find me on Instagram, my handle is playability_de. And those are the main places that you'll find me. My name luckily is quite unique. So if you just put my name into a search engine, you'll also find me.
MR: Yeah. I suppose. Yeah, you might be the only one doing this work. So, interesting. Well, thank you so much for spending time with us, sharing your insights and wisdom and your story. Thank you for the work you're doing and being part of the Berlin community. I know several people in that community, including Nadine Rossa, and you know, others as well, who I'm sure you know well.
And thank you for the work that you're doing in representing the visual thinking community as a whole in the world. It's good to have people like you doing that representation. I think it's important. And you make our lives, everyone else's lives better because of the great work that you do. So thank you.
JK: Thank you, Mike. It's been great fun talking to you.
MR: Yeah.
JK: And, yeah, it's been really nice to be on your show.
MR: Well, I'm glad to have you, and I'm glad we could share our discussion with everyone. And for those that are listening or watching, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. So, until the next episode, we will talk to you soon.
In this episode, Alan Chen, co-founder of Sh8peshifters, shares how his passion for drawing, comics, and film helps him blend sketches, human-centered design, and storytelling principles into clear, impactful visual solutions for his clients.
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Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Alan Chen. Alan, thanks for coming on the show. It's so good to have you.
Alan Chen: Thanks for having me, Mike. I've been really wanting to meet you.
MR: You as well. We were talking a little bit about meeting on LinkedIn and how that platform seems like it's become very visual. I've asked a few people wondering, "Is it just me? Am I following visual-thinking people? And so the algorithm is feeding me visual stuff," but I think I got the sense that there's some kind of a change happening on LinkedIn where visual people are actually having an influence on that platform. Do you sense the same thing? Or what's your impression?
AC: Yeah, I definitely agree, Mike. I probably am much less active on spaces like Instagram where, you know, ordinarily you think illustrators might be sharing their stuff. But you know, I use Instagram, maybe just kind of like a place for references, whereas LinkedIn, I actually have a lot of interaction with people. I share things and I see amazing work from other practitioners. So, LinkedIn is definitely the spot.
MR: Interesting. Okay, it's not just me then. Okay. Well, let's get this thing rolling. With every one of these interviews, I'm really fascinated about you. I want to understand who you are. So let us know who you are, what you do, and then jump right into your origin story. How did you get here? What were the things that shaped you? What were the events that happened that sort of directed you along the path to what you're doing now?
AC: Awesome. I love the questions. I guess at my core, I would describe myself as the dreamer. Somebody who has endless passion and ideas for all things, you know, related to stories and art. You can probably tell I'm a bit of a geek. I love collecting comics, books, and toys, and, you know, that stuff's all around me, as you can see. And that's kind of rubbed off on my daughter Aria, who is probably one of my biggest sources of inspiration. She, mind you also takes visual notes and she's seven. I'll show them to you some time.
MR: Okay.
AC: Now, whether it's drawing, painting, writing, or making movies or sculpting, I find myself deeply interested in telling stories. And that kind of relates to the work that I do. 'Cause I'm also the co-founder of Sh8peshifters, which is a small visual communication agency based in Sydney, Australia. I get to use a combination of illustration, human-centered design, and storytelling principles to help companies improve the ways they communicate the way they solve problems. And, you know, generally to help them better understand their strategy.
Now, in terms of the origin story, everybody loves a superhero origin story, right? Not a superhero, but I love superheroes. Now, I think I've loved drawing for as long as I can remember. I was a big fan of the '70s and '80s films like, you know, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and lots of horror films as well. And I also loved Superman, Batman, and, you know, all the kind of comic stuff.
And the thing is, I used to sketch from you know, being inspired by all of these things constantly. One time, you know, if I think back to when I was little, I was left alone at home, and I ended up drawing an entire story across my living room wall in permanent marker.
MR: Oh, wow.
AC: My folks amazingly, they didn't absolutely lose it. They were in fact, kind of supportive, and they left the drawings up on the wall as a bit of a permanent fixture for a number of years until they renovated. So, it was really cool. Yeah, they're very, very supportive. But on the flip side, at school you know, this was the, you know early mid-'80s, well, my teacher in kindergarten at the time, she was the opposite. She was very much against drawing in her classroom. She said, you know, "Drawing has no place in my classroom." And every time she caught me doing it, she would cane me.
MR: Oh, wow.
AC: She would literally smack me across the hand.
MR: Ouch.
AC: Yeah. It was pretty extreme. But you know, that was her way of kind of communicating to me like, "Nope, don't do this". I was pretty lucky because in Year 1, my teacher was super supportive. She was a bit of a cool hippie kinda lady. She was like, "No, no, Alan, you express yourself. You keep drawing. Do not stop under any circumstance." So I'm very lucky that I had some people around me who kind of were really supportive.
But I think, you know, when it comes down to it, I reckon all of this began because I recognize that I learn a little bit differently than other people. So when I hear things, when people share ideas, and when they speak, I have imagery instantaneously appearing in my mind. So I can see words as images instantly.
But on the flip side, when it comes to me communicating those things in written format or in in more detail, it used to take me a long time to formulate these things. And I think at the time, my teachers would often describe me as being slow, or, you know, having head in the clouds, or they thought that I was not listening. But the opposite was true. I was listening and I was just trying to formulate my ideas.
So I think, you know, these days we might call somebody like that being neurodivergent. It was almost like, you know, some form of dyslexia. I'm not exactly sure. I've never been diagnosed about it. What I used to do was, I would draw what I would hear, and I would sketch and take notes at the same time. Which we now call Sketchnoting.
MR: Yeah.
AC: You know, it wasn't so appreciated back then. And maybe because I was drawing it in my textbooks as well as my workbook, any surface that I could draw. And I was like, okay, this works—
MR: Fair game.
AC: - this is fine. Huh? Yeah, it's fair game. That's exactly right. So yeah, that's kind of where the visuals and the note-taking stuff actually began. But then, you know, fast forward a decade or two later, I studied fine arts at Sydney University for a year. But then I quickly left that when I found out about this place called Enmore Center for Design, which is a really cool design school here in Sydney. And I ended up studying there for three years. And I loved learning about type and layout. You know, and I learned how to use imagery with all of that.
But to be honest, I found graphic design work kind of dull. It just didn't do it for me. What I really loved was probably the things that were linked to my childhood, which was, you know, making movies. I always wanted to make movies. And I applied to study at the Australian Film School, and I was really lucky to get in. And then I can say I found my passion, which was storytelling. The moment I was in there, I knew that this was the right kind of thing.
And I guess you can tell, because it led to, you know, over a decade of me working in the film industry. I started off as a storyboard artist and a concept artist. So I did a lot of you know, rapid prototyping and illustration for directors and producers you know, who just like spouting ideas really, really quickly. And I just had to do things in a way that was fast and clear and concise.
And, you know, then I moved into concept art for Hollywood films. You know, this is like designing cool things. I mean, I got to work on, you know, superhero films. Like, you know, the first two Wolverine films with Hugh Jackman, I was designing costumes and superpowers. That was kind of a bit of a dream job for me.
MR: I bet. Wow.
AC: Yeah, it was a lot of fun because, you know, you get to draw things that don't exist, right? And you're like, this is awesome. I think what that did for me was it helped me understand the fact that no idea, no thought was too complex. Nothing was off limits. I could draw anything you know, as long as I put my mind to it. So that was a lot of fun.
But I think one of the things about you know, working in these creative industries is I constantly was seeking something new. So it was like, if I wasn't storyboarding or doing concept art, I'd be then doing production design or costume design. I even ended up, you know, becoming a director, producer, and writer myself. And I've done, you know, loads and loads of films. So I've probably worked in the way of hundreds of films—
MR: Wow. Wow.
AC: - over the last decade or so. And, you know, I even got my wife Anita working with me. So it was kind of fun. 'Cause, you know, the crew felt like a big family. And all the kind of different work, it kept me very motivated and excited. But the common thread was that no matter what I was doing, I always managed to incorporate illustration in all of my work. I think my drawing skills helped me explain complicated ideas. And it helped put everybody on the same page. It also helped me win pitches and get funding because I could express those ideas really clearly.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
AC: So that was a big kind of an unexpected boost to my kind of abilities. But, you know, simultaneously alongside the filmmaking career that I had, I began lecturing at different colleges and institutions. You know, initially, because teaching was a really good way to fill in the gaps between filmmaking. 'Cause filmmaking projects are super unpredictable, you know? One minute you are working for 14 hours a day for three or four months. And then suddenly there's nothing for two months. So it's kind of crazy like that.
I started teaching because it helped me fill in those gaps. But then I found that I really liked nurturing and mentoring students. I've ended up mentoring many students in different fields. And I taught illustration filmmaking, and design. All the things that I was actually doing, I was teaching.
So, you know, I was trying to be very practical about it, and I was trying to, you know, bring in a sense of, okay, this is what the industry is doing. This is what I'm doing in the industry. This is maybe something that's useful to students. And everywhere I went, I was always rewriting courses. Like, oh no, this is too academic. We need to make this more, you know, hands-on, more practical.
MR: Need some practical, yeah, exactly.
AC: Yeah. Yeah. So it was a bit of a thread. And then I think it was like 2015 I was given the opportunity to lead the visual communication department at Raffles College, which is this big international chain of colleges. And it was kind of hard leaving the film industry 'cause I was in the film industry for a long time already. But being able to have an opportunity to create something completely new was also exciting. And I love change. So I was like, "Yeah, I'm there. I'm definitely there."
And I also, you know, funny enough, I met my friend and Sh8peshifters co-founder Diana there as well. So it was really cool. It's like a, you know, serendipitous thing. Now, I guess the education thing was cool. It was fun, and it was really intense and chaotic for two years. But after two years, I actually stepped away and found myself in the world of management consulting and strategic design.
So I worked with a cool strategic design agency called Tobias. And it was unlike anything I'd ever done before. And I got to combine all of my drawing and teaching skills along with—you know, kind of a deep understanding of how visuals work in a space where I could actually see it making a change in companies and, you know, in their customers. So it was like, wow, this can actually affect people in ways that I didn't expect.
Prior to that, I was like, entertainment and, you know, just like crazy fun stuff. And I was like, wow, this is kind of grown up and, you know, didn't expect to be able to do this kind of thing and help people and, you know, be in these kinda serious environments. So my job description I remember was like a blank sheet of paper, and they were like, "Okay, we don't know how to use a person like you, so why don't you work out what you want to do here and, you know, we'll take it from there." Which was like music to my ears, right? I was like, "Yes."
MR: Yes, totally you, yeah.
AC: You know, totally me. Totally me. And I think I started using graphic facilitation in meetings kind of not instinctively, I've never been taught it. But that's just the way I teach at the college. So, you know, I'm always drawing things on whiteboards. You know, drawing diagrams and annotating, and I take notes really quickly on the fly, and then I draw another diagram to help explain what I'm saying. So it's just the way that I that I taught.
So I did that a lot during client meetings, and then I started graphic recording. I was really literally thrown into the deep end because it was just like, "Why don't you try this at events? And, you know, have you seen this sort of thing before?" I was like, "What? What's this?" And yeah. And I think that was a lot of fun. I even went to the States and I visited Dave Sibbet, Grove Consultants in San Francisco.
MR: Oh, yeah, of course.
AC: Yeah. Yeah. I found out about them, you know, when I was trying to research what this field was all about. I actually got spent a whole day with Laurie Durnell. And we just got to chat about the finer points of how to make visual thinking and scribing a viable business, because I was just like, "So you can make a living outta this kind of thing." I didn't know that. And then I think when the pandemic came that's when I actually branched out and started Sh8peshifters with Diana. And the rest is history.
MR: That's really fascinating to listen to your whole story. Like starting from, you know, writing a story on the wall of your living room or somewhere in your house to, you know, how it expressed. It seems to me that you're very much a generalist in a lot of ways, right? You like a wide variety of things. You like the new things, you like blank spaces, and you're able to kind of meld all these experiences as a fine artist, as a graphic designer, as a filmmaker, and then having teaching ability to kind of put all these things together to make sense for students.
And then further, like, all those things sort of combine together to then do what you're doing now, helping businesses and people express. So it's really fascinating how you've sort of melded all this, your whole experience into like, it's all part of you. Which is not always true for everybody, right? They tend to go, I do this, I'm a stockbroker, and then I'm a baker, and then I'm a this thing, right?
Like, very separate, you know career paths. And this one feels almost additive. It's like the ball just kept getting bigger and bigger until you had quite a wide variety of skills that you could spin and call on, you know, whenever you needed them. That's really fascinating to me, I think.
AC: Yeah. Cool. Thanks for reflecting on that. Yeah, I think I've always enjoyed being able to just kind of create my own path. I don't think there was ever any clear pathway for what I wanted to do. And I think that's just what I like. I was like, "No path suits me, just fine."
MR: Yeah.
AC: In fact, you know, the first scribing gig I ever got was at the film school where I was lecturing at the film school, The Australian Film School, and one of my colleagues, an amazing writer called Mike Jones. He just said, "Hey, Alan, can you come along and do the thing that you do in classrooms with those students, but do it at a client space with me at this—you know, it was at a museum, Australian Maritime Museum.
And I said, "Yeah, sure, but what do you want me to do?" He was just like, "Take their notes and chat to people the way you do." So that was it. I went into a room with, you know, museum curators and researchers, and we were talking, and I was just illustrating what they were saying, and suddenly the entire room was just filled, you know, from edge to edge with sketches.
Because of that, there's a permanent exhibit now, you know, sitting on like, probably one of the most iconic parts of Sydney's Darling Harbour. There's this huge, kind of like a spaceship there, and there's an exhibition with all of my drawings—
MR: Wow.
AC: - kind of wrapped around it. So I was just like, "What? I did not know this could be a thing. This is amazing." That was my first gig, you know, as a visual thinker. So, it was kind of cool.
MR: You mentioned too that you sort of didn't know about this space. Was that sort of the 10 years ago experience when you stumbled into this? What did your brain do when you like, "Oh, this is a thing?" That must have been really fascinating.
AC: Yeah. I had no idea. Whereas Mike, he was saying, "Hey, I've seen these little clips on YouTube. You should check these things out." I was just seeing people drawing on whiteboards, and I was like, "Hey, that's the thing that's the kind of stuff that I do, except I never film it. You know, I'm just in a classroom doing it." And he was like, "You should do this, you know?"
And so, I found out about visual thinking then. But I never really looked too far into it until I began consulting. And then the other guys that were with me at the company, they were saying there are people who actually do this in front of crowds. And I was like, "Wow, this is cool. I'd love to give that a go. I've never tried drawing in front of a big crowd before, but I'll give it a go." Trying something new was lots of fun, but I honestly had no idea that this could actually be a viable business. This was just so much fun.
MR: Wow. Well, you know, there's always need for people to have their stories told. And I think, you know, having it visualized is really powerful, right? And especially in your case, you know, specifically, you were so quick and built all these skills for storyboarding and such that you could almost immediately take those ideas that are coming outta somebody's mouth and then turn it into an image of some kind.
I wonder too, I haven't really talked about this before, but like, as someone's idea is visualized—you know, if, let's say, you know, you and I, we are skilled in visualizing our ideas. So we can explain and draw and we sort of bounce back. It sort of reflects what we're thinking and it changes what we think. I wonder, like, if people see that live in real time, it must change the way they think, right?
Because they see this thing come to life and either they say, "Oh, no, I meant this thing." Or then they would build on it, right? So there's like, once you see it, you can now turn it around like three dimensionally and think about what's on the back and how does this impact this? And like, that reality helps you, I dunno, take it further. Is that a interesting or a realistic way to think about that?
AC: Definitely. I think one of the things I always lead with when I facilitate you know, kind of ideation sessions is I always say, "I'm not here to be right. I'm just here to create things for you. It's your job to be right. You guys are the experts in your field. What I'm an expert at is eliciting ideas from people and kind of reflecting them back to you. So please don't feel like my drawings are the be-all and end-all. By all means iterate and continue doing that. And you'll get the best result when you actually do that."
So I wholeheartedly agree that that is something that happens because of visual thinking, because of visual facilitation. And, you know, if more people do it, they probably understand how much of an impact it can have on, you know, improving your own ideas.
MR: Yeah. I think that's a lot of why I like teaching people even the basics. Because even a rudimentary skill to be able to express yourself even badly, is better than no skill at all or to not try. So, you know, using simple shapes to communicate—it's kind of amazing when I teach this, like within an hour, even using simple shapes, people really feel more confident. It's weird.
It's like, how is this possible that you could teach someone basic skills in an hour and they can already see an application? That's super powerful. And, you know, not everybody pursues it and really practices, but, you know, some do. And you know, if you're faced with a whiteboard in a meeting, you would feel maybe a little confidence like, "Well, you know, I'm just using these five shapes to build stuff." Right? It sort of reduces the pressure and it just becomes a way of thinking.
So hopefully, we're making that impact on people as well when they see it. I think always there's the challenge, like, "If you're too good at it, then people think, oh, you're an expert. I could never be as good as you." I hear that all the time. And so I try to turn it around as quickly as possible. What was your experience being both an educator and then also someone who formed curriculum for students? How did you deal with that specific challenge? You know, "I'm not good enough, or I can't do what you do," kind of stuff. How do you deal with that?
AC: Well, I think one of the things that I do is I show people how I started off. And I definitely did not start off as being really, really good. I don't think anybody starts off as being really good. You know, we are all in a way still kind of building up our own abilities. And I firmly believe that even as you said, even the most basic skill set can actually help you build this ability within you.
Oftentimes, the way I kind of got around the "I can't draw" thing is there's a couple of icebreakers that I do with people. And those icebreakers, I give people very little information. It's usually like, "Hey, give me three things that you're interested in and just draw an icon that represents these three things." And then I say to them, "You've got a minute to draw this," and that's it, you know? And in one minute, usually people have three, sometimes five things.
MR: Wow.
AC: And you know, I'm always astounded. I'm like, "Guys, you got the brief. You get it. We're a visual tribe. This is what we do. And everybody can do it. I think you just need to be able to recognize it in yourself." So there are a couple of exercises I think that are really good to help people get around that fear of, "I can't do this. You are the expert." And they really work. I've tried them out for years and years, and they really do you know, warm people up really quickly.
MR: The other sense that I have is like, the more powerful you are inside an organization, the riskier it is to draw. And the way I would explain that is like, say you're a CEO, let's say your drawing skills are not great. Like, there's a little bit of fear, like public speaking, that if I draw like a seventh grader, 'cause that's the last time, you know, when I was, you know, 13 years old, I'm gonna draw like a 13-year-old and that's embarrassing. So I don't want to do it. Or my ideas might be bad.
Like, because you're not skilled in that skill, you're worried that I might, you know, say the wrong word or do something dumb and I'll look dumb. And I think some of it is just simply getting over the fear of like doing something and it being wrong, and that that's okay. Have you experienced that as well?
AC: So much. The fear of failure mindset it's damaging. It's really damaging. I think failure is—you learn so much more from failure than you do from, you know, being in power or winning. It's something that I kind of try to teach my daughter a lot is not to worry if she makes a mistake. Not to worry if she draws outside of the line or, you know, just, just to keep going.
So yeah, I experienced it a lot. Actually, Diana and I recently—not recently actually it would've been about a year ago, we ran a workshop for CFOs. And, you know, these are people who understand finance really well, who understand tables and columns really well. But we showed them how to use columns in a way that they'd never thought about. And it was a lot of fun because, you know, I think they started off thinking, "Hey, what are you guys gonna show us about columns that we don't already know?"
We just think about these things slightly differently. So there were a lot of fun simple drawing exercises for, you know, people who are you know, sitting in the c-suite and who've never really had to do this. And then suddenly, they're able to communicate to their team so much more effectively. The results that kind of came out of it were really amazing. And I think we're very grateful that we had that opportunity.
MR: And I think that's where our calling is, right? I always think of like, all the opportunity for everybody in this community is that there's so many people that feel like they can't do it. Like there's an opportunity to even move them one step forward to like, I can do basic stuff maybe for some people in their life that's good enough, right? That's all they really need. Like a CFO being able to do simple drawings that communicate, you know, 50 percent better is like a huge forward jump, right?
So that's kind of where the opportunity lies, is moving people from zero to one, and then some people will take off with it, right? Maybe there's a CFO who secretly loves art and is just visual and never felt like the permission to express themselves. And this might be the little spark that sort of kicks that off for all we know, right? So it's really interesting opportunity that we have before us for sure.
AC: So much. That's right.
MR: Well, we've kind of gone off on this philosophical discussion, but I've loved it. I'm trying to do more of these as we get to the end of the origin story. 'Cause I think it ties in there and it sort of relates to application, but what I'd really like to hear is what are some of the tools that you like? And we'll start with analog and go to digital after that, because it seems like I always discover some funky tool that I'd never heard of.
And by tools, I mean like pens, pencils, brushes, notebooks, paper, any kind of stuff that helps you communicate. And that, in the analog space. And then of course, if you use some digital stuff, it'd be interesting to hear the tools you like there.
AC: Cool. I think it's a general rule. I never leave home without a sketchbook and a pen. Never. My default sketchbook is I think a four and a half by seven-inch Moleskine. So that's like roughly A5, you know, according to Aussie stuff. And I always carried with me a Steadler 0.3 fine liner as well as, I don't know if you've heard of these but a Zig Art and graphic twin brush pen. They're these Japanese pens that are just amazing. I love the ink. The other one that I love to use is the Zig Kuretake number 22. And I'll share these with you later if you like.
MR: Okay.
AC: But these things, I find like there's a combination of, you know, tight stuff where I can write really crisp things and I can kind of draw almost diagrammatic stuff. But I love the brush pens, because I love to draw. I love to paint. So the Zig pens are really loose and they're very easy to use for me. The other thing I carry around with me usually when I go traveling though, is a small postcard-sized watercolor pad. As well as a pentel aqua brush.
These ones are amazing because you can fill them up with water or ink. And then if you use dry watercolor pigments, you can do some crazy paintings with very little mess and, you know, very little fuss. And that's kind of why I like it. So I can sit by a poolside, I can sit on a train, and I could do a watercolor painting really quickly, and, you know, not take up much space.
Yeah. So, I also really think paper is king, especially if you are building skills because these skills can actually carry across to digital. But the other is the other way is not true. So digital skills can't carry across to analog, but analog does for both. So it's awesome.
In terms of digital tools, nothing really exciting, to be honest. I have iPad pro, Apple pencil, Procreate that does 90 percent of the lifting for me. The other thing, obviously if I have really large artworks like murals and, you know, things that are kind of wall sized, which I occasionally do I go straight to, you know, Photoshop and like my huge, it's called a Humion Kamvas. It's like a 22-inch massive screen that I can draw across.
And it's really nice. I guess the iPad is probably the easy pick in terms of the digital tool, probably for most of us 'cause it's fast, right? Like, you just open it up and within seven seconds you can actually start drawing, which is almost as fast as when you start drawing in a notebook. Almost as fast.
MR: Yeah. It's close.
AC: Yeah. So that's close, you know. But the digital stuff I think is pretty predictable, right? I can see why you're more interested in the analog tools.
MR: Yeah. I don't know that I've heard of Zig markers. Now I'm curious. I think I have to go to someplace and find them. And I've seen the dual tip, so I'm guessing is one side a brush and the other side a point or something like that?
AC: Yes.
MR: Or are they two? Okay.
AC: That's right. Yeah.
MR: You said the colors you like are? Did you say gray and black? Are those the two or do you typically carry gray in a color? What are the two colors?
AC: I've got gray but I also carry pink. I think pink is probably one of my favorite colors to use just because it's difficult, actually. It's difficult to use because I like using it in its most rich form. So fuchsia and bright pinks. And adding that into graphic recordings or sketch notes can add like this crazy spark. So when you see, you know, pink or orange or, you know, these vibrant colors, they suddenly pop and they kind of really catch your eye. So I'll share with you the exact pink shade I use.
MR: Yeah, we'll definitely put it in the show notes so you can go check those out. In the same way, I love, Aqua. Bright Aqua and Orange are my two—I love those together, and I like them individually.
AC: Oh, that's awesome.
MR: Yeah. So those are sort of my signature colors. I guess if I were to say signature. We're sponsored by the app Concepts on the iPad, but I think it's actually a really interesting tool because as an Adobe person, you might be kind of curious to play with it. It's vector based, so it's got all the brushes and all those things, but you have an infinite canvas.
So like you talked about your large Photoshop thing, it might be interesting to explore that, which you can just open it up and just start drawing. Like on your living room wall, right, just keep drawing and keep going in all directions, which I've been exploring that app, in addition to them being a sponsor, it's actually a really fascinating app. And might be something worth exploring that might have some unique capabilities worth checking out.
AC: Yeah. I'm always keen to try out something new. I think the reason I've stuck with Photoshop is, you know, in one sense is just because it allows you to do kind of crazy things like oil painting kind of style stuff. You know, so I love that sort of thing too, so but I'd be keen to try out something like Concepts.
MR: Yeah, that'd be cool. You know, the other thing I would say too is I am a believer in using the tool you know, best. So, as an example, when I wrote my book, at the time, I was really heavily into Photoshop for UI and UX design, and I had the opportunity to use a Adobe's page layout program. I can't think of what the name of it is.
And I had to, for the front and the back matter, but for the guts of the book, I actually laid out and did everything in Photoshop because I was so fluent in it. I knew that I could be fast. There was a speed advantage by using this familiar tool. I didn't have to think about stuff. I just did it. It just happened and I could work with it. I was working with it all day during the day. So at night, I use that tool to kind of accelerate that process.
So I think there is something valuable in an a known tool where you don't have to think about it. And that's where that would come back to pen and paper. There's very little that you have to know about it, right? Once you have your tools, they kind of work the way they work, and then you can sort of forget about the tool and now focus on the content and thinking and visualizing and stuff. So that I've noticed as well.
AC: I think that's the key, Mike, is forgetting about the tool. Like the tool's almost unimportant, right? It's being able to come up with the idea and just finding a way to be able to execute that. So yeah, whatever, whatever tool kind of gets you there the quickest and with the least mental fuss is the one that you should probably go with.
MR: Yeah. Definitely. Well, let's shift into tips now. I asked our guests, imagine someone's listening, they're a visual thinker, and maybe they're in a rut, maybe they just need a little inspiration, maybe something practical or something to kind of spark them, what would be three things you would tell that person?
AC: Sure. I think one of the things I often say is whether you're starting out or whether you are, you know, somebody who just wants to improve you, let's say you're already you've already got a significant amount of skill and you wanna improve, I always say to people aim for your creative minimum. And what I mean is most of the time, you know, when we set out to learn new skills, we place this high expectation on setting aside time, you know, in the hope that our skills build as quickly as possible.
It's the same, you know, if you go to the gym and you beat yourself up, if you're not going every day or something like that, and you skip a session, you'll feel like everything's derailed. But the truth is, I feel like any skill visual thinking takes, you know, a good deal of time to actually hone. So don't aim for Spartan levels of training instantly. I feel like instead, you should start out by drawing for at least two minutes a day. It's actually so much harder than it looks, but if you keep it up, the results will definitely speak for themselves.
Another tip I would say is practice on paper more than on digital, if you can. Paper doesn't allow for undoing. So this is actually so much more valuable than people realize, because when you make an error, you actually get to see them, and then you could collect them, and then your mind gets a chance to register them as an error. And then you can make actually a conscious decision about how you wanna adjust that error.
But when you undo something, you actually don't have the benefit of seeing the error and you're so much more likely to make the same mistake over and over and over again. So yeah, definitely analog over digital is one thing. And, you know, I think, as I said before, analog skills, they carry over to digital because analog skills are hand-eye coordination skills, but digital skills don't carry across the analog.
And, you know, I've even found myself sometimes when I'm sketching stuff, you know, on paper, like double tapping the paper to try to undo something, and I'm like, "What am I doing? This is insane," you know? So, you know, it builds bad habits if you're doing that. Fortunately I don't do that too often, but like, I have found myself doing that once or twice, and I just have a laugh at myself.
The other tip that I would recommend is to try to link your habits. What I mean is okay, let's take for example, sitting down. Most people sit down a lot, whether it's for, you know, a meeting or a coffee or a meal. I think sitting down takes up probably half of our waking time. So if you can link sitting with sketching, I think you've already solved half of your dilemma.
Now the trick is, if you can have a sketchbook that you can bring with you on your body without it being a hassle, you'll reduce the level of difficulty by a lot. So small sketchbooks, I think, are the way to go. And then I always say keep like a felt tip marker or a ballpoint pen, or anything you can write with on you so that it makes that habit easier to actually achieve.
MR: Those are great tips. It's interesting you mentioned the last one. I just recently, I sort of got out of the habit of carrying a sketchbook and I just started doing it again. I had a little leather case made for a field note size, just roughly three by five inches. I don't know what that is in the A6 or something like that, but it's a little pocket-sized.
And, you know, most of the time I don't draw in it, but there's something comforting when I touch my leg and I feel that notebook. And I always have a pen with me. The feel of the notebook and the pen, and know that at any time I can bring out a notebook and I can capture an idea wherever I am, which is really great.
And the other tip that I'll tell people is if you have young kids like I do when you're in a restaurant waiting for your appetizers, you're waiting for your meal, I play the game with my sketchbook where I'll do a scribble and I'll say, I'll make the kids make something out of it.
So, and then they get to scribble and I've gotta make something out of it. And it's a nice way to pass the time. You're not on screens, you're having fun together, and it's a bit of a game. And then suddenly, hey, you know, the time has passed and the appetizer's here. So it can have some side effects as well for your kids in a positive way. So, an extra tip from Mike.
AC: I fully agree with that. My daughter and I call that game squiggle master, so we—
MR: Oh, there we go.
AC: - we do that a lot too.
MR: Yeah. Cool.
AC: We play that. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely, keeping it on you is useful for more than one thing, right?
MR: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, Alan, this has been so much fun. Tell us what's the best place, obviously, it seems like LinkedIn is one place to find you, and we'll have a link to that. Are there any other social media places to go? What's your company or personal website that we can check out and reach out to you if we want to?
AC: Okay. Well, as crazy as it sounds, I'm not super active online. The best place, as you said is LinkedIn. So I periodically share the stuff that I'm working on. So I get the opportunity to do some really cool and unusual projects, I think, as I'm sure you do, you know, doing this kind of interesting job that we have. So LinkedIn's probably the best place to connect with me.
But the rest of the links you know, I think for my website, it's sh8peshifters.com. And for whatever reason, I think Diana and I, we went with instead of Sh8peshifter with an A, we went with an eight. So it's Sh8peshifters with an eight.com instead of an A. So, I don't know, it's kind of crazy.
I also do stuff on Instagram, but it's kind of personal art stuff. So I mean, people could find me on that. Again, I'll share it with you. The other link that people might find interesting is the link to Sketch Lab, which is where we share all of our teaching stuff. So it's called Sketch Lab Online. Diana and I have created one course on there, which is visual thinking kind of like a beginner's course. It's kinda loaded with all of our kind of personalized tips. Yeah. So it might be a good place to start.
We're just terrible at actually marketing the thing, but there's a full course there. I think I've written three whole visual communication courses for at universities. So we do have a lot of experience doing it, but we're just awful when it comes to marketing, like, "Oh yeah, we've made this course. It's gonna do its thing on its own now."
MR: You guys are too busy doing projects to think about that stuff. I suppose, so.
AC: I think that's our excuse.
MR: Is that the old adage, "The cobbler's children have no shoes" kind of thing, right?
AC: I think that's it. Definitely.
MR: So busy making shoes for other people that your own kids don't have shoes or something. I dunno. Something like that. Well, Alan, it's been so much fun to get to know you and have you on the show. Thank you for the work you're doing in Australia and in the world with all kinds of people, all the influence I'm sure you've had with students, all the influence you've had on the media that we love, like movies and stuff, and for sharing your experience. It's so good to have you as part of the community. Welcome to the community, and thank you for all that you do. I'm really happy to have you as part of this community.
AC: Thank you so much, Mike. I'm really glad I finally got to meet you and finally got to actually put a face and a voice to the person whose book I've been recommending for the past eight years. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
MR: You're so welcome. And for anyone listening to the podcast or watching it on YouTube, this is another episode. Until the next episode, talk to you soon.
In this episode, Deb Aoki reflects on a childhood immersed in manga and anime and how this experience, combined with her journalism background, amplifies her visual storytelling skills.
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Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Deb Aoki. Deb, it's so good to have you on the show.
Deb Aoki: Oh, thank you, Mike. It's good to see you.
MR: You too. Deb and I have been kind of bouncing into each other on the interwebs for a while, and eventually, we met each other in Paris of all places. Good place to meet somebody. At the International Sketch Note camp in Paris in 2019, which I was thinking about that, today. That's pre-pandemic. So that was like—
DA: Yes.
MR: - the world before. The before times. So really different.
DA: That's true.
MR: - mindset and everything a little bit. But anyway, so Deb is just a multi-talented person, and we're gonna talk with her about who she is and her journey and sort of get some lessons from her as well and chitchat about all kinds of stuff, I'm sure. So let's start out, Deb, tell us who you are, what you do, and then how did you get here. What's your origin story from when you were a little girl to this moment?
DA: Oh, gosh. That's interesting. Well, I think the best place to start is I'm originally from Hawaii. I grew up—I'm a third-generation Japanese-American, so I was surrounded by Japanese culture, but I kind of don't speak Japanese fluently. I can read and speak some.
MR: Okay.
DA: But, you know, the nice thing about it, about growing up in Hawaii, I was surrounded by things like manga and anime much earlier than a lot of other people. And so, the nice part about that is that as a young girl, I got to read a lot of comics for girls from Japan.
MR: Oh.
DA: And in all those comics, it would kind of give you this sense of, "Oh, this is the comic artist you love, and here's how to draw like her, or you can be a comic artist too." So I got a lot of great tips from that. And, you know, like, it fueled this dream of becoming an illustrator or comic artist from a young age. And when I've compared notes with other peers at the same time for American comics, comics for girls were going away or almost faded out.
So I was really lucky in that, you know, my love of comics came that way and was sustained that way. So I've always loved to draw, but, you know, comics part is the part where you know, sometimes you draw for yourself, but with comics, I found out early on you're telling stories and you share those stories with your friends and they're like, "Oh, I wanna see more. I wanna see more."
MR: Mm-hmm. So you keep making more.
DA: Yeah. So it's kind of fun. It's a good way for people who normally don't, you know, to talk about themselves be able to kind of put themselves out there.
MR: So I wanna break in for a minute and assume maybe there's somebody who's never heard of Manga or anime. Maybe they've heard them, they're not exactly sure. Like, what are they and are they the same thing? Are they different? And give us sort of a baseline to that.
And then probably, I guess the last thing is obviously comic culture, manga, anime culture in Japan is very different than any kind of culture in the U.S. In a lot of ways in the U.S., comics are seen for little kids, and they're dismissed. Where I think in Japan, they're revered and it's kind of an art form, right? So talk a little bit about that too.
DA: Oh, well, the simplest way to put it is manga is the comics, like, you know, the paper page, you know, panels and word balloons. And anime is the animated version, like the cartoons.
MR: Got it. Okay. That's easy to remember.
DA: Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of times a lot of the anime is based on the original manga stories, but there's also anime that is original, like the Miyazaki works are all original stories created just for that.
MR: I see.
DA: So there's no manga that came before it with pretty—yeah. In general. So, but I guess the way to think about it is one of my agent friends in Japan explained that the movie industry, the entertainment industry in Japan is not as big and well-funded as it is in, you know, the U.S. So their best storytelling talent goes into manga.
MR: Really.
DA: The editors the writers, the artists. And manga artists compared to, say American comic creators like a lot of who work for the big companies. And the big companies here, they work for hire. Meaning if you draw Superman's story, you get paid per page. And that's kind of it.
MR: I see.
DA: You know, that's someone else's character. You get to play in that playground, but you didn't create that playground and you don't own that playground.
MR: Yeah, I know, for sure.
DA: Whereas in manga, what they encourage is every creator comes up with their own characters and story and world, and they just run with it. From beginning to end, volume one to volume, hundreds, whatever it is their characters, their story, their vision, and usually they are. So they own it, you know, from beginning to end. One of the other key differences is that manga artists—well, not all of them are super successful. Some of them are, you know, top tax bracket people in Japan.
MR: Wow.
DA: So the scale of the business is so different. And that manga is for everybody. There's manga for kids, manga for, you know, business people, manga for housewives, manga that explains how to, you know, manage your money or run a business, manga about dealing with parents or Alzheimer's, you know, silly manga, funny, you know, serious stuff, historical manga. I tell people, it's like manga is like movies. It's just a way to tell stories and what kind of stories can be almost anything.
MR: Hmm. That's really fascinating. And I love that it's so diverse.
DA: And it's fun.
MR: You know, it's almost like a whole publishing. It's like we think about paperback books or nonfiction all wrapped up. It's the same thing except as visualized and the creator own it. Yeah, in some sense.
DA: Actually, I went to internet too 'cause one of the things that I found is that—I teach classes in drawing for business people. And I've done this in U.S., India, and Japan. And the thing that I found fascinating is the people I taught in Japan were so visually literate from the get-go. I almost didn't have to teach them much at all. The Indian one, anywhere may be second, but the people I teach in North America seem to be maybe the least comfortable.
MR: Yeah. Interesting sort of resistance in a way, right? Yeah. Resistance to that visualization, which is, I guess sketchnoting opportunity sort of brings that to them. But it's more of an opportunity in some ways. Huh. Well, I've sort of derailed you with that, but I thought it might be helpful for someone who maybe is not into that to know, like, they've heard those words, but what do they mean? And it's kind of nice to have some context into—
DA: Oh, sure.
MR: - how you grew up and now you understand that culture, that very visual culture that Deb sort of grew up in. Let's continue with your story. So you're a little girl, you're surrounded by this manga and anime, and then how did that influence you? And like, were there big moments where you had to make choices where you kind of went with the flow and you ended up in a place like, "Hey, look where I ended up?"
DA: Yeah. I guess that's kinda weird. 'Cause I started drawing comics—I used to just draw comics for myself and for my friends. Then I moved from Hawaii, then I moved to New York, went to art school for a little bit. And I would write home letters to my mom and I would have little drawings of the things that I would see, like the things that people would say to me like, "Oh, you're from Hawaii." You know.
Or things I would run into like, "Oh my God, I can't find, you know, Japanese rice at the supermarket, or why spam is so expensive here." You know, all these things that I'd write letters and draw pictures from my mom. And then when I came back to Hawaii to finish my college education, I realized that, you know, it's, you know, taking a passive approach to my education. Like just going to a lecture, do the homework, come home.
I realized, oh, actually there's all kinds of other opportunities. It's college that I could take advantage of. So I went to the school newspaper and I said, "Hey, I'd like to draw a comic strip." And they said, sure. So that was good in that I got, you know an experience having to draw three times a week, something, right? And then getting people's feedback. People saying, "Oh, I love this, or I didn't get that joke. "So that was a change.
And then I met all these people who were in the journalism department. So I went to school for art. I mean, I went, did printmaking and whatever. One of the extracurricular activities I did was run the campus art gallery. So I had to learn how to write press releases.
MR: Oh, wow. Okay. So writing, yeah.
DA: Doing promotions, making posters, and you know, writing up paperwork to get people to be in the show and ascribe the show. So all of that led to after I graduated college, to me doing PR for art galleries, for my friends art galleries.
MR: Interesting.
DA: Which then led to me writing for the newspaper art reviews, music reviews. I did a comic strip. Like I said, it was—and a lot of people who recommended me were people I went to school within the journalism department at University of Hawaii. So everything was kind of like, I would make it public what I did, or what I was interested in and then people would connect the dots.
They would say, "Oh, Deb, you like to write, how about this? Oh, Deb, you know, you draw a cartoon, would you like to draw your cartoon here?" So it was all kind of making it visible to others. So I would run it to people, other artists and other cartoonists who would kind of—you know, I mean, this is your 20s, right? You're competitive.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
DA: And they're like, "How come you get all these opportunities?"
MR: Ah.
DA: And it's like, oh, that's because I put my sign out by the side of the road that said, "Hi, I do this." And people saw it and would say, "Oh, I have this opportunity. Why don't you?" But if you're just sitting in your room drawing your comics and waiting for someone to knock on your door—
MR: To discover you.
DA: - it won't happen.
MR: Yeah. It can't happen.
DA: And this is before the internet, right, where you could put stuff on Instagram and whatever. So that was one of the key lessons. And then having a journalism background, you know, learning about how to write a new story and do good interviews, ask questions, and be curious. So when I did finally move to New York to the mainland, I got work doing writing. You know, more like I was like an admin assistant at a game company.
MR: Okay.
DA: Where I was a temp at an ad agency. Then it kind of led to—I moved to Seattle, and this was at the time—it was like I'd say late '90s.
MR: Right. At the grunge music period just started to happen, right?
DA: Yeah. So then I got a job at Microsoft working at MSN, where a lot of other former journalists where working. So I wrote headlines for the news, for the homepage, all kinds of stuff like that. I did you know, case studies for SQL server.
MR: Wow.
DA: A lot of writing. So that's when my path diverged a little bit, right. Where most of the camp career was in writing. Content writing, UX writing. And then my drawing was was kind of, you know, something fun I did on the side. And then where it all converged later was when I worked at eBay and I would be in these meetings, you know, having to write, you know copy for different apps or different features. And then they would explain stuff from a technical point of view or from a business goal point of view, and I was like, "I have to write for what the user's gonna do, what the user's gonna see."
MR: Right. Gotta translate.
DA: So then I would just at a certain point go, "I'm not understanding, or you're not giving me the information I need." So I would grab a pen and just go up to the whiteboard and go, okay, so user comes here, clicks this, comes here, does this, sends an email, da dah, dah. Like all this stuff. And then what happens here? Or then what happens when there's an error or they fill out something wrong, or?
MR: Yeah, magic goes here.
DA: And then sometimes I would say, "Do they do this?" Then sometimes the product manager go like, "Yes, exactly. That's how that works." And then an engineering from the back who normally wouldn't speak would say, "No, actually that won't work out. And actually, no that's impossible." And would to the product manager and goes, "No, the database won't do this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What are you talking about?"
MR: Yeah. You're making assumptions. Yeah.
DA: So I kind of got into this, I don't know, some kind of small degree of notoriety for that.
MR: So you'd facilitate these discussions, right?
DA: Yeah. Like you go, "Oh, you know, Deb draws."
MR: Ah, yeah. That came out
DA: Then what led to is I had a colleague in the user research department who was saying, "Your skills are perfect for what we need." So she would bring me into workshops where they were trying to come up with new features, and they would say, "Oh, can you draw storyboards that show how people are using this or might use this? Can you draw personas? You know, who the customer is?" So from that, the magical thing is I started getting invited to meetings earlier in the design process.
MR: Yeah, because they wanted you to help them to guide them, right?
DA: Yeah. And I got involved with business strategy earlier. I got involved with, you know, coming along on user research type projects where I'd get to know who the users were by listening to them and, you know, observing them. For content people, content strategists in UX design, if designers complain about not having a seat at the table or not getting respect. Content designers are even lower than that. You know what I mean?
MR: Right. Because nobody thinks the content till the thing's about to launch. That was always my experience.
DA: All the alarm ipsums, right?
MR: Yeah.
DA: And then it would just be a blank placeholder copy or, "Oh, we'll fill that in later." And then it would come to me and like—
MR: Later it would come. Yeah.
DA: And I'd go, "Ah, wait, why do you have this step before this step? And do we need this extra page and all that stuff?" And I bring up these things and people would say, "Well Deb, those are excellent points, but it's too late. We've built it already. So can you write around it?"
MR: Oh boy.
DA: So, you know, when I've given talk about my drawing to content strategists, I tell them, this is your little tool to get in the room earlier and for you to inject the point of view of the user. Because if it's like, "Oh, hi, I'm the content strategist, and this is my opinion," you tend to not get listened to as much as—
MR: Right. You do backup.
DA: - here's what users going through. And then you show these pictures, and then they imagine they go, "Oh." If they can put themselves in the space of that user and go like, "Oh, that would suck. Huh? Oh, we have to change that."
MR: It puts the burden back on them and not on you, right? It's not your opinion. It's the user having this issue. Oh, how are you gonna solve it?
DA: Right. So, I guess since then I've been discovering this intersection of visual storytelling and what the difference it makes in these types of situations. And, you know, being able to inject humanity into our product design decisions. Which tends to get lost sometimes, surprisingly.
MR: Hmm. That could be a good encouragement for people that are listening who are maybe in non—like, they like visual thinking, but they are trying to find a way to integrate it into their daily life. Being the person who draws things is a huge opportunity. Anybody can do it really in any position.
DA: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be fancy. I've had several colleagues that do very simple storyboards and seen it make huge differences in product direction or product implementation.
MR: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could be a CPA that draws, right? Who you can visualize, you know, numeric stuff in a way that people understand it better. That's a huge value.
DA: What's the guy? There's a famous economist at Berkeley. He does a lot of drawings.
MR: Was his name Larry something?
DA: Oh, I'm—
MR: Trying to think. It'll come to us as soon as we stop recording.
DA: Yeah. I'll remember. But it's interesting 'cause he does a lot of whiteboard drawing with pictures.
MR: Uh-huh.
DA: And so Fanta graphics, which is a comic publisher, they published I dunno, like 11 Rockets and Daniel Clowes comics. Published a book of his whiteboard drawings.
MR: Really?
DA: The Body Economics. They're fabulous.
MR: Wow. Well, that's pretty cool. We'll have to see if we can find the name of that book and we'll include it in the show notes so we can, I'll check it out.
DA: Hmm.
MR: So it sounds like the work that you're doing is a lot like this, but I think you mentioned that you recently have become independent. So tell us a little bit about, you know, moving from being employed in large companies or small companies and then shifting to being a contractor and a freelancer. How does that change, and how does Deb, the person who draws kind of reputation, how has that helped you in that regard?
DA: I guess, you know, it's been tricky for me. Partly because my mix of skills makes it such that there isn't ever a job for me that asks for that, right?
MR: Mm.
DA: I usually get in as a content strategist and they find that I can draw and that's a bonus.
MR: Got it. Yeah.
DA: It's kind of cracking the egg and you get two yolks kind thing.
MR: Yeah.
DA: But the stuff I was really enjoying was the drawing stuff. But there is almost no job like that. Specifically, that.
MR: Right.
DA: So what I've been since—and you know, as we were talking earlier that there's been a lot of tech layoffs lately in Silicon Valley where I live in the San Francisco Bay area. So with the last round of layoffs that I went through, it's gotten harder and harder to find the next job lately. And in the interim, I've been doing more consulting work or more like one-off things.
I teach what I call simple sketching for user experiences or storyboarding to various tech companies on a consulting basis. I do it through a company called Tangible UX. So I've done that. And then I've done things like, I did picture books for Juniper Networks to explain network computing and network security and AI. So that was fun. I get little interesting challenges. But the other thing that has happened lately that has brought me back full circle is that manga now is the number three bestselling comic book category in North America.
MR: Wow. Wow.
DA: Since the pandemic you know, people started staying home and binging anime on Netflix. That led to people buying more manga, and manga sales quadrupled in the last two years.
MR: Wow. So it's been discovered in some sense by the West in a way that it hadn't been in the past. I know it's been around, I've seen it around for a long time, but it's kind of a niche, you know, thing.
DA: Yeah. So now it's gotten super—and then there's a live-action one-piece TV series on Netflix that was super successful. So all of a sudden, people are paying attention to Manga. So over the last six months or so, I've gotten a lot of people reaching out to me wanting me to explain manga to them. Or, you know, to like—I'm working with a company to make their online manga app and website more sticky and more engaging. So that's a UX thing.
But I've also been working with—I have a podcast myself called Mangasplaining. It's basically four friends, and one of my friends, his name is Chip Zdarky, he is a comic book creator. So he writes Daredevil and Batman.
MR: Wow.
DA: And so he's a very much a Western comics guy. And during the pandemic, he said, "What's this?" Before the pandemic, we all went to Japan together, and then we all dragged him around to all these manga places. And he was like, "What is this?" And like, "Oh my God, there's so much of it." And, "Oh my God, I feel so small." You know. And so, when we came back and the pandemic started, we started this weekly book club for him where we would I introduce him to manga one book at a time.
MR: And he would go through it and give his explanations or his reflections on it, I guess.
DA: Yeah. And he would sometimes pick up on things—
MR: Ask questions.
DA: - that surprised us completely. Like, "Wait, what?" Or he would respond to things that we wouldn't expect. You know, there's a manga called Akira which almost everybody—it's a big epic sci-fi dystopian.
MR: Nikita. Yeah.
DA: But then they thought, "Oh, no brainer. He'll love this." But then he ended up liking a really slice of life stuff. Like one of his favorites was The Way of the House husband, which is about a Yakuza hitman who retires and becomes a house husband for his wife who works in marketing and all the things he goes through to, you know, cook and clean.
MR: And prep the dinner. Yeah. Yeah.
DA: And deal with his mitch and it's cats and the nosy Neighbors. It's really funny. So it's been a delight to you know, have this with him. And then we started publishing some manga. Like we published a book called Okinawa by Susumu Higa. And it's a bunch of short stories about Okinawa before, during, and after the war, but from a very human point of view. It's really interesting.
I mean, I'm half Okinawa myself. I've never been to Okinawa. So that's been really rewarding. The book came out this fall and it's been on a bunch of shortlists for books over the past couple—from, you know, like even the Washington Post and things like that.
MR: Wow.
DA: Won a couple of awards. So, you know, like, that's been really neat. And then the other thing that came up is I'm now teaching once a week at California College of Art.
MR: Okay.
DA: I'm teaching a class on manga history, context and creation for their master of fine art and comics. So, what's been interesting with that is that I have to use my facilitation and design sprint training—
MR: Everything. Yeah.
DA: - to try to come up with exercises for these students to help them, you know, understand how to think, how manga creators think about story and character and page layout. 'Cause these are all things I feel instinctively.
MR: Right. How do you describe them? Yeah.
DA: Right. Because so kinda like when you did the Sketchnote Handbook, right, there was something you were doing and you were doing and you trial by error. But then when you have to write a book, you have to explain it. You know by similar—
MR: Yeah, that was interesting.
DA: How is that for you, by the way? I mean.
MR: It's a lot like what you're talking about. It was like, well, I've been doing this for a long time, how do I—you know what's really funny is I'm always been a writer in addition to a visualizer. So I kind of wrote the whole thing first. Like, for me, its sort of worked in my head and I wrote it as a script, wrote it all out. And then once I saw—I let the words pour out, then I could say, "Oh, okay. I could see that visually would look like this, and I could use that sample here."
And I started like, bringing all the visuals in and then melding it together. So it sort of started the backbone was words, and then I added images into it to make it happen. So that seemed to work well for me. Both of books worked the similar way where I wrote the script first.
DA: Amazing. And it was so amazing 'cause I remember the book first came out and seeing how people just so resonated with it, right?
MR: Yeah.
DA: And so wanted to learn more, and it's led to so many things for you, so that's so exciting to see.
MR: Yeah. And it's in a weird place where I guess it's sort of like a manga. I mean, it's not technically manga, but I mean, sort of explaining myself in, not frames of a comic book, but it's not so far away. I mean, if you look at it, it's visualization and words. And, you know, I'm a huge comic fan from when I was a kid. Huge Daredevil fan, Spider-Man.
And so, you know, that had a huge influence on me and the way I looked at things and the way I framed things comes from that. So, you know, there's some universal stuff there, and then there's I'm sure variation between Western and Eastern comics and the way you think, which is probably part of what you're teaching, right? I suppose.
DA: A little bit. Yeah, but there's a lot of commonalities.
MR: Yeah, I think so. A lot of it's human, right? So it's human stories, which in the beginning, middle, and end. There's conflict, there's resolution. Those common things exist inside the story. Then it's maybe more the details of expression that change a little bit. So that's really fascinating.
DA: It's kind of fun for me, you know? Because when you're—because all of these worlds for me, they seem different and I meet different people within them. You know, the comic people I meet are different than the UX design people that I meet than the journalism people that I meet than the people from the Japanese culture that I meet.
But what's fun about being in all these different worlds is sometimes is seeing where the common threads and then applying things you see and observe in one world and applying it in another. Like some of the user experience, design, and innovation, you're dealing with people and products that sometimes—the world is changing around them. And they either resist or they accept and they evolve. So for example, you know, like the Kodak example, right?
MR: Mm-hmm.
DA: The film company. The film developing company. And they had a digital option to make a digital camera at some point, and then they refused because they didn't wanna kill their film business.
MR: Yeah.
DA: Right. So I see that happening with comics now. The pamphlet comics is an old style of reading and consuming comics that started with Newsstands, but now they're only specialty comic shops, so you can find them. But manga has been succeeding because manga is in a little book format, can be sold at any bookstore.
MR: I see.
DA: So I see manga at Target, I see manga at bars and Noble. So that's part of why it's, you know, kind of overtaking it.
MR: The friction is sort of not the same.
DA: Not the same. And then it's cheaper. You can buy a whole volume of manga of 200-something pages for like $10. And then you'll get, you'll get a 30-page full-color comic for $6. So like all these—and then I see like what's happening with scrolling comics now, where it's designed for scrolling.
MR: A screen. Yeah.
DA: And even two-page comics don't work well. So there's all kinds of—I guess, being an observer in this industry and seeing the struggles they're going through, the transitions that's happening, and some of it's relating to customers. Or their reading habits, the devices they're reading on, the stories they wanna read, making easy entry points.
If you wanna start with Spider-Man, where do you start and why is Spider-Man look so different now than he did in the movies? Doesn't align. But like with one piece, it's just a big pirate comic. It's like a hundred-something volume now. If you wanna get started, read Volume One, keep going into Volume 108. And it is the same as in the TV, as in anime. So, you know, it's the kind of thing where I look at it go, "Oh, it's a usability problem."
MR: Yeah, it is.
DA: And most people in the American comics business are—forgive me, I love them, but some of them who are kind of in that Kodak film moment.
MR: Yeah. They're kind of trapped in some ways. Trapped in amber in a way.
DA: They're a little frightened by what's to come.
MR: Yeah.
DA Yeah. So it's fun. It's interesting to observe and see it through that lens.
MR: Hmm. I would think that American, and I guess Western comic makers, now that we're really off on a tangent. They must really be seeing the success of manga, they must know the stats and why it's working. Are they just writing it off? "Oh, that's just a Japanese culture thing. That's why it's popular."
But I think what we're seeing is it's coming to the West and it's popular and there are probably user experience reasons why, like, you sort of cited some. Like, it's a pocketbook that I could carry. It's about the size of a paperback. It doesn't look outta place. It's not, you know, a newsprint thing that's bigger and it's hard for me to fit it any place or, you know, the value is better.
DA: It's fragile.
MR: Yeah.
DA: Yes.
MR: Or maybe I can look it on my—I have an iPad so I can read on my manga there, right? And I think that's where maybe they're similar, right? I would guess. Western comics have adapted to, you know, going on digital devices. But yeah, I would guess that eventually they will be forced to look at manga because It's successful.
DA: They're looking at it. Oh, they already are.
MR: Yeah.
DA: I mean actually some of the—and also kids comics too, right? A lot of the comics, superhero comics has evolved to the point where it's only really targeting you know, men 30 to 50.
MR: Right. Yeah.
DA: And then there's a whole universe of comics for kids where they don't care about Spider-Man or Batman. They like DogMan or they like Reyna Tel stories, so they're not interested in the superhero stuff the way that their uncles and fathers, and grandfathers were.
Like you see, comics is really dear to me, and I think visual literacy is so important, you know, not just for entertainment. I see how it makes me a better communicator. You know, I tell people that when I draw visual diagrams, I get people's attention 'cause people love watching people draw.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
DA: You know, it's like seeing magic appear on a screen. And then the other part is that it brings a mood of lightness into the room and fun, which most meetings don't have. But also too, it's kind of—I think the things that move with creativity and collaborative—one of the things I tell when I give them my talk on how to draw for business, I'll show them like, here's my pretty examples, here's the finished storyboards, here's all this stuff, and then I show them but here's how it usually starts.
And I show my super messy, fast whiteboard drawings that I'm drawing when I'm getting in a room and people are shouting out things at me like, "Oh, and they do this, and oh, they do this." And I just have to draw fast. And I said, "Oh, the messy is good. 'Cause the messy says you can participate too."
MR: Yes.
DA: Or nothing here is final, right?
MR: Yeah.
DA: I've actually had people actually step up, grab the eraser, wipe away what I drew and draw what they want.
MR: Which is great. That's like what you want. That's like the ideal, right?
DA: Exactly. And I thought if I drew it pretty and nice, one, it would take me too long. So I wouldn't capture the conversation. But the other part is that then people go like, "Oh, Deb works so hard on that, I can't mess with it. It's art."
MR: It becomes rigid.
DA: Yeah. And it's like, "I don't have the right to touch this or mess with it." So the messy invites levels of playing field and says, "I'm not attached to this emotionally. This is a tool for us to collaborate and communicate."
MR: Yeah. That's pretty cool. And I think in some ways, the messy stuff, I've been finding, I dunno if it's 'cause I'm getting older or whatever, but like the messy stuff, I'm way more attracted to than the fancy.
I mean, not that I don't appreciate the pretty stuff or enjoy it, but there's something about—like, I can see in the way somebody's thinking by the rough sketching they're doing, and it's a little bit loose and it just feels more alive in some ways, right?
As you do versioning of it and make it more tight and more perfect, it sort of becomes rigid and fixed. And that's what's in people's heads too, right? So if you can capture that loose, you know, sketchy nature, there's something attractive about that actually.
You know, it's gotta be at least recognizable. I mean, if it's so messy that you don't know what it is, I mean, that's maybe at the other end of the spectrum, but like somewhere in the middle is a nice balance to strike if you can.
DA: And it's human, right?
MR: Mm-hmm.
DA: It's human and it has life in it, and you can't help but, you know, find that fascinating.
MR: Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Well, that's really cool. It's so fun to hear how you've sort of—I think all the guests that I have when I look, they sort of collect all these experiences and knowledge and, you know, bring them together. And a lot of times later in their careers as they become to their peak of their career, suddenly they're drawing from all those things.
Learning how to write, visualization, how do you communicate, how do you convince people? How do you observe? Like all those things are coming into one activity, and that you're bringing your whole self to that situation or that problem.
DA: Mm-hmm.
MR: And people trust you. Like, oh, this person's gonna help you solve it because they're bringing everything they have. So that's kind of cool to see that, you know, if you're in the beginning of your career, the goal is to kind of gather these experiences and don't think about like your love of like manga as a side thing that you can't bring into your work experience. You can, that's gonna influence. And there could be a valuable place if you are creative about how you think about it, which is kind of what Deb is doing.
DA: Yeah. I've given this talk to university students over the past couple of years. Like Christina Wodke, she's also a well-known visual thinker. She teaches HCI, human-computer interaction.
MR: Right. She was on the show years ago. I should probably have her back on.
DA: You should. She's doing great stuff. They're teaching a game design class over there.
MR: Nice.
DA: She invites me over once a semester to teach one of her classes that gets into storyboarding.
MR: Nice.
DA: And what's really fun about that is when I talk with my students, the ones that really come up to me afterward or pepper me questions tend to be people who come to me like, "I draw too. You mean I can bring this into my work?"
MR: Yeah. Yes, definitely.
DA: Or like, "Wow, you mean that's valuable?" And I go, "Yes."
MR: Oh yeah. That's cool. That's really cool. So I wanna shift a little bit in our discussion towards your favorite tools. I'm gonna start with analog first 'cause there's so many analog tools that exist. And you being into manga and anime, you probably have some really great Japanese influence tools that you probably like for your work, which maybe people can explore. So why don't you just unleash us all the cool tools that you like?
DA: Well, some of my favorites are some that are not as easy to find in U.S., but they are findable.
MR: Okay.
DA: One is a mild-liner highlighter pen. These are pastel light-colored highlighter pens. They come in a wide range of colors like soft pink, soft aqua, two shades of gray, a dark gray, and a light gray.
MR: That would be really useful for sure.
DA: Yeah. And they're water-based pens, they don't smell. And because they're highlight pens, they're light enough that you can see words underneath it.
MR: I got it.
DA: Like a lot of American highlighter pens are like this fluorescent yellow.
MR: Bold. Yeah.
DA: Too heavy.
MR: In case you're blind or something, right?
DA: It's hard to use for storyboarding. When I teach the storyboarding class, I say you need to have at least a gray pen or a lighter color pen. So I'll say if you can't find the gray pen, use those light blue or lavender. And that's a good substitute for the gray.
MR: Mm-hmm.
DA: But the mild liner pens have a whole spectrum of light colors that you can use for sketchnoting. So you can get those from—there are Japanese companies like Maido, M-A-I-D-O. They're in Kinonuniya stores. If you're near one of those Japanese bookstores, Maido is their stationary section. And they have a Maido-in-a-box thing where you can get a stationary subscription box.
MR: They send you things, huh?
DA: And they'll send you a new mix of interesting stationary items from Japan every month.
MR: Interesting.
DA: The other one is jet pens.
MR: Right. They're one of my favorites. Jet pens are great.
DA: They're a terrific source of these things. So they have that. And then my other one is Frixion pens.
MR: Oh yes. Erasable. Yeah.
DA: Erasable. And they have both ballpoint and felt tip pens, different widths. They also have highlighter pens that are erasable and they're erasable by friction, which is the heat—
MR: The heat, yeah.
DA: - of the rubbing. They have this little hard rubber thing on the end of the pen, and when it erases, it's not like American erasers where it's like you rub it and then like all these little crumbs come up. It's just the rubbing creates heat that erases.
MR: The heat and it kind of evaporates or something like that.
DA: It just goes invisible.
MR: Yeah. Interesting. It disappears.
DA: So they have like a ballpoint pens too. They have gray ones too which is nice. So that's really good for you know sketchnoting, I think. So I use those with conjunction with Pigma Micron pens which are pigment black pens or I use Sharpies. Sharpies are permanent markers. Because the highlighters and the Frixion pens are water-based.
MR: And they don't interact with each other.
DA: They're microns, you know, they don't smear.
MR: Mm-hmm.
DA: That's the main things I use for sketch notes.
MR: Isn't the other challenge with Frixion is because of heat? Like, you don't wanna leave it in your hot car on a summer afternoon 'cause all your notes will evaporate.
DA: Yeah.
MR: It was also the pen that was included with the Rocketbook or still is included with Rocketbook. And I remember the very early ones, you would like put it in the microwave and you could erase all your notes and then start over again with a blank book.
DA: That's right. Yeah. You gotta watch out with that. And actually, I've had the Frixion pens, some of the color, felt ones for a while, and it does die out. Like the pigment somehow dies out.
MR: It dry dries up or something, or it fades.
DA: Then when I write with it, all I get is clear. I'm not sure why. But again, this is like a case where I've had these Frixion pins maybe for four years and not used them regularly, so.
MR: It just broke down over time probably.
DA: Yeah. I don't know whether I have to—'cause you know the whiteboard marker trick, right? Where you put a string at the end of the whiteboard marker and you whip it over your head.
MR: It moves all the pigment to the tip, right?
DA: Correct.
MR: It's centripetal force, I think.
DA: Yeah. Yeah. That's a neat little trick. So I've been trying that with that.
MR: Hmm.
DA: Oh, the other one is I love the Neuland pens.
MR: Oh, they're great. Yeah.
DA: Yeah. The water-based pens. 'cause you can refill them.
MR: Yep. They're permanent as well. Many of the inks are permanent. Especially the—well these guys here, I'm showing the orange ones—
DA: Yeah. The black pens are permanent.
MR: -the outliners. Yeah. These are great.
DA: And then you can also mix your own colors 'cause they have the colors—
MR: Little bulbs, you can kind of mix 'em. And they have blank pens that have no pigment in them. And you can make your own thing. Just, you know—
DA: And it's really fun.
MR: - measure in grams the amount of ink you use 'cause you might have to refill that thing if you need a match.
DA: Yeah.
MR: What about paper and notebooks and stuff like that?
DA: Oh, I've been using your sketchnote notebooks by the way, on tracks.
MR: Oh really? Okay.
DA: They're really lovely. Otherwise, I use Moleskins. The thin ones 'cause I don't like necessarily carrying a big book everywhere I go.
MR: Right.
DA: The other thing I'll do sometimes is—other—oh, Muji.
MR: Muji. Yeah. That's a great store. They're in some big cities. Yeah. New York City is the one I've been to too. Yeah.
DA: One of my favorites is they have these notebooks with plain brown paper cardboard cover. With a little elastic around it.
**MR: Oh, okay.
DA: To keep the book shut.
MR: Yeah. Okay.
DA: But the brown paper cover is so nice 'cause when you—I travel to Japan quite frequently and at a lot of the museums that you go to or the tourist attractions, they'll have a little stamp pad.
MR: Oh. And you can stamp it.
DA: A little commemorative stamp where, "I went to this place." So when I had my little travel journey from Japan, I just pick up all those books and then every place that has little stamp pad, I stamp it
MR: Like an art passport.
DA: Yeah. They also have Travelers Notebooks. Have you heard of those?
MR: Yes. I know about the Travelers Notebooks. Yeah. Those are great.
DA: The Traveler's Notebooks are really from Japan.
MR: Yes.
DA: So they have Traveler Notebooks stores just for them.
MR: If you don't know what these are, it's typically the traditional one is a piece of leather that was cut and folded. So it's like a cover. And then there's a string inside of it. And then you get these notebooks and they're staple bound, and you slide the notebook into the string and that's what holds it into the leather cover.
So you can kind of swap 'em in. You can stack up more than one and you can kind of make it whatever you like. They have all kinds of inserts too, right? Like plastic things with zips. You can slide in and like all kinds of crazy stuff that you can add and make the notebook what you like.
DA: Calendar insert, calendar, mini booklets, grids, dots. So you can make your own customized notebook so that you can slip things in and out.
MR: Yeah.
DA: It's a really nice system. And it's basically about the size of a—looks like about the size of an—a little bit bigger than an airline ticket.
MR: Yeah, that's true. That's the big one. I know that they have a passport-size one too. It's a little bit shorter.
DA: Uh-huh.
MR: So if you need a pocketable thing, you could go in that direction as well.
DA: It's really nice system. It's because it's from Japan and imported, it's not the cheapest.
MR: Right.
DA: I think which is cheaper, but on the bright side for all of the people who like Japanese stationary, the yen to dollar exchange rate is the lowest it's ever been in about 20 years.
MR: Maybe I need to go to JetPens this week.
DA: Yes. It's at like 150 yen to the dollar now. Typically, before last year even, it was like closer to 100, 110 yen to a dollar. When you go to Japan, it's like you're getting a 30, 40 percent discount on everything.
MR: This is the time to book your tickets to Japan, everybody.
DA: You should go to Japan. Oh, and if you do go to Japan, make sure you go to Shinjuku Sanchome area 'cause that's where they have the Sekaido. Sekaido is a five-story art supply store.
MR: Oh boy. You'd never leave that place.
DA: It is the best. And then otherwise, there's also Tokyo Hands, which has a mix of art supplies and stationery and office stuff, and home craft things, like all kinds of craft kits. And then there LOFT, which also has a great stationary and gift selection. So it is a stationary lover's dream.
MR: I bet.
DA: Please go to Japan.
MR: Yeah. Spend some money there. You definitely will in those stores.
DA: Absolutely.
MR: Wow. That's really cool. You're reminding me—I can see my Travelers Notebook right over here. I haven't used it for a while. Kind of encouraging me to maybe get some—so what's nice about those is not only can you buy books that fit there, but you can make your own, right? If you have paper you like, you can cut it to the right size and fold it and just slide it right in and you've got a notebook, so. It's pretty cool.
DA: Absolutely. It's really nice. And the leather makes it like, you know, an object you keep and get attached to over time.
MR: Right.
DA: But the inserts make it infinitely reusable.
MR: Yeah. It's got the lasting part and then the transient part.
DA: Yeah. It's nice.
MR: Right. Hmm. Interesting. Well, that's really cool. And I was gonna go back and you use the thin Moleskin, I'm assuming you mean the staple-bound ones?
DA: Yeah. Not the hard-bound ones.
MR: Not the hardbound ones. Got it. 'Cause they can slip in a pocket or a purse or bag or something. Not so bulky.
DA: Yeah. 'Cause when I'm travelling, you know weight matters, right?
MR: Yeah. Oh yeah.
DA: And so you just wanna be able to have something on the fly.
MR: Yep. Cool. Well, that's really great. I'll follow up and make sure we get as many as we can in the show notes for people, the places, and the tools so you can go check 'em out and spend some money. Sorry.
DA: You won't regret it.
MR: Yeah. People that listen to this podcast, probably I spend a lot of their money. Sorry about that. So I would love to hear some tips from you. We like to make some part of the podcast practical. I frame it with, let's assume there's a visual thinker, whatever they are, comic book artist, sketchnoter, or graphic record, it could be just someone kind of curious, and they're starting to do this, but they feel maybe they he hit a plateau or they just need a little encouragement. What would be three things you would tell that person to give them a little encouragement?
DA: I guess, you know, 'cause I come from writing background and I tend to see people who get really—when I teach my class, I get people who are very tight about their drawing, right? Or very feeling like they're not an artist, and so therefore they can't draw. So I end up breaking it down into you're writing letters and then you're learning how to write words, and you're learning how to write sentences. And from the sentences you get stories.
And if you think about it in building blocks, right? Like your letters are the straight, the curves, the circles, the shapes, right? And then you put that together to make people, places things. That's the words. And then you add conjunctions and connectors or adjectives, right? Like, and that would be like arrows and boxes to group things.
Or, you know, little line radiating license show something is new or swirly lines, you know, to show like a different mood or using different sizes of type. So that's your connector to make sentences. And then when you have all of these things together, then it becomes a story. So if you think about it like as a form of alphabet and writing system versus thinking of it as an artistic system, then it just feels more approachable.
MR: Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Lowers the bar a lot. Yeah.
DA: Yeah. And I guess the other thing I'll tell people, you know, we're all stuck in boring meetings a lot.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
DA: So sometimes, i find that I'll practice my sketch notes in boring meetings. And I'll—
MR: You know, not much to lose.
DA: Yeah. It's sometimes then it's you know, like the key thing, right? You write the words and then you leave space for images. And then you know, it's just kind of even practice. Sometimes I'll draw the people in the meeting to practice drawing different facial expressions or I'll challenge myself to draw tricky visual concepts. Like lately I've had to—I had to recently do a storyboard to illustrate large language models for AI.
MR: Oh yeah.
DA: That was tricky. Bitcoin was tricky. It was the other one before, I think—or how would I draw AR and VR experiences? And so, what I did with that was I would draw the person with the VR glasses in green. The rest of the body was, you know, black and white. And then I would make a pointed, a word balloon, but I would make it a square word balloon pointing at the glass outline in green. So what that would indicate is that this is what they're seeing through the glasses. And then anything they were seeing the glasses I would draw in green as well.
MR: I see.
DA: So then in the context of like the—
MR: Separate those. Mm-hmm.
DA: So it's kind of like there's—especially if you work in tech or anything that's abstract, like finance or healthcare, somethings you're dealing with sometimes a lot of abstract concepts. And these will be like your greatest hits, right? These are things that's gonna come up for you over and over again. So like figure out your icon or symbol for it.
When I teach my class and I teach it to different types of—I teach to healthcare companies, tech companies, some that are more enterprise or more cloud-focused, some are more retail or e-commerce focused, I teach 'em a basic curriculum and then I customize it the second half for their industry. Saying like, I'm not here to—you know, like Duolingo, right? Duolingo will teach me stuff like, "My sister teaches geology at the university." And it's like, I never use that in a sentence when I go to Japan, right?
MR: Yeah.
DA: I'd like to order this, but could I get it with the kimchi on the side instead of this? Or how much is this? Or where's the bathroom?
MR: Practical things. Yeah.
DA: Practical, right? So when I teach my drawing class, I go like, here's the basics, and here's your greatest hits for your industry. You know, here's how to draw a shopping cart. You're an e-commerce, here's how to draw your company logo really fast. Things like that, right?
MR: Things you're gonna use a lot. Yeah.
DA: So I'm always really focused, like when I teach, think of it as language learning. I try to think of it as, what's the stuff you need? 'Cause you don't need to learn how to draw everything in the world. Just the stuff in your world.
MR: That's a great second tip. So first one is think of it as language. The second is to build the greatest hits of the things you're gonna use often using that language.
DA: I think the third one is just be visual with fun low-stakes things.
MR: Yeah. Good point.
DA: Sometimes people get really bent like, "Oh my God, if I'm gonna do scratching on at a conference, everyone's gonna look at it and it has to be perfect, right?
MR: Right.
DA: Or if I'm gonna scratch work, you know, everyone's gonna see it and it has to be good. Then when I say, "Well, how about sketch notes for fun, low-stakes things?" Like a favorite recipe or you know, like a travel journal or like even sketching your favorite TV show. Like, what happens?
MR: Yeah. That's a good one.
DA: So think of fun way—or I think another one is, draw with young people. Yeah. If you have your kids or nieces or nephews or any young people you come in contact with, draw with them. Have fun with them and draw together and you'll find that—I mean, that's how I got started. My mom draw me when I was young. Right.
So one, it invites you to enjoy it as fun. It invites you to you know, play together in a spirit of experimentation and low stakes-ness, but also kind of when you're with kids, you just kind of learn, "Oh, I don't need to worry about a lot of these things."
MR: Yeah. Don't put too much burden on yourself.
DA: Yeah. Or treat yourself as kindly as you would a kid who's just learning how to draw.
MR: Yeah. That's a good idea.
DA: I think so much of it gets blocked because as adults we judge ourselves too harshly.
MR: Yeah. We too much burden on ourselves. Yeah.
DA: For even a very beginner efforts, right. So, you know, there's always a time and a place to be better, but you'll never get better if you never at least go through a lot of routes of being not so good at it. And it doesn't matter that that's not so good. You're at least doing it.
MR: Right. Learning every time.
DA: Because we were talking about people who use AI for these kind of things. It's like, you are missing the point. The true joy of the sketching is the motor memory, the activity, the connection between your muscles and the thing, and your visual, and then that ends up being reinforcing something in your brain. So, yeah, the drawing—I've taught my drawing classes through Zoom, but I find it's so much more fun if it's in person.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
DA: That's a tough one though.
MR: Well, those are three great tips. Thanks for sharing those. And thank you for all that you're doing in the visual thinking community. I know attending the International Sketchnote Camp and doing the teaching that you're doing, thank you for doing that and just helping people move beyond not doing anything. That's really helpful. And I'm glad that you're doing it. So thank you for that work.
DA: Oh, thank you. I'd love to go to next year's Sketchnote. I have such fond memories of that one, but is so sad I missed the last few.
MR: Yeah. Well, it's gonna be in Texas. It's been announced from the 2nd through the 4th of August and San Antonio, Texas. So it's gonna be right in the neighborhood for people in the United States. So Michael Clayton is running the show and I'm helping with a few other people. So as we record this, it's early February, so pretty soon there should be more information. And of course, you probably have seen on the website announcements for it by the time this show comes out. But yeah, it's gonna be San Antonio.
DA: Excited to mark my calendar.
MR: Yeah. Tacos and barbecue and sketch notes—
DA: Nice.
MR: - you can't go wrong.
DA: Absolutely. Yeah. One thing I love about—I wanna tell it to you, Mike, that there are a lot of people who create creative communities and the creative community you've created has such a nice feeling, just a nice warm vibe of collaboration and, you know, shared growth. And so, thank you for that.
MR: Oh, thank you.
DA: It has a great impact.
MR: I'm just one piece of that puzzle. There's a lot of people that invest in that, so I'm glad to hear that. And they will as well when they hear this podcast, so. Yeah, for sure. Well, Deb, what's the best place to find you? Do you have a website we can go to and see your work and reach out to you? Are you on certain social media where you hang out these days?
DA: Well I'm on BlueSky, @debaoki. My Twitter account is having problems nowadays but I am on Twitter with @mangasplanning. And then if you go to mangasplanning.com, that's where all our podcasts are at. I'm embarrassed to say that my website is down right now for renovations.
MR: Oh, okay.
DA: But eventually debaoki.com will be back.
MR: Okay. Maybe by the time the show comes out in March or whatever,
DA: That would be a good deadline, wouldn't it?
MR: Yeah. There you go. I'll give you a deadline.
DA: Okay. Sounds good.
MR: Even if it's just, you know, "Coming soon" and it's you with a hard hat on shoveling, that would be, you know, a throwback to the '90s.
DA: Indeed.
MR: When websites weren't ready yet, they'd have like a little construction worker digging.
DA: That's true.
MR: They should do Deb digging and animate it, and that would be your website until you get it up.
DA: Good idea.
MR: And then they'd stop every once in a while, "See you soon.” That'd be funny. Cool. Well, we'll definitely send people there. We'll get the show notes from you and find them on our own as well. So if you're curious about anything here, just go to show notes and you'll find a link to it. And Deb, thanks for being on the show. It's been great to have you. Thanks for sharing your experience and your wisdom.
DA: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's so delightful to talk with you.
MR: Yeah, you're so welcome. And for anybody who's listening or watching, it's another episode of the podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon.
In this episode, Jimi Holstebro discusses identifying gaps, pursuing education to fill them, and seamlessly integrating acquired skills into his work, all while enjoying the process.
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Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Jimi Holstebro. Jimi, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you.
Jimi Holstebro: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
MR: It's an interesting name that you have, and I think you gave me a hint as to your name. Why don't you reveal to the listeners how you ended up with Jimi when you live in Denmark?
JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mostly because my father was a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, so they chose to call their firstborn son, Jimi. Actually, will be calling me Jimi today, but then it's Jimi with, you know, like a soft J and it's pretty darn hard both for Dens and for everybody else to understand the "Yimi," so we go with Jimi.
MR: Interesting. Yeah. Cool. Well, and so, tell us a little bit about where you live and what you do.
JH: I'm living actually smack in the middle of Denmark, in the part of Denmark that's called Jutland. Which is the mainland. You know, there's a lot of island seals. Funen and then we have Jutland. And in the middle of Jutland, there's this city called Viborg. It's a small city with 40,000 people living there. It's a beautiful old city with the—what's it called? One of those very old churches we have in Europe, which have been, you know, a trade city, an important city where the court is. Also, the old court from that part of Denmark.
So beautiful, beautiful city with some lyrics and it has a good football team. It has some handballs, it has stuff. Actually, I ended up here because I moved here with my children's mother back in the day when she started in school as a nurse. They have a nursing school here. Originally, I come from the top of Denmark, the top of Jutland at a city by the sea called Frederikshavn. So, actually, my childhood was in a small fisherman's town called Frederikshavn.
MR: Wow.
JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back there I was like, you know, a little in toward kid—ah, that's not really true, but in toward in the way that when I came home, I sat down and then took out all my pencils and my markers and start drawing, listening to music, and just sat drawing all afternoon and reading comic books. I think maybe you heard that kind of story before about people interested in drawing. They have like, you know, hours and hours of reading comics and then trying to draw it themselves.
MR: Yeah, I had that history myself, you know, living our best lives as kids, right?
JH: Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of it. You know, normal school we have in Denmark. We also have, you know, like we have just a primary school, and then we go to some sort of high school. And after high school, I went to—actually, I started to read to become a teacher.
MR: Mm.
JH: Yeah. But when I was doing that, I applied to get into to the art academy. Actually, I got in. It's not something you just do. There's a lot of a lot of people trying to get in, and just few getting in there. Actually, I got in there and got my master's degree in fine arts.
MR: Really?
JH: Yeah. Back in the start of—middle of 2000-something. Yeah, '05, '06 or something like that.
MR: Did you have a specialty in the fine arts? Was there an area that you focused on?
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it was mostly drawing and graphics. You know, like old-school graphics. What is it called in English? I don't really know. But when we have paper, you put on rolls.
MR: Oh, yeah. Printing. Yeah, lithographs.
JH: Printing. Yeah, printing of course. Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that. I did that a lot. So always been very, very interested in the line, in the black and whites, working a lot. Also, you just show me you have one of the books I made for Neuland, which is also, you know, just a line. Very, very simple. I'm a huge fan of that, so just drawing, just black and white. And I love it.
MR: Interesting. Interesting.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of it. Then just started my artistic career from there.
MR: Interesting. And so, tell us a little bit about what you do now?
JH: Yeah, actually, the last decade I've been independent, let's call it graphic facilitator because that's the word people understand. Actually, I'm not very fond of it anymore, and I'm referring more and more to myself as just being [unintelligible 05:14] but I draw because that's what I do.
MR: And I think everybody understands it too, right?
JH: Yeah, yeah. They do now because when I think graphic facilitation popped up in Denmark like 12, 15 years ago or something like that, and some people started doing it, and I actually quite fast got a grip of it and heard of it and tried it. And got a lot of jobs all of a sudden because it was also in the time when the social media, especially Facebook started rolling, everybody had an account, and everything that went on there was interesting.
So when people saw it, they kind of just called me or wrote me, "Can you come and help us?" But before I got there, I kind of stopped with art school in the middle of the 2000s. I didn't live from doing art, but it's kind of difficult. I think it's the same story in United States because when you're an artist, you are pretty much dependent on people liking your stuff.
MR: Right.
JH: And even though I have a master's degree, you know, it's not like being an engineer who's coming to tell you, "When we build this bridge, we need these materials." Everything has to be mathematically calculated to fit so the bridge won't fall. And when I come with my theoretical ideas about art and tell people it has to be like this because my reference is compared to other artists, blah, blah, blah. You know, people just say, "But I don't like it. I don't care. I don't like it."
MR: Yeah.
JH: And the internet wasn't—you know, there were no social media. So when I tried to sell art, you know, I had to drive around showing people my stuff and try to get into galleries or art shows and stuff like that. It was kind of difficult actually. So actually, I went back to teaching. Started teaching again and actually quite, quite fast got into managing. I started at a small school and they asked if I would like to manage the school. So actually, I ended up doing management for 10 years.
MR: Wow.
JH: Yeah. And in the area of special needs.
MR: Oh, okay.
JH: Get kids and youth with special needs. And, you know, that was interesting because they didn't learn like, you know—
MR: In a traditional way, right?
JH: Traditional way. And actually, I used the comics very much and the understanding of that, you know, the way it's sequenced. The sequential build of a strip was much easier for them to understand when they had to read text or understand connections with things.
So that kind of opened up something for me in terms of, you know, "Okay, this is interesting in many ways. What if we do it in other terms and also did it with the people I managed." In some ways started to, you know, using all of this. And then graphic facilitation kind of you know, popped up and then it started to make a whole lot more sense to work with stuff in this way.
And, meanwhile working as a manager, I think maybe I have a little, I dunno, may maybe I have a little HDHD—ADH—ADHD, something like this because I've always been, you know, very, very busy especially while working always taking some kind of—still keeping on educating myself. Because actually, I have a degree in management, I have a degree in facilitating, and I also have a master's degree in communication.
MR: Wow. Wow.
JH: I read a lot. You know, I read a lot and kind of built on. It became obvious for me because it's nice to have a master of fine arts, but then you're an artist and people, you know, they kind of expect you to be, you know, like a heavy camper with brushes and paint on your clothing. It is not always serious. So I had to somehow put some aspects to my CV that kind of made me have some weight when I talked about communication.
That became obvious for me in the last decade or something. So built on with my education, meanwhile working both with management and then the switch to working with the graphic facilitation so that I kind of, you know, had some weight when I told people about why visual communication was actually working and how it worked and stuff like that. Yeah.
MR: Interesting. So you sort of built that in.
JH: I'm sorry. Yeah. And I build that in. Yeah, yeah. Sorry.
MR: No, yeah. I was just gonna say, it's interesting the way you've sort of build in the things that you saw were missing as a, you know, something you're interested in, but it also provided—what's the word? Gravitas, or like the credibility or something, right?
JH: Exactly.
MR: So when you would go to a business to say, "Well, I've done all these studies." I guess you probably wouldn't say that, but it would be in your history. So they would see that pretty quickly.
JH: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So the last, a little more than a decade now, I've been an independent graphic facilitator or doing drawings for people in all kinds of ways. You know, traditional graphic recordings or scribing or whatever we call them, where I've of course started out with markers on papers, you know, in big style huge papers, wallpapers.
And then I've been doing, of course, I would like to say a lot of teaching using markers or the way of drawing as a means to communicate for others in their way of communication or teaching or stuff like that. I've been doing hundreds of small—what's it called? Animated videos. You know, the ones where you see the hand draw something and stuff like that. They also have a lot of different names. I just call them drawn videos.
MR: Like white whiteboard animation. Yeah. It's common. Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Something, yeah. They have all kinds of words. And then I also do like, I call it the strategic drawings. You know, where people want to somehow to unfold their strategies, their visions. You know, they have like 40 pages hidden on a H-drive somewhere in the business that nobody ever looks at. But to make it live in the company.
It actually helps to put it on a poster or make it hang in the walls, in the canteen, or something like that so that all the employees actually see what's going on, and they can see themselves in that process. And so, I do loads of that as well.
So mainly I've been doing that the last 10 years and been very, very happy about it. It has taken me all around the world, but mainly in Denmark, of course. But I've been traveling also different other countries to do drawings for companies. And it's been amazing. It's been amazing.
MR: Wow. And I kind of love the way that you sort of built this combination. So you began as a teacher. You know, you practically were a teacher and then a manager. But you've had this art background when you were a kid, you were drawing and looking at comics, it like, sort of this, I dunno, collection of all these components that now you're applying, right?
So you have to manage people and yourself, you have to teach them. And you know, those processes, you know, you know how to draw, but you're also then teaching that to other people, and then using it, of course, as a way to communicate. So your communication skills. So you've really made use of all the backgrounds that you put into yourself and you're applying them all, which is really cool.
JH: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It kind of makes—you know, it's very holistic the way I've you know both my history with drawing and management, you know, organizations and then the tools I acquired and putting it all together, it's very holistic. Actually, I'm getting up every day and I'm not getting to work, I'm just doing my thing.
MR: Having fun. Yeah, yeah.
JH: Exactly.
MR: That's kind of the ideal place where you wanna be, right? If you can.
JH: Yeah. It kind of is. Of course, you know, you making drawings for other people on their demands is not the same as the artistic me, of course, because I still do a lot of art, which is mostly the place, you know, where I do my own thing.
MR: Yeah.
JH: And that's a different language than the one I apply when I do business with people, you know because it is another game. But it smells like art in a very, very satisfying way, you know?
MR: Yeah.
JH: I own my skills in drawing and communication all the time with the work, and I really love it. The long-term idea for me is of course to, you know settle down in the mountain somewhere. I don't know, it's in France in a little cabin walking around half naked, just, you know, like wine in the one hand and brushing the other hand and living from my own house something like that.
MR: Well, it's still a possibility.
JH: That's a good thing about it.
MR: Yeah. That's really fascinating. I'm kind of curious to give me a sampling of a project. You sort of given generalities about the kinds of projects. Is there a project that you could tell us about? Of course, sometimes NDAs apply, of course. But a project that you can tell us about that you're excited about that would give us a sense of the kind of work you mostly do for a client.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. I can do that. Right now, I'm almost putting last bricks together with a strategic drawing for a company in Denmark. They reached out—and that's kind of very normal process for me. Client reaches out, say they need me to come and draw, summarize, live draw, you know, something at a meeting. And then the last handful of years that has never been satisfying enough for me.
So I ask the client, "Okay, why do you want me to do that? What do you need the output to do?" And it always baffles the clients because they have seen, heard something about live drawing and they want a really nice poster of what has been going on. And even though I am pretty good at drawing, and I'm also pretty fast at drawing, it is also very much to ask of me to come in a couple of hours and summarize a whole lot of strategic processes, boiled down to, you know, like a couple of hours.
And my question to the client always is, "But I can do that. I can do that, and I will listen to what you say, but are you sure you want that to be the output you are putting to life when I leave?" Because that will be my very subjective—what is it called? Boiling down what you're telling me in that specific timeframe. I can do that, and you can pay for that, but wouldn't it be greater if you kind of introduced me a whole lot more to all the strategic reasoning behind what you're doing, and then we make it into a small process where I then try to sketch what I see and hear from that.
And then, you know, we have some back-and-forth ping pong about what, and at the end out which, you know me inking it up, making it look nice and coloring, and then you have like a poster where you really, really have ownership of what's going on instead of me just subjectively drawing all kinds of things I here in a small timeframe.
And then also, the businessman in me also makes it much clearer for people to understand that from here on, you also have almost the manuscript for if you want to make a small animated movie out of it afterwards. And I can deliver you packages with all the drawings on each own. So you can use them in PowerPoint, you can do all that. Because you get like a digital package.
MR: Yeah.
JH: And people always go with that because it makes sense.
MR: Yeah.
JH: So that's kind of a typical way I do these projects. And then again, if it's an animated video, they start out reaching out for, I also kind of make them buy, you know, posters and stuff like that in the other end, because it makes sense to have all these components put together so you can, as a company, use it in a way.
I think it makes sense for you as a designer as well, you know, to have things, they have a red line through all the things I do for them. So have like a pack again, unfolding on different platforms afterwards. And of course, it makes sense, you know.
MR: That's more of a sweet—
JH: So that would be kind of a—yeah, yeah. Something like that. And that would be a typical process or project for me to be involved in. I know it's pretty selfish, but it is because I'm also a little—you know, when I started out, I just did everything the customers ask me. Two, I did this and that. But I also, you know, become a little lazy and a little more self-centered. I wanna deliver something that I'm very proud of when I deliver it.
MR: Yeah.
JH: Back when I started, I just wanted as much as possible, I wanted to draw, draw, draw, come out, visit everybody, go everywhere, do everything. But now I've grown a little older and I'm a whole lot more interested in just sitting down really nerding, deep diving into the drawings, and have my own party and fun with doing the drawings and making them look, you know, awesome. So, it's kind of funny, but it works and it makes sense for the customers as well. So everybody's happy. It's a win-win.
MR: Well, I would think that if you're gonna put that much energy into it, you might as well get exactly what the customer wants and also what you want, right?
JH: Exactly.
MR: Than just to, you know, 80 percent of the way do it, you know? I dunno, so.
JH: Yeah.
MR: Anyway. I'm kind of curious, how do you convince the customer? This might be helpful for someone listening. How do you move them from, "Well, we just want you to come in for a day and draw things," and then you end up with this subjective perspective? How do you sort of move them into the next? Are there certain things that they respond to that someone listening could integrate into their own practice to do the same thing? Like, what can our listeners learn from your approach to help do that?
JH: Yeah. I think mostly I start off by saying most clients don't really know exactly what I'm doing. You know, they know I draw, they know I draw and they heard of graphic facilitation, recording something like this, and they've seen drawings, and they instantly know how it works. When they look at a drawing, they want to look at a drawing and they get curious about it and look more at it and read some of the stuff. They don't do that with the 40 pages and the D-drive, right?
MR: Mm-hmm.
JH: So, instinctively they have, you know, an understanding of this kind of works. So, when I unfold and I question them more and more about, but which kind of output do you really want? I think they kind of understand where I'm coming from and what it is I actually do. So they have like this kind of revelation as, "Ah, oh, can we really do this? So can this be the end product? Is that possible?"
So, I'm kinda opening their eyes to what the drawings actually what it does and what it can do and what it really is, and how it is unfolded and put into work when it's best. Which is something that I'm very, very interested in. You know, all the things around it, you know, because also I've been studying it and I think it's very interesting and I want to study even more about how is it, it works, and functions the way it does for us, you know?
I don't know if I'm pretty good at per persuading people or something, but I don't think it really is this, I think it makes sense for people to hear that I can come draw for you live and then I leave, and then you are left there maybe with a piece of paper, maybe digitally whatever, and then what? And then they, you know, maybe also kind of get scared because they don't know what to do from there.
MR: Yeah, yeah.
JH: They don't have the skillset, you know, to—but maybe even if they have a digital drawing, you know, they will put it into Word or other program and cut it and it won't look nice if they need some of it. So they're also happy to have me guide them and help them in all of the process. And when I tell them, but if we make a drawing here, that's pretty good, you can have that as a standout component you can use in PowerPoints or whatever, in emails and stuff like that. That also compels them to go with it, I think.
MR: Yeah. It almost seems like—
JH: And then—
MR: Oh, go ahead.
JH: Yeah. And then normally, of course, it will be a tiny bit more expensive to do the process. But not that much again, because I charge more when I'm out drawing live than when I have the opportunity to sit back at my office, you know, then I can work at different projects at the same time, and I can use my time in a better way. So, in that way that will make it a bit cheaper, but then of course it'll be a longer process. So it is normally not that much more I charge people for one or the other.
MR: Well, it's interesting. I think what I'm reading that you're saying and maybe the way we can think about it is if we get in a situation with a customer or a client is to—because we know they probably don't know how to apply it, at least effectively, but they're willing to spend this significant amount of money to have someone come in and do this.
So we need to think like, well, what would be the—we kind of know, like what would be the best application and sort of think as if I were the client, what would I want? And then you present it back to them and say, "Well, we could do components for PowerPoints and emails."
Like, you know, you could even say that, like, "I've worked with clients who had the single image, they tried to cut that corner out, and it wasn't exactly right. If you've got me on board, we can separate that and we can make that into a component that you can use even after the fact," right? Like, they might get a month into like, "Oh, Jimi, there's this one little part that we've just focused in this area now. Can you pull that out?"
JH: Exactly.
MR: And you might say, "Well, I can't pull it out, but maybe I could just redo it based on the same thing." You're now a resource to them. So you almost need to think like, what is it? You sort of have a better idea of what they could do.
JH: Exactly.
MR: The other thing that I would imagine is once you've done it once successfully, you can then show that as the proof. Like, "Hey, look, this other company, look what they did. I came in for the day, we caught some information, but then we started to collaboratively work to get it exactly right. And then we realized there were five elements that we could pull from it. And here's the five elements, and here's how they used it, and here's a quote from the person at that company and how they were so excited," or whatever. You could, like, once you do the one, then it kind of flips the next one, right? So you can think of it that way.
JH: Yeah. I also always do that, you know, in the mail correspondence, I always add, you know, like, "I did this one, you can see how I did this one. And if you want to see how this one has been turned into and explain a video, here's a link to this." So people also, they—and that's also the thing, because I am obviously very visual in my way of thinking, which most people are, but they think that they everything is written.
So they kind of need help and guiding in seeing things. So I always send materials so they can see how it is. So sometimes confidential and stuff like that, but this is for your eye only, you know, stuff like that. Then they also feel kind of included
MR: Special.
JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
MR: That's great feedback. I mean, we are not even to the tips yet, but these are great tips for visual thinkers who are trying to find ways to integrate this work into their daily life or their work life. So if you're either independent or even inside a company, you could do the same thing, you know, on your own time, and you'd be really surprised at how open many companies are to this.
I know, 'cause I work for companies, I integrate my visual thinking all the time, and they're really excited when I do it, and in fact, request it, right? So just because you work for a company doesn't mean this is off limits for you. This is a huge opportunity. And you might have some benefits that someone like Jimi doesn't have because he's outside. As an insider, you could have some different perspectives and maybe some built-in, you know, a reputation that you could lean on to show this stuff since you know, the inside the product so well.
JH: I kind of have a question for you, Mike.
MR: Sure.
JH: Because in Denmark, I haven't seen the first job opening as a graphic facilitator yet. It's yet to come. And I don't understand why, but that's another discussion altogether.
MR: Yeah.
JH: But do you see job openings or applications that people asking for, you know, as an employee on a regular basis, not just like freelancer or something like that? But do you know of or heard or have heard of graphic facilitators that are hired into larger businesses?
MR: The only place I've seen it has been for graphic recording companies.
JH: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
MR: So like, my friends at Sketch Effect are often looking for new people, right?
JH: Yeah, of course. Yeah.
MR: Sketch Effect, not to focus too much on them, is they do have employees, but I think they also have freelancers. So they have a variety of different modes, right? But they will hire—I dunno if you know Heather Martinez, she's amazing at hand lettering. She just took a position with a company and she's doing something around I think vision work or something. But I can guarantee you that Heather Martinez is going to do visual thinking in that role, right?
So in some ways, probably, maybe in a big company, you would see that kind of a role. But I would say if you're listening and you work for a company, it doesn't mean you can't do it, right? You can just find ways to integrate this. Again, your job even as an employee, is to communicate ideas effectively. And if visual thinking is your effective way of communication, that should be part of your suite of communication tools. But you know—
JH: It is kind of funny. I don't really understand it because now it has been, you know, like—
MR: It's been a while.
JH: Yeah, it's been a while. 15, 20 years, or something. And there's a lot of people working with it. And of course, visual thinking it's not like they—yeah, and some people, when I talk to, "Yeah, we have a graphic designer." Yeah.
MR: That's different.
JH: That's not it.
MR: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. That's not it. But I think many huge companies just think about how many meetings they have every day. If they had like, you know, a visual thinker joining those meetings to help retain information, you know, make it shareable. All those things that makes a visual communication interesting. That's amazing. This year I'm gonna do some work and asking some questions in the proper places to why that's not happening yet.
MR: Maybe it is happening and it's just so hit-and-miss that we just aren't aware of it.
JH: Denmark is so small and we are so few doing it. So, I think I would know it.
MR: I think we're like—
JH: We're like as many inhabitants in Denmark as you are in the biggest citizen in the states.
MR: Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. The small group. Yeah. I mean, I guess the two things I think is one, probably companies are trained to look outside and don't think about hiring it in. Maybe because they feel like they're too small. But maybe that will be a shift too.
So when you think about, oh, it's probably about maybe 8, 10 years ago, I dunno if you remember this, but lots of tech companies bought design firms. So if you think about who's providing graphic facilitation and recording and sketchnoting, there's firms that typically do it and they're trained to go to an outside firm because it's kind of a one-off thing, right?
JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MR: In a lot of cases, the problem too is that when the budget gets tight, you know, first thing to go is gonna be graphic recording, right? Because "Ah, we kind of, don't need that. Let's—" But at some point, there may be a place where it's—
JH: But that's the thing that I'm interested in and curious about because it's not a one-off thing.
MR: Yeah. It shouldn't be.
JH: As I just said, think of all the meetings that are being held, all the processes that are being designed every day, and they have like, loads of project employees just to manage all those kinds of projects. Why don't you have one helping you to visualize it? That's what I'm saying. Yeah.
MR: Maybe there’s…
JH: That's another discussion.
MR: Yeah. Exactly. Now we're sort of talking a little bit about that, let's shift into tools. I'm really curious to hear what tools—we talked before we began, we're both Neuland ambassadors and we use their tools 'cause they're great. So I assume there must be some favorites there, but I'd love to hear about notebooks and paper and any other analog tools, and then of course, digital tools that you like to use in your practice.
JH: Yeah. I think I might be kind of boring in the tool ways because I've never, you know, nerded into what kind of marker do I love the most. Do I have some special pen flown directly in from Japan or anything? When I draw on paper, I like the paper to be kind like for wall coloring, you know? So, it has to be thick. I like that. So it doesn't bleed through. That's number one. Of course, but I don't really have a favorite.
If we have to talk about the Neuland markers, I love the brush tip. And I love that they just made the big ones with brush tips. I absolutely love it. That's my all-time favorite. But normally I just do like—and I have, I don't know, thousands of pens and markers and, you know, just with the small felt tip, something like this black.
MR: Yeah.
JH: It works for me. Works for me, you know? And then when I do my arti fati thing, I mainly paint with the acrylics and brushes. And there also, I'm kind of a weirdo because I don't have any brand or specific brushes I just have to do or any specific canvas. I kind of just make do with the—
MR: Whatever's available
JH: - whatever I have. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. That might be a bit weird, but yeah, I don't know. I have colleagues that really, really nerd into, you know, what kind of notebook they're using, what's the paper and what's the pens like? But I never really—I'm fascinated about it, but, you know, I never really dug into it somehow.
I am, and I know you, you said that it could be a little boring talking about the digital tools because all of us have an iPad and we probably also have a Wacom or something like this. And yeah, I think maybe 80, 90 percent of all my work is done on the computer or the iPad.
Because for me, as I told you, as a process evolves when I'm working with clients, it's just easy for the client, you know, and to send files back and forth and do corrections on them and split 'em into single components and stuff like that. It's just a whole lot easier. But, you know, I have a big iMac and I have the large and new Wacom Cintiq. I really love to draw on this.
I used to draw a lot in Photoshop, Adobe's Photoshop, but a couple years ago, it was kind of like they downgraded. They nerfed the drawing part, and I had to reinstall my brushes again and again. And I kind of grew tired of it. So, now I'm mainly drawing when I'm drawing on the computer in Clips Studio. It's a program made for making comics and it kind of just have the tools depends the stuff I need and all the shortcuts are basically the same as Adobe.
So I've been working with Adobe for, I don't know, two, three decades, something like that. So it is in the fingers. So the transition to Clips Studio was painless. Just did it overnight. And then of course on the—I don't know if it's of course, but I do use Procreate a lot. I miss so much—do you know the German guy, Hulk, who made—in the early days of the iPad—
MR: That's right.
JH: He made—
MR - an app, didn't he?
JH: He made an app that when you—he designed it for live drawing because what you did, all the time when you projected your screen, it was the whole screen. But you could sit on the iPad and work, you can zoom in and out and—
MR: And they would never see that.
JH: Yeah. They would never see that. But somehow it ended up with the Apple not supporting the support of it or something like that. So, it went off again. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and really miss that one because it was kind of Procreate, but you had that single feature, and maybe it's me that haven't been smart enough to figure it out, but I haven't seen any programs having that feature yet.
So, normally now when I do live drawing on my iPad, I wait until there's a break and then I send them like a jpeg of wherever I've gotten to something like that. So that's the thing projected up on the screens and the breaks anyway, something like that. Yeah.
MR: I think I've seen features, and maybe it's not in Procreate, it might've been in—I have a note-taking app I use for slides where it gives you the option in the settings to say don't show the tools. Right. So it would hide the tools and you just see—I don't know if they hide the zooming, I can remember—
JH: But one thing is the tool, but then, assuming if you're sitting in your audience and watching the Zoom, you would be like, nauseous, you know.
MR: Getting sick. Yeah,
JH: Yeah. But if anyone is listening to this, knows a program that does it, please, please make a note about it. That'd be nice.
MR: Let Jimi know.
JH: Yeah.
MR: Do you remember, it was a company called FiftyThree, and now it's owned by WeTransfer paper, that app paper. I think in an old version, it would do what you talked about, where it would just show the screen. Now, I don't think you could hide the tools, but if you zoomed, there was a tool. I can't remember what it was. But when you zoomed, it wouldn't show the zooming. It would just show the static and they would see the changes happening.
JH: Exactly.
MR: Now you're making me curious to poke around my tools and see, is there a tool that will do that?
JH: Was it Nils Holger Pohl, or something, I think?
MR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JH: He made that one. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, but that would be nice to have, because this, of course, I talk people away from projecting it live because people get nausea and then we end up with, you know, a solution where it's shown in the breaks but people will just be watching in the breaks anyways.
But sometimes it would be nice to, you know, like have it projected up whilst people are talking so that they could concentrate and see ideas unfolding, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. That would be nice to have in there, within the whole scene anyway, so.
MR: Yeah. Now you're making me curious to dig around. If I find apps that do it, I'll let you know. And if somebody's listening and you know an app, then let Jimi know.
JH: Yeah. That'll be nice. Thank you. Yeah.
MR: You sound like a practical guy. Probably because you grew up as a kid in a fishing village, you know, just drawing all day and, you know, there was no special art tools when you were a kid. Like me, if I wanted something, I had to make it. If I wanted a comic book, I would take printer paper, cut something up, and make it, staple it, whatever. So you just make it happen. There's no stuff for you.
JH: Exactly.
MR: So I think that I'm like you, I like going into the corner drugstore and finding my favorite pen there in any city in the world, right? Or something close enough to it. I've always had that feeling like I also use a laptop because I've always wanted to feel like I could work independently of a place. So I want to be able to have the ability to work and not have to have, oh, I have to have this monitor, and I have to have this desk, and I have to have because that really limits your ability to do work if you become adaptable to the situation. You know, that's always been my approach. So I think that's maybe a little bit of a mindset in some ways.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't be the first time I've told myself I can't draw unless I have this gadget. And then I kind of, you know, go totally numb until I have that gadget. And in the end, I also always have a notebook and a couple of pens in my back everywhere I go, because I don't want to be limited. But you know, when I'm sitting in my office—I'm sitting in my living room right now, I'm not even at the office, but when I'm sitting in the office, you know, I have thousands of gadgets and I can't find half of them, and "Hey, wait, didn't I have that one?" You know.
MR: Yeah, exactly.
JH: And at some point, I couldn't live without that gadget.
MR: Yeah. That's funny. That's funny.
JH: Yeah. It's terrible.
MR: For all the guests that I have on, I'd like to make it practical. We've done some of that already, but I would love to hear three tips. You can give more if you like, but I just asked for three.
JH: Mm-hmm.
MR: Imagine someone's listening and maybe they're in a rut, or they just feel they're not so inspired and they need a little encouragement or inspiration, what would be three things that you would tell that person can be practical or it can be mindset stuff?
JH: I think maybe it's obvious because we just talked about it, but don't limit yourself. Don't limit yourself on gadgets. It does not have to be the right notebook or the right pen. That is nice to have, you don't need it. You don't need it. Just grab paper, pencil, pen, whatever you have, and start doing it. And number two would of course be exactly that. Just do it. We are so fortunate, not like when we were kids, Mike, I had to take my bike and ride, I don't know how many kilometers to go to the library if I needed any kind of inspiration other than what was in my mind, you know?
MR: Yeah.
JH: You just open your smartphone, your laptop, your iPad, whatever you have, add your hand and you can find tutorials, you can find everything. I would have been the greatest artist in the world if I had those opportunities when I was a kid, I think. Hours I have been sitting, you know, copying stuff to get better.
If I could just sit down and watch all the good guys doing all the good things and copy that and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, that would be—and of course, maybe tip number three, I always kind of say to students I work with, "Do you play any kind of instrument?"
And people say no. If they do, they do, and if they don't, they don't. And I ask them, "How do you get good at playing an instrument?" "Yeah, by rehearsing." Exactly. You know? And it's the same thing with drawing. If you wanna be good at it, you have to do it. You just have to do it.
But the funny thing with drawing is that we kind of all have at least 10 years experience of drawing and, you know, it's sitting in us, it's living in us that we kind of think that it's a thing we ought to, should have to do, could do better because we all have done a lot of drawings.
You know, what's her name? Ah, that's embarrassing. It's a Ted talk, and she's talking about—that's what I first heard it. It's not her founding, but you know, it's the only universal language we have. And it's evolving all over the, all over the globe in the same fashion. From you can get a crayon in your hands till 12 years old. It evolves in the precise same way all over the globe.
So it's a universal language we have, but then, you know, of course, our brains at sometimes understand now the things I'm drawing does not look like reality. And then most people stop drawing, you know? And also, because we are not encouraged to continue doing it in school.
MR: Right.
JH: Which in Denmark at least, getting better. People are getting better and better understanding that we have to, you know, utilize all the modalities to make greater retention, understanding and engagement and all those kinds of things, which are also very, very interesting. And so, do it. Just do it. If you want to use visual communication as a tool, it's not about being—of course, if you use it, you rehearse every day, you utilize it, you do, of course, get better. But it's not about being good at drawing.
It's not always about being good at communicating, it's being good at listening, it's being good at visualizing ideas, you know? And it's the ideas of things, and they are often and normally very, very simple, very simple icons of reality. You know? So, you're not doing lifelike portraits or anything. It's not what it's about. It's about conveying ideas.
MR: Yeah. Well, said. Well said.
JH: Thank you. Thank you. Which is of course also something I'm very, very interested in. And I don't know if that's a question of all, but now I'm just gonna tell you. You know, I told you I'm glad to be educated and actually I'm working hard on trying to see if I can build even more education on top of what I've already done because I think there's some questions that need to be answered.
And it is, why is it drawing actually works as well as it does, you know? So right now, I'm trying just as a start collecting as much evidence as there is, see who's been researching in stuff like this. And, you know, because it draws from psychology and movie studies and all kinds of things.
But that's not really doing a lot of studying in what is it exactly drawing does, and why does it do? Because we all feel it works when you look at a drawing and, you know, we have all kinds of sayings, like "Picture says more than a thousand words."
MR: Right.
JH: Why is it that it does that? That could be interesting. And maybe I don't know if it ends out with that, but I'm willing to do a PhD on that subject if it comes down to that. Because it would also be a very good selling point for people like us. But we have to draw because research tells us exactly that works in this and that way, you know.
MR: And here's why. Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's what I'm very, very occupied of as we're going into '24. And some of the things I'm trying to get laid out planned out, what's the direction for this and how do I somehow get that into motion?
MR: Sounds like a keystone project for you. Something that could be a lifetime achievement kind of thing.
JH: Mm-hmm. Hope so. Hope so.
MR: Cool.
JH: I'm very occupied with it right now, and I've been a couple of last years, and I've also—we haven't been talking about that. I've been in some other programs where we're talking about, I also made, you know one of the first, I don't know how it is in U.S., but I've been one of the founders of making visual communication, you know, as graphical visual communication education that actually gives you points as in a bachelor degree in Denmark.
MR: That'd be cool. Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
MR: Yeah. That sounds excellent.
JH: Yeah, it is. It is.
MR: Well, Jimi, this has been really wonderful to chat and sort of have these interesting discussions. Thank you for sharing.
JH: Of course.
MR: How can we find you? Do you have a website? Do you have social media that we should check out? What's the best way to connect with you?
JH: I'm everywhere. I didn't even mention, I'm also a certified social media manager.
MR: Oh, really?
JH: Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram. I was all on other platforms before, but, you know, I kind of narrowed it down. Also, I have two different websites. One for my art and my posters, which is my name Jimiholsterbro.dk, as in Denmark. And then I have, you know, the work platform, the work website for all the visualizations and movies and stuff I do, which is and it is a Danish word, it's taenkogtegn.dk. Taenk og tegn which means think and draw.
There you can see a lot of work I've done with the visualization of vision strategies, movies, teaching, and stuff like that. So courses. Yeah. Also, of course, we have contact infos and mail addresses on those on those websites. But I think the fastest way would probably be on all the social media platforms.
MR: Mm-hmm. Okay.
JH: And everybody just reach out if you wanna have a chat or wanna ask me anything, it's okay.
MR: So is your handle the same on all those social media platforms, and what is that handle?
JH: My name, Jimi Holstebro.
MR: Okay. Just Jimi Holstebro. It's pretty unique.
JH: Yeah, yeah.
MR: Cool.
JH: That's Even Stevens. That's easy.
MR: And we'll reach out to you and get links for all these things and make sure the show notes—we like to have robust show notes on the podcast.
JH: Yeah.
MR: So if you're listening and you wanna find any of these things, you can check there and go to any of those locations.
JH: Very welcome. Yeah, very welcome.
MR: Thank you, Jimi. This has been really great. I'm so thankful for the work that you do and how you're representing visual thinking and all the thinking that goes behind what you're doing, and how many people you're helping and businesses you're helping. I think it's great to have you representing the community, so thank you.
JH: Likewise. Thank you, Mike.
MR: And for everyone listening, that's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, this is Mike and Jimi signing off.
JH: Bye-bye.
In this episode, Claire Ohlenschlager, an avid doodler, shares how she developed her sketchnoting practice, found a thriving sketchnoting community, and awakened her passion for teaching.
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Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here with Claire Ohlenschlanger. Claire, it's so good to have you on the show.
Claire Ohlenschlanger: Thank you for having me. It's a very honor.
MR: Well, I've been trying to get you on the show for a while, and just timing and other things haven't worked out, but we finally have you, and I'm excited. You're someone who's been involved in this community for a long time, and it's always good to hear the perspectives of people who have been in the community for a while.
And it might be interesting for us to chat a little bit about that in our discussion too, and see, how does the community remain the same and maybe how has the sketching community changed a little bit? Obviously, we have new people coming in all the time, so that changes the community, which I think is great. But before we get into that, let's first start and let us know who you are and what you do.
CO: Well, I'm Claire Ohlenschlanger. I live in the Netherlands in the Hague. A very small country. I work at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where I work at the Teacher Training College, languages department. I've been a teacher, I think this is my 34th year. Secondary education and now higher education.
MR: That's really cool.
CO: Yeah. I think it's the best job. It's hard work, but very rewarding.
MR: Oh, yeah. That's true.
CO: Yeah.
MR: I really admire teachers. The more that I teach, the more I admire teachers because I see how hard the work is. I enjoy it. It's really satisfying, but it's really hard work, and when you get a really good teacher and you see it, I appreciate it. I know how hard it is to do it well. So, thank you for doing all this great teaching for many years for many different people. I'm sure that people appreciate you for that.
CO: I think it's a very—it keeps me young. I was just saying that to my colleague because you work with young people, it kind of keeps me young, I feel, but it's very nice to see people grow and to help them progress and help them when they're kind of stuck. In the pandemic and the years after, a lot of kids have been stuck.
MR: Yeah.
CO: And so. It's extra challenging, but it's very rewarding at the moment. Very frustrating sometimes as well.
MR: I suspect. Yeah.
CO: Yeah.
MR: So, I'm really curious how—so we know that you're here, you've been teaching for a long time. You've moved all the way through secondary to higher education, but how did you begin? As a little girl, you know, on your own—you do sketchnoting and visualization, right? Probably in your work, but also personally. How did you get here? Starting as a little girl, were you drawing all the time? what's the story and how did you end up where you are?
CO: Well, I wasn't really drawing. I was always writing. So I was always making sure that I wrote in nice letters. And of course, I'm from pre-computer, so we had to do all the writing. And I also, as long as I can remember, I would always want to write with fountain pens and not with ballpoints or felt tip pens or maybe sometimes pencils. What I would also always like doing is add color to what I was doing so that what I wrote also looked nice. But not like we sketch these days, but I did spend a lot of time making things nice to read again.
I would also do a lot is doodle. I'm not a very good drawer but am an avid doodler. So Lots of my notebooks, I still have a lot of them, have all these little doodles all around what I wrote. Actually, when I started, I couldn't stand messy pages because I would always spend a lot of time on making it—that's what people always say, "How can you write things down straight away, so neatly." But I think that's from when I was very young. I've always been like that. I've never been a drawer. I've developed into a sketcher.
MR: Interesting.
CO: Very simple.
MR: Definitely an interesting perspective. Tell us a little bit more about that.
CO: How I came to sketching is I think somewhere around 2010 or so. You know, every so often you have a seven-year itch. And I think I was having a seven-year itch, and then I decided to go back to Uni to start studying again. So I went to do an educational master's. And as it happened, on one of the first evenings after class I was walking home and I passed our bookstore, and our bookstore had a workshop on mind mapping that was just about to start. So I figured I'd sit down.
And it was a very practical workshop. So we got a large piece of paper and some pens, or actually I probably had a pen. I always have pens in my bag, so I think I probably had the pens. And then he was telling us about how to mind map, and at the same time I was mind mapping. And that was actually my first-time taking notes of what I was hearing.
And that worked so well for me that everything I did in my master's, I started off mind mapping. I mind map everything I heard on my lectures, but also the books and the articles I read. And gradually I found myself needing pictures and visuals. And then of course, I started because I was intrigued by the fact that it was helping me so much to, you know, remember and to retain the information.
And while I was getting feedback, people telling me, "Oh, it looks so nice, and can I make a copy of it?" Et cetera. And so gradually, I found myself needing pictures. So I started looking into it, and that's how I came across your book. And then I thought that was really interesting. So then I looked into that, and then gradually I turned my mind maps into sketchnotes.
So actually, quite often when I sketchnote, it has the order of a mind map that works from the top to the bottom back up again. And I noticed that the mind maps, how I started this is, I can still find it in my notes. I use a lot of colors and a lot of arrows and what you would do in mind maps. I think it's probably originates from that.
When I did Uni, that was also when I was introduced to social media because I'd never even heard of social media. So I had to make a Twitter account to have a personal learning network and, you know, broaden that. So when I found your book, I started looking for you. And then of course I came across hashtags. And that way I got sucked into the community.
Today's Doodle, I think Sketchnotes in Real life or Today's Doodle in Real Life, that's how I met Rob, Rob Dimeo, who started off and showed me you could make sketches in actual pictures. In the meantime, I bought an iPad. So I was kind of playing around with that. And that's where I met a lot of the Sketchnote community.
And I was also intrigued by that because around that time, a lot of people my age were saying, "Oh, what are you doing on social media? Social media is scary. Lots of ugly things happen on social media." And I was just getting inspiration after inspiration. So that intrigued me as well. And then I started traveling. I like traveling.
Then I started thinking, well, I'll just ask who in this community lives in whichever city I was going to. And then I found out that you could also meet up with sketchnoters that you met on internet in real life. And they were actually very nice. And that's right.
Where I sometimes try to tell my friends that if you chat with each other and you have a common ground, like sketchnotes in our case, then eventually you also get to know people, you get to see their sense of humor, you see sense of humor in how people draw. Talking about something that you have in common also is binding. So meeting someone in real life then is as if you've known that person for a while.
MR: Yeah.
CO: That's what I really love about our community. It actually feels like I have friends all over the world. I've met some. You know, I've met you, I've met people at the International Sketchnote camps. I've met people outside of the camps, but in the cities, they live in, or shown people around the Hague here in the Netherlands. And you always have something to talk about. If you don't feel like talking, you always have something to sketch together.
That's how one thing grew to another, because at the same time I met McKayla. The McKayla Lewis in London, and somehow James Sorreta in Australia. And we started talking to each other and I started saying, good morning, and good evening, because of course, there's such a huge time difference on my way into work.
And that grew into me sketching, because what I always do on my way, on my commute is I also found myself—I have about a 40-minute commute to work by train, and there's a very small lapse, I think it's probably only about a minute, where we're kind of in internet digital no man's land and you don't have internet connection.
I honestly think it's only about 10 seconds. But I found myself every time I got into that area, and my phone would not connect, I'd get this kind of feeling stress. And then I thought, that's not really very healthy. So I started taking these little, I don't know whether you remember them when we were in Lisbon? I had these little Usem note cards.
MR: Yes.
CO: The size of the business card. And I started taking them to school, and I started drawing on those. That's how I got into drawing a doodle a day. I always kind of tend to go overboard. I think I did that for about five days—five years. I switched from the Usem cards to Hobonichi because that paper is fantastic.
MR: Beautiful. Yeah.
CO: Yeah. So I started sketching my morning, evening for Mackey and James, and I think I also did that for three years every single day. And that turned into a huge box of things that I couldn't never throw away. So that's when I switched to making them digitally because then you can have a digital cupboard.
And I did a couple of those with the community. So a couple of times I got to my 1000, or my, I don't know how many and then I thought, "Hey, how cool would it be if we could make one?" I think we even made something for you once.
MR: Yeah.
CO: I think we even drew you. I really love the way we can connect together. And I really love the idea that we can be all over the world and still be focused on doing the same thing and then make one thing together. That's very, very interesting. And I think it's very motivating. I get a lot of energy from that. So I've done a couple of those kind of projects. Yeah. We drew you in little kind of pixel boxes.
MR: That's right.
CO: I remember that now. Yeah. And then we made morning, evening together. And I had people from all over the world sending me. And of course, every time I did that, I regretted that I started it because there's always more work than you anticipate when you start off.
The idea is always fun, but actually getting it to work is—but then that's a good thing of working at the Uni full of people who understand digital things much better than I do. So I always have someone, a student just who can help me out with all those kind of things.
What also happened is, I think also those sketches, because I started drawing on those little, Usem papers, I'd go to conferences or talks or whatever, and then I'd wanted to sketch, and I usually only had those papers. And so, I'd have to sketch very small. And then obviously you can't use too many words. You need the little icons?
And then I'd give them. Afterwards I'd take a picture for myself, and then I'd give the cards to whoever it was that was presenting. I also sent a lot of my Usem cards all over the world. I'd make a little happy birthday card, and then I'd tell people, "Give me your address and I'll send it to you."
And then I'd get their email address, and I'd have to explain, "No, I mean, snail mail, and I'll send it to your home address." And not many people send you actual cards or anything written in the envelope with the stamp on it these days. So it brings me a lot of positive energy.
MR: And I think the people that you share with get positive energy too.
CO: Yeah. That's why I hope, yeah. That's why, I hope. And of course, you know, in Uni where I tried to explain—'cause all those mind maps I made during my master's, eventually I laminated them all and I put them together with a binder and they're always at the office.
And then every so often when I see kids studying in my hallway feeling slightly frustrated, I take out my binder and I show them and I tell them, "You know, this is also a way for you to retain and to also make it fun. And drawing it makes you remember."
You'll always remember, "Oh, yeah, I think it's probably in pink on the right-hand corner." And then you'll also remember, because you thought of an icon, the icon will trigger your memory and it really helps you remember. And yeah, quite a lot of my students try, not all of them persist, but quite a lot of them try and regularly I hear that it really helps them. So that's good.
MR: Even if, I would suspect if they still say, type notes, but maybe they use drawings as a support mechanism, that could even be a win as well, right?
CO: At the moment I don't teach that much anymore, but when I still did teach, I would actually tell them they had to have a notebook and they would have to take actual old school pen to paper notes. But I don't really like it
MR: How did they react to that? I think some have notes.
CO: Well, in the beginning, you know, when you start as a teacher, of course kids don't know you, but when you've been somewhere long enough, people already come in with their notebooks because they know.
MR: Yeah. Reputation.
CO: Yeah. And what also happens is it needs persistence. I remember one of my students a couple of years ago, and of course my students are already around 20 or so, so they're not very—they're still young, obviously, right?
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
CO: They're not really kids. And it took a lot of patience on my side and persistence. And then I think into the fourth week, he came to me and with a very proud facial expression, he showed me the notebook he had bought and the pen he had bought. And no, that's what he used. Then what I hope is that if they catch the hang of it, then it really helps them.
MR: It does seem, you know, I was talking with somebody else about that too, that when you teach any kind of thing, some people will incorporate it into their lives more than others. Some not at all, some quite a bit, and some people in between. So that's just the normal thing, I suppose.
CO: I don't think it matters because everyone has their own way, and what you have to do is at least give yourself the chance to find out what your way is, and not find yourself stuck in the computer because that's actually what they start off with. But to give yourself the chance to try out what works for you.
MR: Yeah, it's having an option, right? Presenting an option. And maybe that doesn't fit for everyone, but for some people it's perfect, right? So, if you'd never—
CO: And then it's up to—yeah, you can go.
MR: I was gonna say, if you'd never been exposed to it, you wouldn't know if it works, right?
CO: Yeah. That's what I was about to say. I think it's up to you as the teacher to show the different ways that they can actually try to study. Sometimes you tend to get stuck into your own way, into what works for you. But I think as a teacher, you're obliged to show them different ways because you have different kids there.
MR: Yep.
CO: Yep.
MR: An interesting side note that I hadn't planned on, but I'm curious about is, and I have a theory around it is young people, at least that I encounter, seem to have a fascination with old analog things, record players. My son bought himself a turntable and he's buying records. I have a nephew who's really into Polaroid cameras. So, being on a college campus, do you sense any of this sort of an attraction toward analog things?
And my theory is that because, you know, our generation, we grew up with all analogs. So digital was really interesting to us 'cause it was a new thing. But I think about this generation sort of steeped in digital stuff, that analog is now the fascinating thing. And so, that becomes attractive for them. Can you speak to that at all?
CO: Yeah. I think I noticed that as well. What I also noticed at the moment here in the Netherlands there's this movement that kids aren't allowed to take their mobile phones to school, or at least not use them. What we're hearing back is the kids admitting that it gives them peace not to work with their mobile and not to have it in the vicinity. And that they're finally talking to their friends again and actually also starting to pick up books.
I mean, it's still very early, but it's quite interesting to hear youngster saying these things because, you know initially when they started, of course, they were all stressed out that they would be shut outta the world as they know it. And so, it's actually very interesting to hear youngster saying that.
MR: Interesting.
CO: Yeah, it's interesting. What I do know is that in education, people are promoting taking notes again with pen and paper more so than they've been doing in the past decades, I think. So I think that's a good sign because research shows that that's the best way to remember and to learn and to study. I'm a language teacher, in COVID time, of course everything was digital because we were teaching through computers. And what happened was that when the kids came back, they couldn't write anymore.
So they were having a lot of difficulty actually writing their essays because they didn't have the time. And of course, always in a test you have a set time and they weren't used to writing and then having to correct and having to rewrite the whole thing again. Because of course, obviously on the computer, you can copy paste or throw away or add. So that was also very interesting how quickly you also forget.
MR: Yeah. It's a lot of practice.
CO: You need the practice. So one of the tips I would give is practice, practice, practice. It's not about doing it right straight away. It's copy that makes sure to develop your own style.
MR: Interesting.
CO: Yeah. I have my stick figure and my stick figure is my stick figure. I think people recognize that it's mine, but it's a stick figure. So it's not really anything very special except my own style is in it for you to recognize it. That's why sometimes you have all these companies that do sketchnotes, and what you see is a lot of the same thing.
So here, you know, you have a lot of stick figure for visual note taking, and it's very difficult to see the style of the person who wrote it because it's set in standards of how you draw the stick figures, the coloring, et cetera. And I think in my opinion, the best thing is to do is to develop your own style because the moment it's your own, it's more authentic and more real.
MR: Yeah. It's part of you. It's an extension of you.
CO: It's part of you. Yeah. It's like you do your pizza or your Packers or whatever you do, you recognize your style is the same, the approach is the same. You know instantly which of you drew the sketch that you're looking at.
MR: Yeah. That's pretty fascinating.
CO: Yeah. It's like handwriting, but then in sketches.
MR: Yeah. It's extended.
CO: Yeah.
MR: So you mentioned doing Morning and Evening. It sounds like you're not doing that now, or maybe you are, but digitally is there a project that you're working on right now that you would like to share and talk about?
CO: No. Well, the little drawings I do, they help me relax. What I notice at the moment is I'm doing a lot of Zentangle things because I'm extremely busy at my work. And it really helps me unwind at the end of the day. It helps me focus on something completely different and it really relaxes me before I go to sleep so that I don't go to sleep with all these hectic work-related thoughts on my mind.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
CO: I'm busy. I've got another project going with all kinds of different Zentangles. So it's something completely different. And I think the interest is, you know, when I contemplate on what I do is I'm not a specialist in anything. I tend to do lots of different things. I always like projects and I try to look at different things to do. So I'm an extremely creative person in a huge variety of creativity.
MR: Interesting.
CO: I do a lot of picking up, you know, Mackey would say rubbish. Picking up rubbish from the ground and then I make something. I make a little figurine from that. In COVID time, what kept me going was going on walks. So I'd pretend to go to work at the beginning of the day and pretend to go home at the end of the day.
And then I take pictures and that developed into all these pictures, and then I make collages of whatever it is I see. Sketchwise, I think at the moment it's the Zentangles that I'm doing. You have Inktober, so I like to do something for a whole month, the same kind of thing. And then it gives you a nice collection.
MR: Yeah.
CO: Yeah.
MR: Interesting. I know a little bit about Zentangle. I think it's fascinating. And we'll put a link in the show notes for anyone who's never heard of it before to look at it. It's really cool. It's really cool.
CO: It's very meditative. Yeah.
MR: It's some crossover between sketchnoting—it is a visual practice, but it's very personal, I think. And the way to kind of get thoughts out of your head as you talked about.
CO: Yeah. And the personal thing is somehow in everything I do, all kinds of art things, I always need words. So I always think of words and I like incorporating words or a sentence into whatever it is I'm doing. And this morning I was thinking, I'm going to try a Zentangle that incorporates a word into it or something. I think that's probably also my personal thing because otherwise Zentangle they can look alike. So I'm looking at how can I make my own Zentangle signature or something like that.
MR: Something of a crossover.
CO: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: Interesting.
CO: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: Well, you know, one of my memories doing something creative with you, you mentioned Lisbon, is when I reached out to you and said, "Hey, let's do a workshop on lettering."
CO: Yeah.
MR: And that was so much fun, right? We got a little projector and we each kind of presented our different ways of doing things. And encouraging people to say like, "You know, Mike does it this way, and Claire does it this way. They're just inspirations for you to do it your way. These are some starting points."
CO: And we did them on the Usem cards.
MR: On those little cards. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
CO: It doesn't have to be huge. It can be small and it can be yours. And we did coffee, we did the cards with the coffee and told people to make their own cards around coffee.
MR: Right, right. We'll have to link to those cards too, for someone to find them, so.
CO: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the international camp, and of course, the international camp is also great the way that came into existence and how people meet there as well.
MR: Yeah. Yeah. If you're listening and you are curious about it, we have interviews, I think with every organizer of the event past seasons. But basically, it was four women in Germany who decided—
CO: Yeah, Exactly. Yeah.
MR: - they wanted to make something happen, and they just—that's the way the community is. Someone just decides we're gonna do it. Kinda like Claire and I decided, "Hey, let's do a thing on lettering." Like no one gave us permission. We just decided, right? So I think that community mindset is all through, and anybody that comes into the community feels that, and I think that's really empowering to feel like you can do it.
CO: It reminds me of in COVID time we did the sketchnote on location museum visits.
MR: Yes, I remember that.
CO: Yeah. That was also so cool. And sometimes, I mean, I don't want a pandemic ever again, but somethings that happened in the pandemic were very cool.
MR: Yeah. It showed that you can be creative. Yeah.
CO: I remember here we had the first signs of COVID happening in Italy. And I thought the Marro and Mario, and I felt sorry for them. So I sent a couple of the community members a message saying, "Shall we send Marro and Mario a positive message every morning?" And I gathered all these messages not knowing that we were actually going to be in the same situation as they were, because I just thought it would stay isolated in poor old Italy and not to reach us. But then of course it did.
You can send out a question like that and people actually want to participate and then they also participate. If you have a lot of people, some people had to wait for 20 days, and then they actually wait, and on their day, they post something.
MR: They're excited. Yeah.
CO: Yeah, yeah. I really like that. I really like that. It also brings me to, at the moment, with everything that's going on Twitter, I feel like our community is quieter.
MR: Yeah, I think so.
CO: At least. Yeah. Yeah
MR: It's spreading out a little bit. You know, we have a Slack channel for Sketchnote Army, which you can of course check out. I know there's other people that are creating private chat areas and I think probably individuals are probably chatting with each other, but I think there is—maybe that could be an encouragement for this year is find some way, some public place. I think it's maybe moved to Instagram to some degree, but, you know, it's more visual there, it's not—
CO: It's a bit different.
MR: Yeah. It's different.
CO: It's not about the conversations. On Twitter, you could wake up in the morning and you had 89 messages or something like that. In Instagram you don't have—maybe you have—also, I'm on Slack, but—
MR: It's different.
CO: You also have that on—it's different somehow, but, and maybe it's also digital fatigue after pandemic.
MR: Could be, yeah.
CO: That's also quite possible that people need detoxing from the digital world.
MR: Yeah. There's quite a lot of dynamics involved probably, I suspect.
CO: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: You know, talking about the International Sketchnote Camp, it's happening in 2024 in Texas, the details aren't available yet 'cause Prof. Clayton, who's organizing is still working out details. But he's a professor of a university in Texas, in San Antonio. It would be centered around San Antonio.
An opportunity for maybe some Europeans to make it to the states and see that and have some great barbecue of course and tacos and the things that are unique to San Antonio and Texas. So as we get more information, we'll of course post that. If you haven't been to one of those, especially if you're in the U.S., this would be a great opportunity for you to come to it.
CO: Yeah, I think especially if you're in the U.S. because they've all been here in Europe. I can imagine that people in the U.S., It's a lot of money of course, that you have to spend. If it's in the U.S., it's closer to home, but it's such a nice experience. It reminded me of, you know, when I was at school as a kid, he would go on weeks with your class and you'd have fun—
MR: School trips. Yeah.
CO: - doing silly things and laughing your heads off and having, you know jaw pain and stomach aches because you laughed too much.
MR: Laugh so much. Yeah.
CO: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: You don't want it to end, you know, at the end of this time.
CO: And sing together and dance together, and when you get older, maybe sometimes you feel like you can't behave that way anymore, but it's—
MR: We do.
CO: I remember when we were here in Leiden, the last day we danced and sang and it's so much fun. It's so much fun. I mean, I always think never grow up. And sometimes it's good to have that feeling and to just laugh out loud.
MR: Yeah. places where you can be yourself.
CO: Yeah. Laugh out loud to silly things that you can't describe to people who weren't there. Very difficult to describe to people who weren't there. So I would tell my colleagues and you know, people who haven't been there and who don't know that, I think they don't understand why it's so much fun, but it's a lot of fun.
MR: Yeah. It is. Definitely it is.
CO: Yeah. It's hard work for whoever organizes it.
MR: Yeah. But, you know, it's for the community, so there's satisfaction in delivering it to the community. That's what I've noticed in all the organizers when they're done, they feel tired but it's like a good tired when you do something of meaning and you're tired for a good reason. That's the kind of feel that they often have.
CO: Yeah. And definitely, I mean, how cool is it to see people enjoying themselves over something that you organized.
MR: Yeah. Super satisfying.
CO: Yeah. yeah.
MR: So, we'll have more information on the Sketchnote Army page when that's officially announced, which I think should be relatively soon. I won't speak for Prof, but maybe by the time this recording comes out, it'll already be announced. I dunno. We'll see.
CO: Yeah.
MR: So you mentioned you mentioned these little cards, and that reminds me to talk to you about your favorite tools. You mentioned too that you do digital. But let's first talk about analog tools since we're old school and we love our analog tools. What are your favorite pens? You talked about these cards. Are there notebooks that you like? Any other stuff that you use that you can share with us that maybe might inspire someone to try something new?
CO: I'd say Hobonichi is number one. Hobonichi paper is perfect. I always like the small sizes, so the A6, Techo. These days I use Talens. It's a Dutch brand. Which is very nice paper, but not so much if you're writing with a fountain pen, which I like. And then Fountain pen-wise I like TWSBI. TWSBI has a very nice pen point. And I really like extra fine. I don't really like the medium. I always like writing an extra fine. And then the extra finest is a Sailor Fountain pen.
So fountain pen. And then I use I think it's—now I can't remember the—but anyway, the watertight ink in the converter in my fountain pen. I don't remember the make anymore. Diplomat ink. And then for using fineliners yeah, recently I've been using Art Line. I picked up an Art Line, I think on—I'm not sure, at a sketchnote camp sometime, maybe even in Portugal. So I don't remember. And they're very—now, I used to use Uni Pin, I think it was called Uni Pin.
MR: Yep. I've used those.
CO: Actually I'm using Art Line a lot. And they're very water tight. They're actually really black-like.
MR: Nice.
CO: And some of the pens, if you press too hard, the tips kind of disappear into the pen.
MR: Squish.
CO: Yeah, yeah. That doesn't happen with those. And then I like using colored pencils and then have to think what's—oh yeah, Carand'ache.
MR: Okay. French.
CO: And then the watercolor pencils because you can—
MR: You can put some water on them.
CO: Watercolor pencils are really good colors. If you press hard, they're actually very dark. I don't know how you say that.
MR: Yeah, intense. Yeah.
CO: Intense colors. Yeah.
MR: And then I think you can use water to spread them too as well.
CO: You can use water. Yeah. And so, those are the things I use most. And then you have the Usem cards. The sad thing is the guy who made the Usem cards and sold them, et cetera, he passed away last year. So they're looking for someone to take over his business. So it's down for the moment, but I'd still share the—because they're working on, you know, someone else doing it.
MR: Keeping it going.
CO: It probably be up again. Yeah. I like using small, and so like what I'm doing now is, what I do is I have these little—
MR: Oh, I can see them.
CO: A little gift tag.
MR: Yeah, like a price tag or something.
CO: Yeah. And then a little gift tag. And then I tie them together, and then I put that in my coat pocket. And then sometimes I just take them out, and then I always have a pen in my coat pocket and a little packet of those.
And then I just sketch or Zentangle, or write a word that I want to remember or whatever. And on my holidays, what I've been doing is these little wooden pegs, and then I sketch the name of wherever it is I'm visiting, and I put those in all my pictures.
MR: Oh, nice.
CO: That's how—yeah. And then digital. So I have an iPad Pro. I tried working with the Remarkable for my notes at work but it didn't work. I need paper. I need to feel paper, I need to feel the flow of my fountain pen on the paper, and I need to be able to color in with red or wherever in my lettering. And Remarkable doesn't do colors so Remarkable was a bit boring. And iPad is too smooth to do that. I tried the sticker thing on top, but also so—
MR: Still wasn't enough. The paper—
CO: Still it wasn't enough. I like writing on paper, but when I do my sketches—so I do a lot of sketching for all kinds of educational things here in the Netherlands, and I do those on my iPad. And when I'm sketching as a sketchnote, I usually use Adobe. I think it's called Fresco.
MR: Yes.
CO: It used to use Pro, but it changed. I'm still kind of getting used to Fresco because things work a bit differently. And when I'm doing a more kind of artistic look to it, then I use Procreate.
MR: Okay. 'Cause of the brushes they have available of course.
CO: Yeah. They have different kinds of brushes and blurring and they have so many possibilities that I think Fresco's a bit harder. It looks like writing on paper more than Procreate. Can also look that way, but it also does a lot of as if you're using a brush or whatever.
MR: It is interesting that these—
CO: In the more artistic way.
MR: - tool has a field to it, right? You know?
CO: Yeah.
MR: Great. Does feel like it's made for making art.
CO: Yeah, exactly. And I used to do a lot on my phone just with my finger, and I used to draw on my phone, but since I have my iPad, I usually have my iPad in my bag. Also, I have a far too heavy bag. I'm always carrying around everything. And then I have, you know Diana's little pencil case?
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
CO: And it always starts off relatively flat and empty. And then within a week it's far too full. And then my bag gets heavier and heavier and I have to empty and sort it all again.
MR: Reset. We have to reset.
CO: And then I'm sure you recognize I have far too many pens, but I'm still always able to find a pen that I really need and I can't do without, and then I just have to get it. So, when I was in Jordan a couple of weeks ago, and we arrived on the December 31st at 11:00 p.m. And right across the street of our hotel was a little pen shop—
MR: Oh, nice.
CO: - which was open on December 31st at half past 11 at night. So I had a stroll around that. And of course, had to buy two little pens, which I really needed.
MR: Of course.
CO: Probably not, but still.
MR: You can rationalize anything, right? Yeah.
CO: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: That's great. That's great. Well, we'll have to make sure and put links into the show notes, especially Diana's pencil case. The standup pencil case. So we'll find that link as well.
CO: Diana pencil is really good.
MR: Yeah. So now let's shift into the tips section. So this is where I frame it as, imagine someone's listening or watching, they're visual thinker of some kind. Maybe they feel like they've reached a plateau, or they just need a little bump of inspiration, what would you tell that person in three tips?
CO: Well, I think I'd start off with practice. And because with practice, you develop your own way of visual thinking. 'Cause It's about paper layout. When you start, you want to have an idea of how you're going to place things on paper, which also I think brings me to that white spaces don't matter.
When I started, I would put everything together. And it would kind of intertwine 'cause sometimes you want to add a picture or a word, or you want to tie it together with a border or with a color or whatever. I think another tip would also be don't be afraid of white spaces because in the end, what you do is you finish it off and you'll notice that those white spaces won't matter.
You also need a bit of peace and quiet in your sketch. If it's too full, it's too much. And if you're able to work in quiet spots in your sketch, I think it's also good to have a bit of peace of and quiet on your paper or in your notes.
And I think with all the talking about tools, et cetera, It's not really about the tools because like I was saying about my students, I think you have to try, and then you try different tools, and then you work out that, you know, you prefer the 0.1 over the 0.8 pen or the other way around. And whether you prefer the Caran d'Ache over Stabelo pencils or whatever.
And it's not really about the tool, so don't go around buying whole sets. Start off with one. You know, usually you can also buy one color of a certain pen or a certain pencil. First try it out before you invest in lots of tools that you're not really going to use. And that's why I also think of buying a whole box of pencils or a whole box of felt tip pens or whatever colors, there's a lot of colors you're never going to use.
MR: Right.
CO: Yeah. So it might feel like it's more expensive to buy the single pencil, but in the end, if you're only going to be using three of the colors of a whole box in these days, you know, you'll have to think about not wasting too much. Yeah.
MR: Cool. Those are—
CO: That would be—I don't know, did I say things in pictures? I'm not sure whether I said that already.
MR: That can be number four, I guess. Yeah.
CO: I do drawings for educational meetings. And then they'll have a theme. And then I always find myself saying is if they have a theme for one of their evenings, they have a title. The title is usually very general. So I find myself always asking them, what kind of words do you think of within your theme? And those words will help you find the icon and the pictures and metaphors will help sometimes as well. And that reminds me that a good link would also be is the Noun Project.
MR: Yeah.
CO: Yeah. The Noun Project is where, if you have a word, you can type it in and it gives you all kinds of digital drawings that people have made little icons, and not that you use them, but they are good for inspiration for what you can use in your drawing yourself or in your sketch. So I use that a lot as well with the Noun Project. Yep.
MR: That's great. Those are great tips. We have four good tips and solid ones that you can apply right away. Thank you.
CO: Good.
MR: So tell us, Claire, what's the best way to reach you? A website, social media, if someone would like to follow your work and reach out and say hi.
CO: I think I'm most active on Instagram. So that would be #claire_ohl. My name Ohlenschlager, that's far too long. And that's where I post a lot, it's not everything. And of course, I don't post the notes I take at work anymore.
MR: Right.
CO: In my profile, I have the link to a WordPress called Claire's Creativities. I haven't updated those. But if you look in that, then you see—well, I just described that I'm very diverse. I'm not a specialist, so I do lots of things. And then you'll see all kinds of things I do that aren't necessarily sketch noting, but still recognizably me. So, yeah.
MR: That's great. That's great. Well, we'll definitely put that in the show notes as well. So if you wanna see her work or reach out and say hi, you can certainly do so.
CO: Yeah. I'll let you know the names, I'll send them to you just to be sure, the names of my pen and my notebook.
MR: Yeah, for sure. We'll get that to make sure we put those in the show notes. Perfect.
CO: Yeah. Well, Claire, thanks for being on the show. More importantly, thank you for being part of our community. Thanks for being a leader, for being so welcoming and caring and connecting. You're another part of this community that's connected us together. So thank you for your contributions. I really appreciate you and the work you've done, because you've made a lot of people's lives better. Thank you.
CO: Thank you very much, Mike. Very kind words. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me, and thank you for being my inspiration, because that's what you're, and I'm sure you're to many other people in our community.
MR: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that as well.
CO: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: Well, for anyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, we'll talk to you soon.
Pierpaolo Barresi shares how he’s always dreamed of creating something significant. He founded Yobi Scribes, an Italian company that uses creativity, art, games, and communal enjoyment to help achieve business objectives.
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Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with my friend Pierpaolo Barresi. Pierpaolo, how are you doing today? It's so good to have you.
Pierpaolo Barresi: Yeah, nice to meet you, all the people. Nice to meet you again, Mike. Super nice, sunny day in Bologna. So I smile more than rainy days.
MR: I can relate to that. Living in Milwaukee, we're in the middle of a snowstorm now. So hopefully, I'll be happy after I'm done shoveling today. We'll see. Anyway, well, so Pierpaolo is one of the principal creators of Yobi Scribes. We've continually bumped into each other all over the internet and through friends like Mauro Toselli, and it just seemed like it was time to have Pierpaolo on the show and learn his story and hear what he does and all those things. So, Pierpaolo, let's start with who you are and what you do.
PB: Yeah. I am a South Italy guy. I started from the bottom, from the very bottom of Italy. I'm a young boy now. I am more or less 40 years old, and I'm the creative director of Yobi Scribes. Yobi Scribes is a creative crew of artists, designers, scribers, sketchers, knowledge workers, a lot of competence and super nice people is in Yobi. And we are in Italy active, from more or less 10 years.
I started as a self-employed, just me. But my idea from when I was a young boy is to create something bigger, is to share with the others. If you ask me, which is your art? My art, my talent is to connect people and to create things together. So this is my short story.
MR: Great. And so, it sounds like you have quite a variety of skills that you offer to companies and individuals, one of which is scribing, right? Like graphic recording, graphic facilitation, sketchnoting, but it sounds like even more than that. Tell me a little bit more about what Yobi Scribes does, and then also where does this name Yobi come from? What does it mean?
PB: There is an interesting story behind the name Yobi. As Yobi Scribes team, we do mainly scribes and graphic recording, is our core business. The machine is moved by the scribes. We also do graphic design, illustration for internal companies. So we work mainly with the internal part of the companies. We also do videos. We do also some facilitation and creative skill boosters. We love to call this in this way.
We try to connect objective with creativity, reaching objective through creativity, through art, through games, through having fun together. So scribing is the last part in some way because everything comes and join into the scribes, but we try to support and help the company in a bigger way.
MR: That's really cool. So the name Yobi, what's the significance of that name?
PB: Yobi comes from stupid research on Google Maps. We were looking for a short name that was memorable, that was connected with our background. Two of the founders have a huge important hip-hop and graffiti background. So we come from this kind of mood and field. And Yobi, "Yo" is one of the--is like Ciao in Italian. "Yo" is for the black people and also the Italian people in the U.S. say "Yo."
We find that this national park in Papua New Guinea close to New Zealand, just moving the mouse around Google Maps like that looking for a name. And when we see this name, we say, "Whoa, this is the name." We found that the next step is to have a company journey altogether in Yobi, it's not so close to Italy, but one day it is in our objective.
MR: So it is an actual place then in Papua New Guinea sounds like?
PB: Yes. Yes.
MR: Interesting.
PB: I think it's a gross place. It is not the beautiful place over there. If you look on Google Maps, it is not the best place of the region of the nation.
MR: Sure.
PB: Sometimes people tag Yobi on Instagram from the place, and we see the stories. It is the end of arrival. Just not so beautiful. But for us, it's wonderful.
MR: Interesting, interesting. So, I have a funny little story about Google Maps, if you'd like to hear it.
PB: Yes. I want to hear it.
MR: So my son, now he's 21, but when he was a little boy when he was, I dunno, eight or nine years old, we had set up a computer for him to play games on Thomas The Train games and such. One of the games he wanted to always play was Google Maps. At the time, they had an application that you could search around the world. It started with a globe, and you would zoom in. He sat behind me in my office at the time I sat on the other side.
He was home from school one day, and I hear him going, "Woo, woo woo." And I'm like, "What are you doing, Nathan?" I turned around and he said, "I'm playing Google Maps." And you just see this globe floating in space. He thought that was the funniest thing, was to make this the earth shake, like, you know, like crazy. So that was pretty funny.
PB: We played the same game.
MR: Really? Yeah, exactly. That's how you ended up with the name. That's great.
PB: Yes. So the names come from this creative research.
MR: Yeah, exactly. That's great. That totally fits with your whole way of being, right? So that makes total sense. So with Yobi Scribes, tell me how you got to that place. Now, you're doing this thing. How did you end up there? Where did you grow up? Did you grow up in Bologna or have you travelled? Were there things that happened that sort of directed you bit by bit toward the life that you have now? I would love to hear that story.
PB: Super. I born, as I told you, in South Italy in a small town close to the sea--in front of the sea. I studied at Classic Lyceum for my high school. Then I moved to Naples. It's a longer travel story. Then I moved to Naples to study law. I studied two years law. Then I recognized that not mine, and I changed and move from Naples to Bologna.
MR: Okay.
PB: In Bologna, I start to study anthropology. And after my degree in anthropology, I was a little bit, "Oh, what I have to do now? I want to do graphics. I want to do something with my hands. I want to create using my mind and my hands together. Not only my mind or not only my hands." And I decided to start a career as a graphic designer. Starting also in this case, from the bottom, making flyers for my friends.
My friend was a musician, was an artist. I am not able to play nothing. So I start to make graphics for them using my background as a graffiti writer, as a drawer, not illustrator. I don't want to say illustrator. After that, I study in this school, and from this school I win master degree in a school in Milan, the science school in Milan. And I move from Bologna to Milan.
In Milan in this master's, a person that already knows graphic facilitation, scribes, my mentor comes to run a workshop, and I immediately fall in love with him and with the methodology. Also, because the only things that helped me in my studies, in my career as a student was to sketching things. I already studied working and thinking with the sketching.
My graffiti background also helps me to understand immediately the power of graphic recording and graphic facilitation. Because when you make graffiti and especially illegally, you have the same splitting of your brain like when you do scribing. With a left part, you draw and see the space and the flow. With the right parts, you pay attention. In one case, don't be captured. In the other case, listen to the other, but it's the same splitting.
MR: Wow. Well, it sounds like you almost gathered all these parts, right? And also, interesting that you went all the way from the toe of Italy all the way up to the very top of the boot, right? So from the bottom to the top in a sense.
PB: Yes.
MR: And then, you know learning about law for two years and all these other experiences, anthropology, which it's interesting there's some ties between anthropology and user experience design as well, because you're, you know, observing people and how they act in a natural environment to learn how to improve, you know, the design of the thing that they're going to use, right? So all I would imagine all these things maybe are helpful for you and the work that you do. Would that be true?
PB: Absolutely, yes. When I was in my career as a student, I can recognize this can help me, or I was young to recognize. But now, I really use and I'm great to myself to make anthropology, but also law, also Classical Lyceum are things that have opened my mind, especially in the relation with the clients, especially in the understanding the clients is super important for our career, for my career now and for our career. I talk as a Yobi as a group, so I will speak us together sometimes. Just to finish the story of my--
MR: Yeah, please.
PB: I will jump into this field. The person that comes in the workshop ask for a guy to make an internship with him. So I move back in less than one year from Milan again to Bologna. And I stay one year and a half in the studio looking, listening, as a sponge, I try to catch more things and more information for myself. And after this period, I start my self-career honored only by me. Is like a fiscal number, personal fiscal number. I made eight years alone. After eight years the first that joined Yobi was Monica. And now we are four people in the studio.
MR: Wow. Wow. So you sort of, you know, live the life for eight years doing it yourself and probably saw all the places like, "Man, I wish I had someone else who could do--who thought like this, or who could spread the load a little bit." Probably all those things, right? I'm really curious what role do you play now. Obviously, you do scribing still, 'cause there's only four of you. You probably have to, but who does like the company management and those things?
Is it spread across the four of you? Is that something that you focus on? Or are there a few people that do sort of the--you know, you have to get the customers and you have to book them and the invoicing and the paperwork and taxes and all that stuff, which unfortunately comes with the whole story of being a business. Who sort of manages all those things?
PB: Me.
MR: Okay.
PB: I'm just joking, but yes. The thing is in this period, in the last two years, my professional life is changing from a creative life to a manager life. But it's a process of killing ego first. Because if you want to grow up, you have to kill your ego, and you have to trust the people that can speak for you, work for you and make things how you imagine.
My idea is, don't create copy of me, but to have people that can add value and to pass the logistic way of my idea to my team. But in this moment, I'm looking to a lot of things. There is Monica that is helping and looking for me in into the art direction part, into the creative part. She's more focused on it. And also, she's focused on the video editing, video scribing part. But the administration is in charge of me for now.
My idea is to delegate as more I can. A little to come back to be more creative, the more practice, because I want to do scribes a lot, and again and again. It's really my passion. When I make scribe it is like a happy crying, and I feel some light hits me. I feel scribing is my thing. But my thing is also, as I told you, organize, manage people, and try to create new things together, not only with my hands, but with my vision. Yes.
MR: Yeah. Well, I could see some advantages in a company like that where if you have three other people who could do scribing and different skills, they each bring their own perspective. It makes you a stronger company, right, because you now have three different ways, like, oh you like the way Monica does it, she could take that job, or so and so could take this other job because their skills are really good at that thing, right?
So you diversify, I suppose. Then the next thing for you maybe is now that you've internalized all the running of the company, you know what you need. Now you can hire an administrator, you know, to do certain things, to free you up to do that creative stuff. So maybe the fifth person isn't a creative person, but maybe an administrator who does sort of the things that take you away from the creative work, right?
PB: Yeah. The next step is to hire an administrator. I think just to have a complete view of my idea is when you want to grow up, the two processes are making people happy. So simply paying the right fee for them to be happy and also killing your ego. I killed my ego so now we are just growing.
We have Monica as creative director and our director, we have a copywriter. We have a young illustrator that she's learning scribing and she's trying to learn as much as possible visual methodologies. The next step is to hire an administration. Step by step. We don't want to scale up too fast because we want to do the things in the natural flow.
MR: Yeah. I think following an organic path makes sense in this case. And it's really interesting too, because remember in your origin story you said that you were just like this new person you hired trying to absorb as much as possible and learn, right? So maybe that person in the future, at some point, maybe they start their own Yobi Scribes, right? Like, you'd never know. Right. But you're sort of following the cycle. The cycle that you went through is now the cycle that your team is learning through as well, which is really cool.
PB: Yeah. And also, I think we, as scribers, as graphic facilitators, as graphic recorders, are really lucky people. We have the possibility to learn a lot from big companies, from open-minded people. So, one of my goal life, the first is to share what I learn with the others is. To pass my competence to some other one, to create more and more and more visual communication for the world, for the people. I really believe, and I really, truly believe in the methodology. So for me, it's super important to have an Infiniti loop.
MR: Yeah, exactly. You become--
PB: To grow all together.
MR: Yeah. And then you become Obi-Wan Pierpaolo, right? So you become the old master teaching the Padawan, right?
PB: No. No, no, no. It is not in my objective to be the Obi-Wan.
MR: That's funny.
PB: We just want to make beautiful and useful things for the others.
MR: That's good. That's good. So we've talked about who you are, what you do, your company, how you got here. Can you talk about a recent project that you're excited about that you can tell us about and what that looked like? What did you do? Were there videos or other components outside of the scribing that were part of it, and how does that look when you deliver it to the customer?
PB: Okay. One of the last projects of the year 2023 was a video we created for small company that produce sustainable energy. And they asked us to create some story that could be catchy for different age of target. We tried to do old 90-style cartoon. We work a lot on this and we were really happy of the results. The client was really happy of the results. Now in the New Year, in this year, we are starting to work a lot to keeping notes and keeping trace of their work with sketching and with pencil and not with the digital tools.
And also, we are working with several university on this field. And this is another part of Yobi that me and also my team like a lot to help the young people to try to make in their mind there is a possibility. "There is another possibility for me, and this could be a new way for me." We love to see the eyes shining in the young generation, and that fills our heart and our mind.
MR: That's really cool.
PB: As scribes with restarted normally. Also, in digital, but also in a handmade version. And we will go in Sofia in February to follow the next Sofia event that will be about limitless. So we move also in Europe in this year. We are trying to cover Italy as much as possible. One of our objectives is to be the best, the number one company that do this in Italy, step by step. But also, we are looking to Europe.
MR: Yeah. There's certainly opportunity for sure. That's really great. So you've talked about a project. Now I would love to hear, shifting, what kind of tools do you and your company like to use? I have my guesses, but it's always interesting to hear, especially if there's some unusual tools that you use. And let's start with analog first and then digital second. If indeed, you still use analog tools as part of your process.
PB: Okay. The best tool we use--I can say the product name.
MR: Yes, please. Please.
PB: Yes. Okay. We use mainly Uni-Posca's and GROG tools. The GROG are graffiti markers. The one that drips also when you see in the city, some drip text is made with this kind of marker like a mop. And these ones are the best one for us. They are acrylic colors. They feel on a lot of surfaces. That's the reason we love this one because with these two kinds of markers, we are sure the surface will be covered with the right color in the right way. Almost always.
But we try a lot of markers. We come from a world, as I mentioned before graffiti that mix technology and techniques like spry, rolls, paints. We try to use different tools, but it depends by the project. For the digital obviously, normal ones are Procreate and iPad. But also, we love to use a still Illustrator, like all designers.
MR: Right, yeah. Yeah. So that would be on the computer. Do you use something like a Wacom tablet with a pen or just the mouse?
PB: Yes. We have two Wacom tablets in the studio and several iPads for the live scribes or for some small projects. It depends. When we have to print, we normally use Illustrator and Wacom. If we have to create and produce something for the web, we go directly on Procreate.
Also, for the animation, the world is changing because Adobe is not the--yes, it's still the best, but a lot of competitors of Adobe is still trying to do something easier than use the software of Adobe. Procreate is growing with the animation parts, and we put use both Adobe and Procreate to create a short animation. Maybe we animate in Procreate and then edit in Premier to have a more professional editing. It depends on project by project.
MR: Yeah. It's always good to have more tools, right? Because then you can choose the tool that's right for the job.
PB: Yes. And we--yeah. No, sorry.
MR: Yeah. Otherwise, you know--I mean, sometimes you get interesting results by using the wrong tool for the job. I've seen that happen where because you use the wrong tool for the job 'cause that's what I have, it produces a really interesting output, which actually you might come to like, right? I don't know. I can't think of an example, but I know I've had that happen where I just grab the pen that's available to me and think, "Well, this is not the right pen, but that looks really interesting." And you kind of go with it, right?
PB: Yeah. And you open an open door with me because I think there is no wrong way to create. The only way to create is experiment. Is mixing technology, techniques. Especially in this era, if you want to create something new, you have to mix, you have to experiment, you have to try to find something new. Is not so easy finding something new. But if you experiment, you can try to also to put yourself out in a different way. If we use the same brush, all the scribes, we use the same brush in Procreate, all the scribes will be more or less the same. If you try to experiment and to put yourself experimenting, trying, having fun on what you do, the difference comes out.
MR: Yeah. This is an interesting--now that you talk about this, this brings up a thought that I've had, and I don't think I've talked much about it, is that the tool you use can change the output of the way you work, right? So when I use a brush pen, it changes the way I work. You wouldn't think so.
You would think, I mean, still there's the Mike Rohde personality is coming out of it, but it gets expressed in a little bit different way when I'm using a brush than when I'm, say using, you know, something like a big Neuland fat marker with a--you know, like the output, it changes the way I work.
And it's interesting that we don't often think about that. We just think, well, tools are just interchangeable. But I think in a lot of ways, the kind of tool can sort of shape the output to some degree. Maybe not completely, but have you found that as well?
And I think that might be an opportunity, while we're talking about tools, is to maybe use intentionally--what if the experiment is to intentionally use the wrong tool and get frustrated, but then find the unique, like, "Wow, that's really--for 80 percent of what I wanted, it didn't work for that 20 percent, that's really cool. Maybe I can use that in a future project, right?
I usually do that, right? I'm fooling around and I discover something and I try to remember to use that in some way or find a way I can use that kind of mistake as an intentional thing. Has that happened with your team as well?
PB: Yes. We think nothing go into the trash. When you do something, you get some experience and maybe you will not use this experience for years and years and years, but when you need this, you already know. If you have a lot of space in your head and you feel it, when you need something, you immediately remind what you need.
We have also to play, to use our mind as a computer. Some information you have to delete, some information you have to keep. And this kind of information is what can help you to grow and to make new things, beautiful things, useful things.
MR: Excellent. Excellent. Well, that's good to hear. Sounds like we're on the same page. Let's shift now to tips. I warned you a little bit ahead of time. So the way I frame this is I say, imagine someone's listening or watching us, and they're a visual thinker of some kind, but they feel maybe they're in a rut or they just need some inspiration, or it's a gray day, right, and you just don't feel it. What would be something you would tell that person that would encourage them? And I frame it as three tips. They can be practical or whatever you like.
PB: I think I will give three mindset tricks because for us, it is more important the mind than the end. Especially in our work. First of all, have fun as you write in your book. If you don't have fun, you can do this kind of job, this kind of work is not your field. You have to think positively every time and try to play with yourself, especially when you listen and you have to synthesize in real-time. If you don't have fun, you can create nothing.
The second thing is do what you know. We are professionals. A lot of clients for our point of view, but in general, for our experience, try to guide you but is not correct, is you have to guide the client because you are a specialist. We are specialists in this field, and is not to be super egocentric, but is true. If you want to have the best result from us, you have to trust us.
And doing what, you know, is the only way to make yourself sure and be specified as a sure person, as a professional person. So the focus is, "I am good on that and I do that," and try to implement and grow up on what you love what is the obsession of your life.
And the third thing I can say as a trick is to give thanks. As I mentioned before, we are super, super lucky. I had the possibility to meet super HR manager, super people manager, marketing manager of big brands. We have to steal from them and to report to our community.
And doing this is giving thanks because we have this good possibility to have an impact. We have an impact during our scribing session because the responsibility is huge. We can evidence the difference or eliminate some difference. We have to be really responsible when we do scribe, but the same responsibility is to what we learn in the big companies is to pass to the community where we live.
MR: Very cool.
PB: Thank you.
MR: Well, it's always good. I love this part of it. You may or may not know that at the end of the season, we gather all the tips together and we make them into an episode at the end. One of my favorite ones, one of many people's favorite shows, is those tips all merged together because you get 60 minutes or something of inspiration from all the guests. So it'll be exciting to include these in the session, in that episode. So thank you for sharing those with us.
PB: Super. Super. Thank you for having me with you this afternoon in Italy.
MR: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the last thing that we can talk about is how do people find Yobi Scribes. Is there a website, social media? What's the best way to see your work? And then also to reach out to you? Which may be is the same thing.
PB: Okay. I think the best social media to see our work is LinkedIn.
MR: Really. Okay, cool.
PB: Yes, we use a lot LinkedIn. Also to create relationships with our clients also to find new potential clients. But is the place where we publish more scribing, the more part of the job. If you want to see illustrations and other stuff, also like videos and promo of our company, Instagram, and it's @yobiscribes. But if you want to see scribes and works, LinkedIn is the best page because it is the one that we use more with post and creating pools. We use a lot of our LinkedIn page also because our bios are on LinkedIn.
MR: Got it.
PB: Our target is over there.
MR: Yeah. It does make sense. It's interesting that you've mentioned that, that I've noticed probably in the last--I guess maybe starting with the pandemic, that there's a lot more visual thinkers on LinkedIn. And I was asking someone, a guest, a few seasons ago, who is a specialist in LinkedIn. I said, "Is it like a trend or is it just me and the algorithm is showing me what I want to see?"
And she said, "No, it actually is a trend that there's visual thinkers that are going on LinkedIn and sharing their work because it's an interesting platform. Lots of engagement, a really different type of you know, potential clients or people there." So that's really a fascinating shift.
Of course, you know, Instagram is natural, right? It's designed around visuals. Although Instagram is in a strange place where they don't know what they wanna be. The static picture is sort of getting overshadowed by the Reels and, you know, there's so much going on there, it's hard to know what the focus is. Whereas LinkedIn is where relatively stable and a lot of opportunities. So I think there's, you know, a visual aspect..
PB: Yeah. If I can give you a numeric data is from Instagram, we have the page from eight, nine years, we catch and collect three clients, From LinkedIn. In last year, five, six years that we have the LinkedIn page, company page, the 50 percent of our clients comes from LinkedIn.
MR: Wow. Wow. And I suppose word of mouth, which is probably the best type of new clients acquisition is happening there.
PB: The other 50 percent.
MR: Yeah. But that probably supports it, right? Because someone says, "Oh, you need to work with Yobi Scribes, go look at their LinkedIn page." So now it becomes a reference, right? And then you can see who else did Yobi Scribes work with, then you have validation.
PB: And also there is an empty space. In Italy, there are several companies that do scribes and this kind of thing. We are thinking also to implement our YouTube channel, because also over there especially in Italy, there's not a voice. There's not a company, a person that is doing this in a strong way.
In Germany, there is Benjamin. But here that channel with tips and tricks--in Italy, there's not a social communication about scribes, about graphic facilitation, about sketch noting. So we are trying positioning ourself also in this social way. We love to work and to make job done and not to be posting and social media manager, but it's not possible to live in this era without posting on social media.
MR: Yeah, that's true. And it seems to me like probably, you started to identify that each social media sort of has its benefits and also, it's often not the same audience. I've noticed that with the podcast. So the podcast has existed since 2016, the audio version. I think two years ago, I started experimenting with posting these recordings as videos on YouTube. And it's a completely different audience.
So if you think of it that way, if you've got the capacity to do LinkedIn and Instagram and YouTube and whatever other platforms, you're actually diversifying in a lot of ways because the people that see you in one place don't necessarily see you in that other place. And so, it's actually expansion in that sense.
PB: Yes. Also, you have to remain under an umbrella, but the tone of voice is also different. It's not only the target, but how you have to catch, engage, connect, attract this target is three levels of three different communication.
MR: Yeah. You have to tailor to that.
PB: We have hired a copywriter.
MR: Smart move.
PB: Yes.
MR: Well, Pierpaulo, this has been really excellent. I've learned a lot from you. And of course, we'll reach out and get us links for all the things, all the places we can send people to. We like to do show notes with details. Thank you so much for the work you're doing in Italy. Thank you for being such a great person and seeking to find people to work with you and to represent our community in such a positive way. I'm so encouraged, and I just wanted to let you know, I appreciate you. Thank you.
PB: Thank you, Mike. It was a super pleasure for me to be here with you. Hope to meet you in person as soon as possible.
MR: Yeah. I think I need to do an Italian trip. Of course, my wife will kill me if I don't bring her along. So maybe we bring the whole family. That would be fun. So when that happens, we'll of course, let you guys know.
PB: And you'll be our guest in Bologna.
MR: Oh, that would be great.
PB: You can come in our studio.
MR: Maybe we need an Italian tour all the way from Milan down. So, we'll see.
PB: Yeah. I have to be your fifth runner.
MR: Sounds good. Well, for anyone who's--
PB: Good luck with that.
MR: Thank you. And for everybody who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon. Ciao.
PB: Ciao.
In this episode, Alina Gutierrez reflects on her childhood passion for art, her work as a banker, and how her banking experience led to her career in graphic facilitation.
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Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everybody, it's Mike, and I'm here with Alina Gutierrez from Visual Versa. Alina, it's so good to have you. Thanks for being on the show.
Alina Gutierrez: Thank you. I'm super excited to be here.
MR: Yeah, me too. You were a recommendation from my friend Alejo Porras, who has been on the show in the past, and he's coming back again this season because so much has changed in his world, but he highly recommended you, and I'm always looking for new, interesting people, and you fit that perfectly. So why don't you tell us a little about who you are and what you do?
AG: Perfect. Thank you. That's such a simple question, yet complex answer.
MR: Sure.
AG: So who am I? I am a mom, wife, friend, lots of roles. I like starting with that because I think beyond whatever we do, we're all humans and have a personal life outside what we do. I have two little boys, seven and eight. I'm originally from Columbia, but I've been in Canada, oof. I lost count, I think since 2007, around those dates.
I am the founder of Visual Versa. I've been working for a little bit over 10 years, bringing color and visual notes to organizations. Well, there's a little bit of everything because I have a background all over the place. I think through Visual Versa, I found a way to merge all those passion and all that experience that I've had gained. I don't know if I answer.
MR: It sounds like you're kind of a generalist, I would say. You have lots of skills and you find ways to weave them together. Maybe that's a way to say it, I guess.
AG: I love that. Yes.
MR: Yeah, there you go. You can steal that if you want to.
AG: I like it. Thank you. I'll be stealing it. Yeah.
MR: Well, you hinted at it, but I'm really curious, I'm always curious for every guest, but especially in this case with you, how you ended up in this place. It sounds like you had lots of interests and lots of things happening, and yet you found this way to weave them together or find a place to weave them together. I suspect there were things you did in the past where you couldn't do the other things.
Like you had to focus on one thing and maybe you're frustrated, or. Tell us that story, go all the way back to even when you were a little girl. Were there things that you did as a little girl that you see now the thread tying you to the present?
AG: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was actually having a conversation with my parents not too long ago, and they were like, "We're not surprised you're doing what you're doing right now." I used to paint everywhere. I was the one who did a mural in my room and painted my jackets and painted on my backpack, whatever. You name it, I have painted on it. I was blessed enough to have a family that allowed me to do that. But I also had, I would say, this duality between that rational side of me and the artistic side, I think a lot of it came from my background.
You know, back home, the opportunities or the amounts of jobs available were not as many back then. Right now, I think there's a lot of stuff going on, and there's actually a lot of people doing sketch notes back home and really good people. But I felt that I had to go for a more secure career. When it came to the time where I had to design what, I wanted to do, I went into a program called design Engineering. It had that design aspect of it, the creativity, but it had the engineering title that kind of had that recognition. So social recognition.
Back in high school, I was the one who painted doors for every single party or whatever we were celebrating. I was part of a musical actually in my hometown. I used to sing and act. Then I got to university, and despite the design part of the program, there was a lot of calculus and physics and all that kind of stuff.
I've been kind of a perfectionist my whole life so I wanted to excel, but I had to put a lot effort into it. I realized by now, but then looking back, it's like sometimes when you have to push that more effort, things do not come natural to you maybe that's not your place. It doesn't mean that you cannot do it. If you put yourself to it, you can. But, you know, all the creative part of it used to come so natural to me.
Then there was this opportunity to do exchange program in Quebec. So I applied to university and the way it worked, it was a agreement between governments, so I could come here and do a semester or a year of my program and some students would go there. I had to pay for my expenses, but I didn't have to pay for the university.
I applied to Concordia University. I got accepted. Then when I got my acceptance letter, they said, "The only thing is we don't have the same program here, so you have to either go into fine arts or the engineering department." I was like, "Ta-da." I was so excited. Scared but excited. So I said, "I wanna go into fine arts." And you know, that self-doubt of like, "Oh, maybe I don't have what it takes because these people that are doing all plain arts and I haven't done that much."
But I submitted my portfolio, got accepted and came to Montreal. After I got here, I kept extending my stay, extending, extending. I was like, "Oh, I like it. I'm gonna finish my program and then go back home." Then I graduated. In Canada, when you graduate as an international student, they give you a work permit. And I was like, "No, I need to get work experience here and then go back home with that in my CV." Long story short, I ended up staying. I met someone and it's been way too long and I'm still here. I'm getting to your question.
MR: Oh, this is all part of the question. You're doing excellent. Keep going.
AG: Okay. I then graduated and I had to find a job because part of the rule is they give you a work permit, then you have to find a job within a timeline. I found a job. It was hard for me to find a job because you had to speak English and French for most job openings, and I didn't speak French back then. I found something, I was not too happy then found a job at a bank, you figure.
They hire me. They were like, "We don't care, you don't have that background. We'll train you in the background, but you like dealing with people, you're good at customer service, you're good." I worked at a bank for three years and it got to the day where my boss was like, "Okay, we need to do something about your background so you can keep advancing at the bank. I need you to go back to school and do a program in business or HR, whatever it is but it's a little bit more aligned with the bank than fine arts." And I was like, "Sure. Fair enough."
I went back to school and I couldn't keep up with classes, I couldn't keep up with my notes. I started doing a program in organizational psychology or change management type of thing. It was really text heavy, the things were complicated. And then I started getting sketchbooks instead of the traditional lined book and I would do mind maps. I would get stuck like, "I dunno how to write that word." Then every time that I didn't know how to write that word, I would doodle it and keep going.
MR: Ah, okay.
AG: Then during my second year one prof came to me and she was like, "Alina, do you do graphic facilitation?" And I was like, "Wait, I do, what is that?"
MR: What's that?
AG: "What is that?" She said, "Graphic facilitation." And I'm like, "Well, it has the word graphic in it, so it sounds cool, but I have no idea what that is." She was like, "Okay, you should look into it." I was like, "Sure." And I remember that night, like it was yesterday, I came home and I googled "graphic facilitation." Then I started looking at people doing these big drawings in front of people, And I was like, "People get paid to do that? That is such a cool job. that's what I wanna do."
Then I started looking into courses, you know, that academic side of me, I have to get trained. I have to get something so I can start. I took a two-day course here in Montreal of graphic facilitation. Then, you know, my classmates and the profs started seeing what I was doing, and they were like, "Why don't you come in front of the class and take notes?" The professor would explain something, I would like doodle and then at the end of the class, people would take pictures.
And I was like, there's something in here. Initially, I thought it was like, oh, this is something that helps me because I'm studying my second language. I'm doing a program in a second language. But then I realized that even people from here who were studying their native tongue were like, "That's really cool. Can I take pictures of your notes to study for the papers or to write the papers? And I was like, "Cool. Yeah, take pictures."
Then the university was doing events and I started volunteering myself, and I would do it in exchange for material. I was like, "Hey, I need to get these markers that are super expensive. Can you buy three or four of those markers and then I'll take visual notes at your event." And they were like, "Sure." Or, "Can you get me paper and whatever." Then I started getting exposure and practice 'cause now I look at the first visual notes that I took, and I'm like, "I can't believe someone let me do that."
MR: Same for me too. When I look back at the first sketch and I was like, "What was I thinking?"
AG: What was I thinking? And I'm like how come I was not even shy to go in front of people and do that, but I'm grateful. I'm really grateful because that's the way it started. Then I realized there was a career in it, and because my background is in workshop design and facilitation and strategic sessions, then I do that as well, but I bring that creative aspect.
So it doesn't matter what type of workshop I'm designing, it doesn't matter what type of a strategic session or whatever I'm doing, there's always doodles or images or visual metaphors or whatever it is involved in the planning and delivery of these workshops. I always bring that aspect into my work.
MR: Interesting. Well, it's interesting because you say that you're doing this now, but you were going to school for change management. Was there a shift somewhere that you made a change? Because obviously, you were now excited about this graphic facilitation you discovered, but you obviously were not going in that direction. So how did you manage that with the bank? That sounds like a whole story in itself, huh?
AG: Yes. That could be another episode, but let me try to make it short. Okay, I'm bad at answering short. I always go on and tell a long story. Long story short, I gave myself a deadline. I had a year left to finish my program. I asked for a leave at the bank and I said, "Okay, I have what it takes for me to leave for a year and see what happens.
So if from now in a year I see I can make this my full-time job, I'll quit the bank and if I can't, then I'll go back." You know, no harm. I gave it a try at least, right. I gave myself year, and by the end of the year, I had enough to be able to take the risk and then I quit the bank and started doing this full time.
MR: Pretty smart way to approach it.
AG: I always have like, yeah, I need to—I go with the flow, I adapt, but at the same time, I always need like my plan A, B, and C because I know things don't always work the way we want it, but yeah.
MR: So then you proved that you could do it for a year, that it was something you could survive with. I assume then that that's probably when you started doing this other schooling or education, it sounds like, for what you were talking about around facilitation and meeting plan—or I guess I'll let you describe it because I don't know exactly what that focus was.
AG: That's fine. That was actually part of the program I was doing when I discovered visual notes.
MR: Ah, okay.
AG: Yeah, it's a program where we talked a lot about creating containers for people, facilitating spaces so people can have the conversation. I'm not the expert in whatever topic they're gonna talk about, which I think is pretty aligned with graphic facilitation. Sometimes I'm taking visual notes for the pharmaceutical or a non-for-profit, you know, organization. And they're like, "Oh, so you just work with these types of organizations?" I'm like, "No." "So how do you understand what we're talking about?" I'm like, "I don't really understand the whole—I don't understand every little detail, but I understand what you're talking about.
I mean, there's always the option of putting a post-it on with a word that I didn't understand and going and asking people, but we don't need to be the experts in their topic. I actually think it gives a nice, fresh perspective because from an outsider perspective, we get to ask different questions. And with facilitation is like that. So it was part of the program.
MR: Cool.
AG: I was doing it with the goal in mind of going back to the bank and hopefully going into HR, because I loved training and development. And then, you know, I ended up doing training and development, but on my own.
MR: In a different way. Yeah. Interesting.
AG: Yeah, and—
MR: One question about when you did that one year, was there one client or project that made you say, "Okay, I can do this?" Was it that, or was it more like, there were a lot of clients that said, "Okay, I think I can make this work." How that go in that year between?
AG: Yes, it was more about multiple clients than one client, but it was also the idea of—I started seeing the ripple effect that you could create. It was something innovative enough or different enough for me to most of the time leave each event with at least one potential client. At least. I would say at least, because most of the time you leave with like two or three referrals and sometimes even down the line, you get more especially in conferences where you get people from different organizations.
So it's not the same if I do any strategic planning where it's like an internal group. Yes, I might get referrals to other departments, but I don't get as much triple effect on when I go into a conference of like, I don't know, real estate agents or you know, a conference on non-for-profit organizations that are working mental health. But in one meeting or in one conference, I might get access to 60 different organizations or more. That's where I started seeing, okay, you know, this is creating a pipeline good enough for me to see the potential and take a risk and give it a try.
MR: Cool. So then now we'll pick up again. You've done the year, you've decided that this is the way you're gonna go, you quit the bank, so what happens next?
AG: It's really scary.
MR: I would guess so, yeah.
AG: Yeah. Then you quit the bank and, you know, it was really comfortable to get a paycheck every two weeks. Then I realized that, you know, there's months where I was making three or four times what I was making at the bank, and then months where I was making $0. It gets way better as the years move. There's also a cycle throughout the year and you learn to deal with it. So I know most of the time, January is a quiet month, but then I take that month to reach out to clients, do a lot of admin work, prepare things.
I have now my online aspect to my business so I have like an online course and an eBook and all that kind of stuff. So I know that during January I can take that time without the anxiety of nothing is coming. It's normal that nothing is coming. I kind of started seeing the cycle, but what happened once with the bank was, I started reaching to people, reaching out to people I knew or looking for events in the city and reaching out to the events, being like, "This is what I do."
The difference is that right now, I would say, one out of two people, I tell them, I take visual notes and they're like, "That's really cool." And the other person would be like, "You do what?" But back then, two out of two people were like, "You do what?" So it was really hard to explain. And I found myself in that reality that it was like, okay, it was really easy for me to get referrals out of an event where people saw what I did. And It was not as easy to reach out to people and be like, "Look, this is what I do and these are the benefits."
Obviously, it's way easier for me 10 years later to explain the benefits than back then. So I got into a rollercoaster. It had its ups and downs and, you know, moments where I was like, "What am I doing? I'm gonna look for a full-time job again." Then other moments where I was like, "This is amazing." You know. I think I learned a little bit to deal with that rollercoaster and appreciate the highs and be prepared for the lows because as an entrepreneur, that always happens.
MR: Yeah. I don't know your language skills in French, but I think one advantage you hold is you understa`11nd Spanish English. And I assume by now some degree of French, I don't know how much. That could be really valuable in that environment and Quebec especially, right. Because there's probably multiple languages probably being spoken and that would set you apart, I suspect.
AG: Absolutely. Yes. I mean, it's also shown me a different part that I didn't realize at the beginning, but a different part of this amazing tool. It's how we can make information accessible even during an event, especially in Quebec, a reality is most events have to deal with actual duality, the bilingualism. And there's not always a translator right there. Sometimes people are presenting in English and switch to French. I've done it where if the person is presenting in English, I take visual notes in French, and if they're presenting in French, I take visual notes in English.
MR: Interesting.
I had people come and see me at the end and be like every time I didn't understand what was going going on, I would turn and look at your notes and be like, "Oh, okay, they're talking about this." They might not get the full detailed thing, but at least they had an idea of what was going on. Every time they got lost, they could look at the notes and be like, "Oh, okay, this is where we're going." So it's been a nice experience. Obviously being me, I was like, there's something in there.
So let's add another layer to my story. I started my PhD, about some years ago, longer than I would like to say because it's taken way too long, but I was like, you know what? There's a lot of people saying, look, this works and this is what it is. And because of my personal experience, but there's not a lot of research behind it. There is some, but not as much. And I was like, I wanna start getting into that. Into how we can make communication more accessible. How we could use these types of tools to work.
'Cause the reality nowadays is that in most teams, you have someone like me who's working in their second or third language. And even if we have a good level of understanding and speaking, sometimes it—well, even when we're speaking our mother tongue, we have misunderstandings. Communication is hard.
And adding this thing where like, I could doodle as I'm explaining things and we can have a conversation and make sure that literally we're on the same page, and we're like, "Oh, no, this is not what I had in mind." Or like, "Oh, what about if we move this line here?" We don't go on and each work on our projects and realize we were on different pages and didn't realize it. So I was like I wanna look into that. So, yeah, I started doing a PhD and I'm researching the effect of using visual tools to facilitate change in organizations and communities.
MR: Wow. That's really cool. When you finish the PhD, do you have plans to include, I assume, imagery to convey and communicate your points?
AG: Yes. That's the idea. I mean writing papers in English is not easy at all for me. I am lucky enough to have a committee that they're super open to innovative ideas. I think thanks to that I've been able to get to the point where I'm at. I should have been finished by now, but in between, you know, starting the PhD and now I had my second baby and there was COVID and there's been all kinds of stuff that we don't plan for it.
So it's been taking way longer, but it's still something that informs my practice and my practice informs my research. And I like that way of being able to bring things from one side to the other. It's also giving me tools to teach because I love teaching, but I don't have a background in teaching.Facilitation and teaching, I think they have tools they share and principles they share. But it is giving me a little bit of tools and resources for me to do a better job when I'm trying to teach this tool to others.
MR: Well, there's two thoughts around that. One is for English speakers, writing papers and PhDs is not easy in English. So, I mean, you don't feel too bad about that. It's tough all around, right. But I'm sure there's probably challenges you face that may be a native English speaker might not.
The second thing I was gonna mention is a book my friend Nick Sousanis wrote, he was on the show many, many seasons ago, and it's a book called Unflattening. You can look that up. And anybody who's listening look up Unflattening. It is a graphic novel that he submitted as his PhD paper explaining why graphic novels are a superior form of communication for idea.
AG: Awesome.
MR: My thought is—
AG: I'm not only gonna look at the book, I'm gonna reach out.
MR: Yeah. I can make that connection with you, if you like and talk to Nick. I think it would be really interesting for you to see, even if you just see photos of it, but you could certainly order a copy of it and see how he did it.
AG: I'll absolutely do that.
MR: Right. Because that might inspire you when you submit your PhD, maybe you can bring to your committee like, "Hey, I wanna make it, maybe not to this degree." 'Cause the whole thing is a comic book, right? His focus is on graphic novels and comics as a communication device. So very possibly you could, you know, take ideas from it but make your PhD paper much more visual than maybe anybody would expect, and that could advantage you know, what you're trying to do.
AG: And that's the idea. I mean, I don't wanna do—and I tend to fall into that trap sometimes that if I'm talking about visuals, I don't wanna have something really text heavy. I know it's academic and I still have to have that research part, but a big part of it, I think can be visual. I've had that conversation with my supervisor, and now when you asked me about my story, I forgot, and it's actually during high school, there was a way that I got out of a paper, a philosophy paper saying I wanted to do visuals to represent that. And I negotiated with the teacher, and I ended up giving him a booklet with drawings instead of doing a paper and actually one exam.
I did the same through my master's program with the prof that is now my supervisor, where I was like, "I'm so tired of writing papers. It takes so much energy." And I think I spent like double the time doing this booklet, but I had so much fun and add to today, years later, I could still talk to the topic, which doesn't happen with the tons of paper I wrote, the part.
MR: Yeah. Yeah. It's so cool.
AG: So that's the idea. I don't know how far they'll let me go with it, but I'm like, "Yes, my thesis is gonna be image heavy, not text heavy."
MR: Sounds like you're a negotiator already. So you'll probably find a way to negotiate something, right?
AG: Yes.
MR: And, you know, find a way to make everybody happy. But yeah, that's really interesting. And so now you're doing this full time, it sounds like it can be a rollercoaster at times, which being independent can often be. Tell me about a project that you're working on or maybe something you just finished that you can share that got you excited that you can tell us about, and then we can see like, okay, here's how all the things that you're interested in fit together in a project.
AG: I actually just finished working with a client and I worked with them for several years. The name of the organization is One Drop. If you haven't heard about it, go and look it up. It's an amazing organization. It was created by Guy Laliberte'. He's the same founder of Cirque du Soleil. So it is a non-for-profit. They work in different countries. They work in India, south America, here up north, in Africa.
Anyways, they have tons of projects. Most of the projects that I was working with them were the ones in Latin America. So it's a project called Lazos de Agua , and they bring clean water to underprivileged communities. But then what they realized obviously is—this was founded by Guy Laliberte, it had to have that creative side of it.
They were like, "A lot of times we spent tons of money in the infrastructure of these projects, we bring clean water to the communities, and then it happens that people are not using it because sometimes they have to walk." It's still a distance to do it, but it's because there's a behavior change included, right?
If you were used to walking to the river, meeting all people from the community, grabbing water there, or washing your clothes, it's not the same. There is a component of these projects that is behavior change. You have to create that awareness in the community. So they used an approach that is called Social Art for behavior change, where they use art to work with the communities as, you know, a parallel approach.
While there's people working in the infrastructure, there is this amazing team of people working with the communities in behavior change, and they work with people from the community. So it's initiatives and art that comes from the community. They use actually local art to do different things.
I work with them in—it was so nice because I found one organization where I could actually use all my skills. Sometimes I would facilitate sessions, sometimes I design interventions, sometimes I was designing visual tools that they would use when they would go and meet with the community. I actually helped them design and facilitate a big event that happened to celebrate the anniversary of the program in Mexico last year.
It was an organization with which I could use all my facets and experiences. They also work in English, French, and Spanish. When I got there, I was like, "Oh my goodness, this place was created for me." It was so good. I could be part of different projects and take different hats. I realized, with them, it was the first time that I actually started using visual tools and visual notes as a tool for behavior change. And that part, I had not experienced that before.
And it got me into another road where I started learning a lot on how to do it and how to involve with the community. It's not like they go and they have an intervention and it's ready and it's done. They go, they work with the community, they get people from the community to facilitate, to co-design, to co-create. Everything is done together. It was such an amazing experience throughout. I learned a lot.
MR: Well, that's pretty cool because then I would imagine if the people who co-create, it's more likely they will adopt. So if it's their choice or they have a hand in, "Hey, we're not going to the river anymore, we're going to the well, right?" They would say, "Well, what things do we do with the river? Well, we wash our clothes, we probably chat, we gossip. So how do we relocate that stuff to another place?" And I'm sure you've facilitated all that kind of change with them. That's pretty cool. That sounds really like a fun project.
AG: The tons of projects throughout the pandemic also working with the handwashing behavior and soap and they even went the extra mile on like, "Okay, we're gonna create the capacity within the community." There are communities that didn't have access to local soap, you know, they would have. So, okay, let's you know, inject some capital in the community so someone could start a business and do soap and sell soap."
You know, so it's like this whole chain we're thinking about the different components and kind of addressing them. Yeah, it was such a cool experience to have and to see how we're using a tool to create meaningful change.
MR: That sounds really great. Thanks for sharing that project.
AG: My pleasure.
MR: Well, so let's shift now to tools. We're always curious here on the show, what kind of tools you like. I don't know if you use digital, but we typically do analog tools, and then digital tools, mainly because everybody says iPad Pro, pencil, and Procreate, which is incredibly boring. And there's often so many fun, you know, pens and markers and paints and things that people use that maybe are unexpected. So I would love to hear, like, when you do your graphic facilitation or anything, where you use regularly. Tell us about the kind of tools you use and then you can do the digital stuff at the end if you like.
AG: Yeah. The digital stuff. I'm gonna be boring.
MR: Like most people.
AG: Let's go into the analog. Look, I'm all over the place and I like saying this because obviously I love Neuland. I love the fact that you can refill the markers. I love everything about that brand. I have their board, and I love them. But they're an investment. It's something that I did once I was into this for a while and I could do that investment, but I literally use Crayola markers with in my workshop side, right?
I tell people, "You can get started with that." I got started with Ome DeSerres, it's like a local art store here. They have their home brand. They're super affordable and they're amazing markers. The only thing is that I realized every three months I needed to buy new markers, which it hasn't happened to me since I got Neuland. I can't even say the name. I should know. So I'm all over the place. I use Crayola, I use Sharpie, I use local brands, well, for my workshops, and when it's me taking my visual notes, I use Neuland.
MR: Okay. Got it. Are you someone who experiments? Do you go to the art store and like, "Ooh, that would be interesting to try," and you pick things up or you like that?
AG: Yes.
MR: Okay. That's me too.
AG: I love that. And I love finding clients who are upto, you know. So like I started using postcard or I don't know, acrylic markers not too long ago. I got them and they have amazing colors, like really bright colors. I Told the client, I'm like, you know, "It's gonna be different. Is it okay if I give it a try?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give it a try."
I think it's one of the most colorful graphic recordings I've done. I loved it. I try even with acrylic when it's something that is like a long event or when I could prepare some graphics ahead of time. I've done, if I prepare things, because sometimes I come with posters that are already illustrated for people to fill in with the ideas. And then in there I've tried everything. Ink you know, acrylics, you name it. Pastels.
I use pastels a lot too especially with people that are starting when I'm teaching them, I show them things they can do with pastels that is not complicated, doesn't take a lot of time, but it brings a little bit of a colorful effect to your graphics. So they look like you did it really fast, but it's just because it's easy to just spread the pastel around and give a little bit of shadow or highlight to whatever you're drawing.
MR: Interesting. It's interesting that going back to when you were a little girl and you painted everything, that you found a way to incorporate Pastel markers and paint markers into that process. So it's sort of its full circle, right? In some way.
AG: Absolutely. It might sound weird, but I love getting my hands dirty. At the end of a job when my hands are full of colors, it gives me this sense of like, "Oh, you did something really cool today." It's like that. I think like it connects with that, you know inner child of like I was able to get dirty and do colorful stuff, and it's always fun.
MR: You're really in there, right? You're in there doing it. Your hands are dirty.
AG: Yeah.
MR: I think that—
AG: Yeah, exactly. Like barely.
MR: What about paper and notebooks and those kind of things? Sounds like you like large scale, but do you work with any notebooks? Do you do any personal stuff in notebooks or sheets of paper, anything like that you can share?
AG: I do, yes. I have all kinds of sketchbooks. I have them all. I have yours. I love it. For me, it's more about having thick paper that I know I can—I don't know, somehow it bothers me if I draw with a marker and then you can see it on the other side because it's like then I cannot use both sides of the paper.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
AG: So I love thick, good quality paper when it comes to taking visual notes. But even for my day-to-Day stuf, I have my own notebooks. Visual Versa, has a line of notebooks.
MR: Nice.
AG: Even for the day-to-day things, obviously they have good quality paper because I'm all about that, but they're not as thick. But I'm using Neuland fine one. Even if I have a meeting with a client or whatever, I'm always taking notes and my notes are never linear. I can't go back.
MR: Yeah.
AG: I guess I'm not being super helpful because I use anything that has no lines.
MR: Okay. So clean paper.
AG: Yeah.
MR: Thick paper. Clean and thick.
AG: Yes. Absolutely.
MR: Now, what about your large scale, do you have a supplier of large scale thick paper that you like to use that you can stick on a wall and, you know, the markers aren't gonna bleed through to the back?
AG: Oh, yeah. That was a good experience to get because, you know, before I had my own board that I could bring everywhere, there was that struggle of like, "Are you sure that, you know, the markers are not gonna go to the wall." Then I used double paper and it's such a waste of paper until I found, but it's a local store that sells roll of paper. I'm always scared they're gonna stop selling them. So I always buy like five rolls or 10 rolls in advance just in case because it was not easy to find one.
I have my rolls there to make sure that if, you know, one day they tell me we don't sell them anymore because I'm pretty sure not a lot of people buy those papers, I'm like, well, "At least I'll have a little bit of time, a cushion there to find another provider that is good. They're called Omer DeSerres. It's a local, it is the same that I mentioned for the markers. They have their markers as well.
MR: Yeah. We'll have to have you send some links so if someone's in Quebec or in Canada, they can get access.
AG: Absolutely. Yeah.
MR: I suppose they might sell internationally to the U.S., but then you'll really pay for it in shipping, I suspect, or VAT or something like that.
AG: Yeah. But I mean, for the paper, it might be worth it. It is really good quality paper and I've looked around always to have a plan B. I always have like having the plan B, but I haven't found something as good on, you know, price quality. You know because it's not extremely expensive for the quality they have.
MR: Do you have a standard size and you cut it and then you bring rolls and then stick 'em on the wall? Or do you have a board that you mount those to? How does that part of it work for you?
AG: Yeah, so I have the modular board. Depending on how long the event is, sometimes I use my four modules, which is like pretty big. And sometimes I just use two. So I use two or three or four. Most of the time, I—no, I think I've never used one. For a half day event, normally I would use just two panels, and then full day, depending on how packed the schedule is, I use three or four panels. I always bring my roll with me and, you know, cut depending on—
MR: What you need.
AG: - on what I need. Exactly. Yeah.
MR: Is that the Neuland graphic wall? Is that what it's called?
AG: Yes.
MR: I know there's two products, and I hadn't realized this, so I talked to somebody else. So the graphic wall is for this like graphic recorders large scale, but there's a smaller scale thing called GraphicWally, which is like a little brother, right?
AG: Wally, exactly.
MR: It's got a roll of paper and you bring it across and you can do the same thing, but on a small scale. And I think they even probably imagine like you would put a camera on it, right. So if you're working remotely, you could show it this way, right?
AG: Yeah.
MR: Interesting.
AG: I don't have the GraphicWally. That's on my wishlist.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
AG: But the wall, yes. And I've had it for nine years now, and it's still working great. And it's light because, you know moving the stuff that size could be really hard. And it's not hard at all. And it avoids the problem. A lot of times I would get to a building and they were like, "Oh no, this building, we don't allow anything on the wall." Then, you know, you had the struggle of, it doesn't matter how many times you ask the clients, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, no problem." Then you get there, "No, you can't." I actually did one a whole day of visual notes on the floor.
MR: Oh man.
AG: Which was a really interesting experience, but, you know—
MR: Kind of crawling around.
AG: - kind of like going back to your childhood, it's like you're doing things. At the end, I embraced it and I made people step on different icons depending on what it was. It ended up being a really cool experience. And I actually have a picture of it that I use on my website because it seems like a really—well, it was a really creative moment.
MR: Yeah.
AG: People were literally stepping on the words and the things to vote for things. It was cool, but at the moment it was like, "Oh my goodness, what am I gonna do? You know, I'm already here, I have my materials, we're about to start, you know, let's figure something out." Now I don't have to go through that. I have my board.
MR: And you have your wall. Yeah.
AG: Yeah. And it's flexible enough that if the space is not big, sometimes what I do, even if it's a full day event, I just use two panels and then sometimes have two posters. So one for the morning and one for the afternoon.
MR: I see.
AG: Yeah.
MR: Smart, smart. Cool. That's really good. We'll make sure we get links to all these products that we can find with Alina and me.
AG: Absolutely.
MR: I'm sure we can do that. And Esther who does our show notes, loves to dig for this stuff. So we'll get that in the show notes for you. Let's shift now to tips. So the way I like to frame it for guests is imagine someone's listening, they're a visual thinker of some kind, but maybe they've reached a plateau or they just need a little inspiration or a pick me up. What would be three things you would tell them to encourage them in their practice to keep on going and to keep striving?
AG: So the first thing that I always tell people is, and I think it applies to everything, but it applies to visual notes, is it doesn't matter in which part of this process you are, push yourself a little bit to try something new so it doesn't become boring. There's always that thing of like, if you're—I tell people if you're scar it's because you care. But it's also like, if you're not scared, if you feel so confident, it's like you're not pushing yourself enough.
In my case for example, it's like trying new medium or you know, pushing myself to try new icons, try new ways to engage with the audience. So, you know, like in whatever facet this comes, like if you're a really experienced graphic facilitator, then I will invite you to put yourself to find different ways to engage with the audience.
Because I found throughout the years that the more people are engaged with the creation of the visual, the more impact it has with the group. It's not the same thing when I'm that silent partner in the corner that people just see at the end and they're like, "Oh, wow, really cool." And that's it. Let's, you know, move past that. Then when they're part of this co-creation, they're actually feeding you ideas.
And then at the end, they see their ideas with illustrations and they're like, "Oh, I just said that. Look there's a drawing of what I said?" And they get super excited and there's way more by eating. I actually just visit a client who I did in a strategic session for eight years ago, and they had my poster on the wall. And I was like, "Wow." And she's like, it's so amazing because this poster happened when the initiative didn't exist.
They were brainstorming about it. Now, they're a full department, and they take grants and they help students with innovation projects. And they're like, "That was our first session when we dream about, like, it was our dream that all this stuff would happen." And now it's happening.
MR: Now it's real. Yeah.
AG: And they still have that poster there.
MR: Wow.
AG: But they were engaged throughout the session, right? Like, they were coming to me, they were giving post-Its, they were like saying—so, you know, engage people. If you're starting, then pushing yourself might mean, you know, well, you haven't tried taking live notes. And I think that's a scary step for anyone, is one thing, is taking notes for yourself, doing summaries or whatever. But, you know, no one is gonna look, like to see them, or also you don't have that time pressure.
When it comes to taking live notes, I think there's always that—you know, it's a big leap. But I would say, you know, they don't—well, first don't compare yourself with someone who's been doing it for 10 years. If I would've compared myself when I started with someone who was doing it 10 years, and I would've stopped because of that, I would not be doing what I'm doing right now.
MR: Right. Right.
AG: I knew what I could do and I was transparent with my clients, and I would say as far as you're using arrows and speech bubbles, you're already being more visual than most people. So I would say, you know, like, give yourself realistic goals. They're a little bit stretched, but they're not too far out so you're paralyzed and you don't do anything.
If you're not taking the live notes yet, then I tell people, you know, listen to a TED talk or listen to a podcast and take notes. And then you tell yourself, "This time I'm gonna have one icon." When it gets to the point that having just one icon in your notes is too easy, then you have two icons per podcast, then three, then four.
You know, it could be just an icon for the title, and the rest is a mind map with no more visuals, but you're already doing something more visual than you were doing before. So it's just taking those baby steps, but keep pushing it to the next level. That was like seven tips in one
MR: Well, Esther will have fun finding those tips and putting 'em in. So we'll make sure we capture those and number them for you. Everybody, and they'll also appear, of course, in our end of the season, All The Tips episode, so you can hear this all again with everybody else. So thank you for those steps.
AG: I'm so excited for the end of the season tips to see.
MR: A lot of people say that's their favorite episode. Yeah, it's a great one. I enjoy doing that.
AG: Is it okay if I add another tip to the—
MR: Go for it? Go for it.
AG: Okay. I would say try doing something or taking visual notes or whatever it is from something you've never experienced before. Let me explain that. Let's say you're in the tech industry, you know, try to do that, listening to someone talking about design—no, design thinking is good in the tech industry. Someone talking about, you know, human systems or facilitation or, you know, even medical innovation, whatever it is. Just look for something that you're not an expert in and take visual notes of that.
I love it because sometimes it is like, we're already comfortable—we're comfortable enough doing visual notes of whatever we know best, but it also—well, I would say it gives you the exposure to learn something new, which is always good for creativity. It's been proven again and again. It also shows you how much you don't have to be an expert of something to be able to take these visual notes.
So even going back to that person who's scared of taking live visual notes, doing that might help you build your confidence a little bit in the sense that, you know, you don't have to be an expert. You'll understand enough for you to be able to do a visual summary. And it's also because I think the more things and the more fields that we're exposed to, the more we start seeing how we can transfer one thing to a to another.
I think it's a good practice, and it's something that I push myself to do when I'm getting really comfortable in somewhere. So it goes back to living your comfort zone. But the being exposed, getting yourself exposed to different things and different tools and looking for inspiration. People are like, "Oh, I don't wanna copy anyone." You're not gonna copy. Even if you try, you can't do exactly the same thing. Your style is different.
But every time that I'm like, I feel I've been doing—I don't know, there's three or four posters that they look too similar, I start looking for other people in the field that are doing visual notes and see what they do that I'm not doing. So like, oh, maybe I'm always putting the title up, you know. My comfort zone is putting title top center.
And it's like, "Okay, you know what? Next time I'm gonna do title in the middle." And it's uncomfortable. And I get like, "Oh, like, ooh." You know, the first line is always the hardest. But try to do something that you haven't done before. That sometimes helps with the blockage in whatever sense that you're doing it, or just doing the first line. Sometimes I sign my poster before I start.
MR: Keeps it fresh.
AG: A blank paper is intimidating.
MR: Yeah.
AG: A blank piece of paper is really scary. And when I feel like stakes are high, sometimes I start staring at this and I'm like, "Why am I doing this again?" I get really nervous every single time before I start taking visual notes. And if I see that that nervousness is going to the next level, I'm like, you know what? I know doing that first line is the hardest. Once I get into it, I'm in my zone and I'm having fun. So even if that means signing your piece before I get it started, sign it. It's not blank anymore.
MR: Yep. You're committed.
AG: It's kind of like giving—yeah, you're committed. You're already started. Just jump and keep going.
MR: Those are great tips. Thank you, Alina. It's helpful to hear your perspective and more good inspiration for people who are doing this work to encourage them. So thank you.
AG: My pleasure.
MR: Let's talk now a little bit how we can find you. Your company is Visual Versa. What's the website we should go to? Are there social media that you hang out in? Any other projects that you wanna share here? We'll make sure again, that these get in the show notes, so if you're listening, you find the links.
AG: Absolutely. So visualversa.com is my website and then you can find me a—well, Instagram is the social media that I use the most. I also have Facebook, but it's more because I think I have to have it, but I don't go there often. So if you're gonna send me a message, definitely use Instagram and it's @visualversa.
And I also have my online offerings or my online course, it's called, Let me Draw What I Mean. Going back to that idea of, you know, I wanna teach people how to use these to explain their ideas and make their ideas more accessible to others. So Let me Draw What I Mean is more like the online side of it, but for events or organizations is Visual Versa.
MR: Okay. Got it. One is the educational arm and the other is the business are my guess.
AG: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Let me Draw What I Mean was born during the pandemic where we all had to reinvent ourselves.
MR: Yeah.
AG: And I realized how much I enjoyed it, and I kept it. And then Visual Versa was what got me started.
MR: Got it. Cool. We'll link those up for you. If you're in listening here, you can go to the show notes and find those links in the episode or on the website. Well, thank you, Alina. This has been really fun to talk with you. Thank you so much for the work you're doing. I so appreciate your positive influence in the world and fighting through challenges, coming from one country to another, changing jobs, learning multiple languages, and yet flourishing and making these things into who you are. I'm just so proud of you, and I wanted to let you know that. Thank you.
AG: Wow. Mike, that means so much coming from you. I think your book is the first book I got when I got into visual notes. I still have it. And, you know, like, just being here for me is such an honor because I've been following you for years and I've been inspired with the work you do. So it means a lot to me to be able to be here in this space having a conversation with you. So, thank you.
MR: Well, you've definitely deserved it. I'm excited and I'm excited to see what you'll do going forward. So thank you. Thank you for sharing your time with us.
AG: Thank you so much.
MR: All right, everyone, well, that's another episode of the Sketchnote Army podcast. For those who are listening or watching, until the next episode, talk to you soon.
Alejo Porras, driven by a passionate pursuit of challenges, shares how embodying a can-do attitude has significantly propelled personal growth and career advancement. Beyond business success, Alejo is motivated by a desire to be a good father and husband and positively impact others.
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Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with my friend, Alejo Porras. Alejo, it's time to come back on the show. It's been, man, since 2021. You were in season 10, and so much has changed in your life. I thought it'd be cool to have you back on and talk about what's going on.
Alejo Porras: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, Mike. Honestly, you know, since 2021, I cannot believe it, I thought it was like last year.
MR: I know. Doesn't it seem like just recently?
AP: Yeah, it feels like not much has happened, but at the same time, so much has happened. And yeah, I appreciate the invitation again, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
MR: Yeah. If you're listening here, I think the thing to listen for is I guess the growth and evolution of Alejo and where he was. We'll put a link in the show notes. His episode was season 10, episode 1, September 6th, 2021. We'll put a link to that so you can go listen to that if you're curious to see where he was and compare it to what he's doing now.
But you've been doing a lot of really interesting work. You challenged yourself to do lots of work intentionally. So you've been doing a lot of work. Someone that I follow and I really admire, Chris Doe is someone who you have been doing sketch noting about, and then it looks like you're working with him to some degree. So I'm just gonna step back, and why don't you take us from September 6th, 2021 till today and tell us what's going on?
AP: Oh my gosh. So, a lot. Well, when we talked last time, I was diving deep into artist coaching, and I had this dream, this desire of turning something that I had been doing for so long, which is coaching people, leading people, helping people do their best and excel in their careers. I was trying to figure out if there was something that I could do on the side because I had a full-time job at that point. And yeah, I just wanted to try that out. I had some coaching experiences, I took some coaches, and then I realized that my expertise didn't lay there, and it was hard for me to position myself as a coach when I was so widely known as an artist.
At some point, I was like, "I'm not giving it my all. I don't think this is moving forward. I'm helping people, but I don't feel like I even have the capacity because of my full-time job and my family to take on extra after work to get coaching with people." So I stopped that for a little bit. Then 2022 was a time in which I was struggling to find a balance and to find harmony with my rhythms of life. Partly because I was working a job that I absolutely loved. It was the best full-time job I have ever had and I was enjoying it.,
The problem was that I had to work a full-time job, and then I had to commute on certain days. It was an hour commute going to the office, an hour coming back, and then I came back home absolutely drained. I gave it all, and I was so exhausted. My son, who at the time was three and a half, four, maybe. Yeah, four. He wanted to play with me. I remember sometimes he was like, "Papa, play with me. Play with me." And I was there on the couch like, yeah, I want to. My eyes were starting to close and I felt like I was gonna start falling asleep. And I was like, "No, this cannot happen. I want to be a good dad. I want to be a present dad."
I still have my moments in which I'm probably working too much, but now that I'm freelancing or in my own business, it fluctuates. There's some days that I can just spend with him. But at that point, it was like every day I felt this tension of I'm not being a completely present dad, and that's not what I want. That's not what I wanted for my life. Part of that is my background with my relationship with my dad, because my parents divorced and then my dad was not physically present in my own home. And also, we didn't hang out that much. And I missed him for most of my teenage years and younger years.
I learned from him, even though he did the best that he could, you know, that we didn't have a close relationship. I remember when I was 16 or 15 that I committed myself and I thought, "I wanna be a great dad when I am a dad." So since that moment, I started kind of preparing myself and trying to do my best to become a good dad.
In '22, I was struggling with that tension. And in December of 2022, I had a meeting with my then bosses and they actually offered me a raise and a promotion. I felt something so odd 'cause the first impression was like, "Wow, I'm really thankful for that. You guys are trusting me and have obviously thought about this next stage very, very carefully." It was a substantial raise too. It was very generous, but I didn't feel happy about it. It was odd and it was partly this brewing sensation that I needed to make a change in my career. But I couldn't figure out how to take the step.
The thing that happened was that, that was on a Friday, and the Monday after that, my dad had a stroke, and on Wednesday he died. So through all the chaos, I was like, "I'm gonna think about it, guys. Thank you so much." I never say yes immediately. I have room to negotiate and all that stuff. And at that point, I hadn't said yes or no to what my then bosses have told me. They were very supportive and all that. I went to attend business to Costa Rica and do all the things that needed to do as only child that I am.
It was a wakeup call to me. It was like going back and reflecting on my relationship with my dad made me think really hard about the path that I was leading and how I want to be remembered as a dad by my son. So I then and there thought like, "I love this job, but I cannot continue in this capacity. I want to keep working with them, but I need to be at home more often. I need to have time for my family."
By January, I told them, you know, all of that. I told them, "Hey guys," 'cause I was creative lead, you know, at this company. And I was like, "I'm not gonna just go. Let's make a plan here 'cause I know you need to find somebody to fill the space and to fill the role. I wanna support you guys and you've been very good to me." So we devise a plan and it took me three, four months to transition to part-time. Now, they're my client. They're like my biggest client. I work with them for projects, but I don't have to go to the office except if I'm doing a workshop 'cause I work workshops with them.
It's been great since then. It's kinda like the silver lining how something so sad, you know, and choking serves in a way to wake me up and realize that the path that I need to take is different. I feel like from that point on, my life has been taken off. So, you know, it's been great since, you know, since April-May last year when I started just working from home in my own business with my wife. The opportunities that have arrived since then is something that I didn't even imagine. I couldn't have planned. The last day that I had as I was working full-time, the day after that I went to a conference to Creative South. I think you've been there.
MR: Yeah, I've heard of that before. I've never been, but I've heard it. It looks really great.
AP: Yeah. I think it was a perfect kind of segue into my new life, I will say. 'Cause I got with other creatives and I got pumped about things that I do. Got a lot of feedback of things that I'm—because I did sketch notes there and people loved them and all this stuff. So I was like, "Okay, I have content here. I can start promoting that I do this thing, you know, as myself and then try to figure out how to structure my business in a way that fits the lifestyle that I want to achieve."
So I hired a coach right away, and I started working with her. Well, one of the first things that she told me was, you know, "A lot of people that I work—" She was with corporate CEOs and all that stuff. She said, "A lot of people have trouble in their business trying to promote it because the benefit of what they do, it's kind of abstract, but the benefit of what you do is immediately visible. When you show your sketch note, people can immediately see the value of it. So you have an advantage here. All you need to do to get clients is to show your work, you know, and show it consistently."
And she told me, "Maybe one thing that you can do is just to join people that you admire in webinars that they're having, in the conversations that they're having, and do sketch notes and just, you know, send them to them and see what happens. See what feedback you get there. You get goodwill from that. And also, it's an opportunity maybe, you know, to get noticed if they decide to reshare that stuff."
I was like, "Yeah, that's a good idea. I have a lot of people that I admire and I would love to just, you know, from the content, just do sketch notes and share it with them." It was so funny 'cause the first one that I did was a workshop—no, it wasn't a workshop. It was like a —yeah, it was a workshop, I guess that was kind of promoting a course. I had forgotten about it, and I was about to take a break for lunch and I saw it on my calendar and it was like, it starts in 10 minutes. I was like, "Should I join? I don't know."
MR: How hungry am I?
AP: Yeah. I was like, "You know what, let's do it." But at that point, I was just joining workshops in general. I wasn't necessarily taking sketch notes. But when he started, he said, "I apologize for the presentation. I haven't used PowerPoint since I was in college. But the content is there and the content was great."
And I thought, "Hmm, maybe I can just do a sketch note. You know, put some graphics to what he's saying and then send it to him kind of like, 'Hey, you know, your webinar was awesome. The content was fantastic. Here's something, you know, if he interested you, you can repurpose it for your next, you know, webinar or whatever.'" 'Cause I've followed his work and his content for a while.
I did that. And the thing is, he hadn't finished because he finished a workshop and then he had Q&A , and during the Q&A I got them polished, and before all the thing was finished, I posted it. And when he finished the workshop and hopped on Instagram and saw it, he was like, "Whoa, this is cool."
MR: What the heck?
AP: Exactly. He reshared it. And I think that kind of snowballed from there, because I committed myself to do one sketch note every week. So I either join a webinar, join a workshop, or there's no events happening, I just listen to a podcast and then do that. That has taught me—I'm making this story super long.
MR: That's okay.
AP: But that has taught me the thing for us visual artists in general, and especially, you know, your crowd who does sketch notes and graphic recording and all that stuff, show your work and show up in spaces with the kind of people that you will love to be working with. I initially just did it from, you know, thought leaders and people that I follow, that I admire, and that I'm grateful for their content. And kind of like, "Hey, I'm grateful, just this is as a thank you, you know, for you."
And it also served me for practice because I discovered certain things about my style, how I wanted to show my work in a way that was different from the kind of work that I was doing before for other people. It gave me more confidence and it and definitely helped me, you know, open some doors. Chris Doe is one of those doors that was open just because I showed up. And I'm super grateful. I say to people that I have learned so much from Chris Doe because I have followed him since 2000, I think 17 or '16. And I have learned so much that I feel like by doing this thing, I'm kinda like paying him back.
MR: Yeah. That's interesting.
AP: I kinda owe him a lot of money for all the business advice that I've gotten from him. So I'm just trying to pay it back, pay it forward. And yeah, it's been phenomenal. And right now that's what I'm doing. I'm doing, I call it visual summaries because there's a lot of it that is not life. It's just people sending me content for the recorded stuff.
MR: Recorded stuff. Yeah.
AP: Yeah, recorded stuff. Yeah. So I'm doing that and growing my business and it's been great. It's been great so far. So long story, long. There you go.
MR: Well, that's what a podcast is for, right? You can tell the long stories and not feel constrained or compressed. Well, that's really cool. That's quite a shift. I find it interesting that you were right at this precipice. And I can imagine if they were making you an offer to be elevated in the company, it wasn't gonna be less time at the office or less responsibility or less of your mind, it would be more.
And as it was, you were already maxed out, even without doing the side stuff, you're coming home just totally s sapped out. And it was in a way, leaving you with no energy for your son or your wife or anything that you wanted to do on your own, because it was so intense.
AP: Yeah. When I started there, I was wearing many hats and, you know, they put me on one hat and I intentionally took all the hats because that's just the kind of person that I am. I like to do different things and learn. So the restructuring of that was, "Okay, let's just put you one hat. One hat that is very important that only you can do." So definitely it was more responsibility. It wouldn't have required more time in work, you know, but it was definitely more responsibility and more a managerial aspect of things.
So yeah, it was probably like taking a step up into the corporate ladder. And even though I didn't have to wear a tie, I would've felt that way. It's fine because now that I'm freelancing—well, not freelancing, I own my own business, I have to know all those things as well. So I'm doing that, but I'm also very involved in the fulfillment part of actually doing the drawings and being part of that. So I think it's a good balance by now.
After my other coach, I got enrolled in another cohort that I am right now. Well, at this point of this interview, I'm still going through it. And it's been great because I'm just learning from other experts and people who are in the creative industry who have way more experience than me, are making way more money than I am. And that's where I like to be. I like to feel like I'm the small fish that has room to grow. And these spaces where I feel inadequate, 'cause I don't have that much knowledge, make me feel like there's definitely a way in which I can create this business that helps the lifestyle that I want to achieve.
Because I don't dream with becoming a huge company that has a lot of employees and that is busy all the time. I dream with having to work just the amount of time that I want to work and making all the money that I can from that time because I want the work to support my lifestyle. I don't want my lifestyle to be the second thought to make my business grow, if that makes sense.
MR: Mm-hmm.
AP: So, yeah, it's been fun.
MR: Interesting. What kind of opportunities has that opened up? Obviously, you talked about doing this weekly sketch note or visual summary. Something visual weekly, maybe that's a good way to say it, right?
AP: Yeah.
MR: Because I can imagine someone's listening and thinking, "Ooh, that's a really good idea. Maybe I should try that." Are there any recommendations you can say around how do you structure it, what to look for if someone is—or is there a way to structure it in a way that encourages people to reach out to you? Should there be an end slide that's got your info? Should you have a link? What kind of stuff would encourage someone who sees it to like, "Oh, I wanna hire that person," kind of thing. Assuming someone wants to do similar thing.
AP: That is a great question. And I think to answer that question, people need to take into consideration that all learning compounds so there's not a one trick that solves everything, is a collection of different aspects that all enhance the opportunity that you have. I think all the life is trying to find how to increase your odds of success. There's no guaranteed success, right? It's just more odds, more possibilities for that so that when opportunities show up, you're kind of, you have fertile ground.
This is gonna sound completely unexpected, but copywriting and personal interaction, I think are one of the most important aspects when you're showing what you do. I've learned, because I also took a class in communication, and I've been learning about copywriting. Two years ago, I found this guy Eddie, I forgot his last name. He has a website that's called VeryGoodCopy, and his newsletter is really, really good. He teaches people how to write copywriting for advertising and stuff like that.
All of that is very useful because at the end of the day, if you have something that is great, you know, if your work is amazing and you cannot communicate the value of it, people won't get it. Sometimes you have to give people the words that they can use to describe what you do. I'm not an expert by all means, but I've learned to copyright to a degree in which I feel like I'm okay at it, and I can communicate something that is clear when I'm doing a post and when I'm sharing what I do with other people.
So I would say, you know, become curious about learning how to write well, how to communicate your ideas well, in written form in a way that is succinct, that is clear. And hopefully, you know, get somebody to help you out with that if it's a struggle. I have the enormous privilege that my wife is really good at writing. So she's my editor. Another thing that I've done to improve my writing is I have a newsletter that goes every Monday, and I have her read most of my newsletters.
Sometimes I just forget or I just write it at last minute, like on Sunday night. So she's already asleep and I need to send it. But she has helped me to polish and make my ideas more clear when I communicate them. So that's one thing, you know, communication. And the other one has to do with kinda like the art of conversation being somebody who is genuinely curious about connecting with other people.
After all, social media has the word "social" for a reason. If you just post things there and you expect that people are just kinda click on them and interact for some magical reason, you're delusional or you're selfish because that's an ad. You know, an ad is something that you put in front of somebody who doesn't know you, and you expect that they do something about it. But for that, you need to have a good copy so that they know why they should interact with it.
I've developed this kinda like taste. There's one thing that I'm doing right now, for example, is I am forcing myself that if I like something on Instagram, on LinkedIn, I have to write a comment and the comment has to be useful. Not, not just like, "Hey, that's great, or that's cool." Because that doesn't add any value. And I just imagine, you know, like, "I did this sketch note, look at these guys. I'm so proud of it." And somebody's like, "Cool," you know.
MR: That's nice, but that doesn't really, yeah.
AP: Yeah. And it is like, "Okay, I appreciate it, but I don't really remember that person." The person who said cool versus the person who said, "Oh my gosh, this is so great. I had learned about this, and this is helping me in this reason." Was like, oh, we engage in a conversation now and I noticed this person. I've realized, for example, LinkedIn is great about that because on Instagram when you comment, it kinda like stays there, but LinkedIn is very focused on interaction and commenting to the point that the people that I follow when they comment on something, even if it's somebody that I don't know, I see their comments and I can join that conversation.
So I really love that. Is all about making these conversations happen. Before I connected with anybody, I engaged with their content, and that's what I do right now. I try to find people that's like, "Oh, I love what they do." A lot of people is like, "Send friend requests or send connection requests". I follow to see what they're doing, and I comment and I stay on the radar, and once I have earned their trust and they already see that I'm there, then I feel like that's the point in which you can eventually send a connection request or, you know, move a little bit further into something like that.
I love that approach because it's not salesy. I'm not trying to sell things to anybody. I'm just trying to kind of make friends and make contacts and add value. I know that said a lot, but just give something that people enjoy that is insightful, that helps them in some way or entertains them. And if there's a good relationship there, I feel like it's just way easier because when you have a relationship with somebody that you, like, you support them, you know, and you don't feel like you're being sold to. It's like, "Oh, I do this thing. Oh, so cool. What can I do for you?" That's something that has helped me a lot. Just kinda like making relationships with people online.
Now, I don't know that—I guess people will still have the question of like, okay, so I get it, I have to learn how to write, I have to get out of my shell and start making some friends. But what about the actual sketch note portfolio thing? I think what I did is just something that you can replicate. I honestly don't mind if you don't do it. Hey, if you do it, I will say challenging yourself to do one a week.t is very, you know, low-hanging fruit, I will say. It's not that hard to do.
MR: It's doable. It's doable. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. It's very doable. You do one a week and you commit yourself to share it every week. It doesn't have to be a specific day, just like one a week. It forces you—I look back and I did a reel about it that showed like, pah, pah, pah.
MR: I saw that. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. And I was like, wow, I did all that?
MR: I did all that? Yeah.
AP: Yeah. It is very rewarding. It's very rewarding. I like how James Clear, I think is who says, "You're kind of gathering proof." Because people say, "Fake it till you make it." I'm more of the side of like, make it, and the more you make it, you gather proof of how you actually are, or who you really want to be. So, yeah, I'm a sketch noter because I do it now. Before it was like, I'm gonna do it every day. And now it's like I have proof of that. Proof that nobody can deny much less myself. So I hope that's helpful.
MR: That reminds me of I have a few friends who have PhDs and something that I remember that my one friend told me was, if you go into academia, there are a million, they're called ABDs, all but dissertation. They're people that did all the coursework and now they're challenged with writing the dissertation, which they have to then defend and then they receive their PhD. That's like the hardest step. And he said there's a million ABDs out there because the easy part is doing the coursework 'cause It's structured. The hard part is now taking all that coursework, choosing what your focus area is, and then going to research it and prove it and defend it. That's the hard part.
I think that's the same thing with doing any kind of work. Like writing a book would be an example, one thing or anything where you're consistently doing things over and over again. It proves like, "Hey, Alejo showed up again this week. Wow, man, I can expect that something's coming every week." And it gives you credibility, I think, that you are committed, right? You're showing commitment where it's easy to just occasionally now and then do something and not have that commitment. It doesn't have quite the impact, you know?
AP: Yeah, definitely true. Not only for, you know, promotional reasons, but just from a personal standpoint. Again, because the beginning of that would be to prove to yourself that you can do it and that you're the kind of person that does this thing. 'Cause I feel like that's the mental barrier that is harder to actually jump over. I was actually talking with my wife this morning. Of course, at the beginning of this conversation before we started recording, I was telling Mike that I did a cop lunch this morning.
And it was an interesting experience, but what I didn't tell him was something that it just struck me when I was doing it and after I finished doing that was that I have a motto for this year, and my motto is, "I can do hard things." I've been doing personal training, working out, trying to get in better shape. I've been also crossing my comfort zone to show up in different situations that are awkward or difficult and prove myself that I can do it.
When I was doing that, I was like, most people will say, "Oh my gosh, you're crazy. I would never get in a bathtub that is cold for no reason." Because it's painful. Because it's hard. And it is very tempting to think people are not doing something that is beneficial because it's hard, because it's difficult, because it's painful. But actually, most people, the barrier that they have is not the pain, it's not the hardship, it's actually comfort.
Comfort is the first barrier that you have that you need to cross to achieve the life that you want to live, to achieve the success that you want to achieve, to get the clients that you want to have. Because we are very comfortable in our comfort zone, right? We're very comfortable with being who we are at this moment. And that challenge, it's not the challenge itself, it's just losing that comfort, is what scares most of us.
I'm starting to trying to ignore comfort. It's not that I'm becoming masochistic by any means, you know. I still like coffee, shoes and stuff like that. But in certain things, I feel like as a culture, we probably worship too much comfort and convenience and that has taken a toll in the amount of reach and growth that we can potentially have as human beings, not just physically, but also mentally and in business as well. As artists, of course, so don't get comfortable would be just summarizing all that. Don't get too comfortable. Comfort is not a great thing if you want to grow.
MR: Maybe comfort in moderation, right? Just like anything else.
AP: Yeah. Yeah.
MR: It's funny you mentioned doing hard things. There's actually a book, I can see it over in my library area called Do Hard Things by Steve Magnus. It's actually a book that was written I think last year. Really fascinating. He's a performance coach for Olympic athletes and things like that. And then he talks about how important it's to do difficult things. Kind of what you're saying, that develops this. And, you know, it's interesting when I look back, I've had things break that I had to fix or things that I had to solve where, "Well, I'm just gonna have to figure this out." I felt really good afterwards when I solved it. You know, it's really satisfying.
AP: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we're created for that. The way that we are wired is to solve things and feel, fulfilled. It's very hard to say, but we find fulfillment and purpose when we are doing something that is improving something else. That we're solving a problem. It's just very rewarding. I feel like at the core, we all need to experience that we are capable. You know, part of that is, you know, doing for myself the physical training. It's like, I wanna know that I can run. I don't wanna feel like my body is getting in the way of what I am able to accomplish.
I don't remember who I told this, but I used to sing a lot. I actually went through like 10 years of training for singing. It was fantastic. I loved it. I still like to sing. The problem is that at some point, and I think it's probably when I came here to the U.S., I developed a lot of allergies and all that, and I felt like my range of voice has lowered.
So sometimes I'll be listening to a song and inside of me, I know how I should accommodate my mouth and the level of pressure of air that I should put into it, and how I put my tongue and all that. I know what I could do to reach that note, to reach that volume, but I can't physically do it right now because of the problems that I have. And it's so frustrating. I know how I could do it, but I can do it. It's one of the worst feelings to experience.
And I don't wanna—I know we have limitations that there's—I'm probably not gonna be able to be an Olympic athlete or something like that, but I know in my body, and I know in my mind there's certain things—or maybe I'm just delusional, but I believe that I can do way more than I can do right now. What's keeping me from doing that is something that I can work on. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to work on, because when I accomplish those simple steps, you know, just showing up my work, being recognized by people that I admire and not only from people that I admire, but from people who see me and say like, yeah, of course.
You know, there was a friend who saw me—I got on an Instagram live with Chris Doe, and a friend was like, "Oh, look at that. Alejo is just talking with Chris Doe." Sure. For him was like, "Of course, why not?" And I'm like, "Are you kidding me? This is Virginia. I don't know how it happened to me, you know, but"
The certain things that now that I'm doing and some people are noticing, believing in myself more than I sometimes do, it's just very rewarding because just showing up and just try to push that boundary and actually accomplishes those things, it makes me feel so alive. And it's something that I would love for everybody to experience. And again, the wall that is you know covering that is just the comfort zone. So get over it. Step over it. Yeah.
MR: It's funny. I have a story that came to mind when you're talking about that and it's years ago I did illustrations for Rework and Remote with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson at 37signals. And they invited me 'cause I'm in Milwaukee. I'm an hour and a half train right away. They said, "Hey, we wanna hire you to do some sketch notes. We have these big chalkboards in our office. Would you come down and do a mural on one of these chalkboards with chalk?"
I was like, "Yeah, sure." So I gave 'em a price and they agreed and hired me to come down. And I got there and I bought all these chalk and I had ideas about what I was gonna do. And I think it's on my Flickr account buried deep in the history. But I got there and I remember Jason and I were talking and Jason said, "So you got a lot of experience doing chalk." I was like, "I have no idea, but I'll be an expert by the end of the day."
I just knew that, "Okay, it can't be that hard. I mean, you know, it's my personality, it's gonna come out, I'm gonna figure things out." I had played around with chalk before. It wasn't like I never used chalk in my life, so it wasn't that. But I knew that by the end of the day, I would be really good at it and have an approach to how to do it. You know, which by the time I got to the end of the day, I went back to the beginning, oh, I could fix that and I would adjust things and, you know, made it into this cool mural thing.
But it was the attitude of like, "Hey, this is an experiment they're okay with. They trust me as Mike to do something." 'Cause I had proven myself, we talked about proving yourself. I'd done all kinds of work before. So they knew who I was, they trusted me, and then they turned me loose on their chalkboards and paid me money to do this and kind of experiment. But I knew we're gonna figure this out. And they were confident and they were really happy at the end. So, you can get to that place.
AP: Mike, that is amazing because that speaks to a characteristic that I believe everybody who is just starting in their career or anything that they're trying to accomplish should acquire in order to grow and is saying yes. Whatever shows up in front of you, if you're not completely ready, if you don't feel like you're completely qualified but you have the opportunity, just say yes and figure it out on the go. Because honestly, life is all about that.
Because you don't have a school that tells you, "This is how life's gonna go," and then you're ready and everything's gonna go as planned. Life is awesome, but throwing curve balls happens all the time. And what we need to do is to develop the skill to adapt to those circumstances. So everything in life is adaptation. And when you treat your career as, "I'm not ready, I'm gonna get ready for this or I don't feel unqualified, I'm gonna learn to get better at that."
Then you learn a skill and hopefully you even get paid to learn that skill. Which is amazing. You know, you're not paying a institution, you're not paying a workshop, they're paying you to learn. Now of course, if there's something that is like super high stakes, sometimes you gotta be careful with that, but I think that most of the time we actually—the stakes are not as high.
MR: We elevate them more than maybe they really are.
AP: Exactly. Exactly. So it's definitely a great—and I've approached my life in that way all the time. It's just because I'm kind of crazy about challenges. You know, I'm just like, "Challenge accepted, let's try it out." Sometimes that has translated into me being a little bit unfocused of like, I wanna try just many different things. So, you know, from a few years, probably '22 till now, I'm trying to just do the one thing. You know, I'm doing the sketchnotes, I'm doing the graphic recording stuff. This is what I'm doing.
I'm not playing music anymore. Not because I don't like it, I love it. It is just I need to focus and learning this business and all that stuff. But there's a lot about business that I don't know, and I cannot sit down and try to plan the perfect business model and pretend that I'm gonna start when I have it figured out. No, you build the boat as you go. Definitely it's a great attitude to have. I'm figuring it out. It's a great attitude to have.
MR: If you're listening, here's the challenge. Have you ever taken a job where when you did the interview and you got there to the first day and you thought, "Oh man, this" is way beyond my capability. And then six months later, like, "What was I thinking? I could definitely do this. I'm already looking at new ways to do things." You know, I've experienced that many times on jobs where, you know, I would not totally kind of believe I could do it. And like my wife would like, "Dude, you got this." Or friends or other people I worked with would know that I would be able to do it.
So everybody's kind of experienced that where, you know, it's just a normal human fear, like a failure, but you just have to go forward. I look at like, if it's too easy, maybe that's actually a warning sign that maybe that's not as important as finding something that's just a little bit scary. Just a little bit scary, right? That "I haven't totally done that before. How would that go?"
Putting yourself into a corner, right.? I like to say, "Put yourself in the pickle. How am I gonna get myself out of this pickle I found myself in?" So it forces you to be adaptable and to think of like, "Well, what are the resources I have on hand? What are good things about this situation that I can leverage?" And turn that in a positive direction because there always seems to be when you really look at it.
AP: That's true. Mike, I know that you are interviewing me, but I've very, very curious to make this question.
MR: Go for it.
AP: I imagine you probably have had a lot of situations like this, so maybe just the first one that comes to your head, besides the chalkboard that you just explained, a very uncomfortable situation that you have said yes to, or something that was like probably the highest one that you feel like this was very challenging and you just kinda went for it and prayed that it would work out.
MR: Well, there's two instances. I think one that was more difficult was, I was talking with the New York City School District and there was somebody, a principal of a school wanted to have me come in and teach his staff, but apparently there was lots of paperwork and it was complicated and he wasn't totally sure how to make it happen.
But then he was talking with somebody who was higher up that said, "Well, we need a keynote speaker for the last talk of the year to come fly in and talk to 600 teachers in Brooklyn at this high school." So he said, "Hey, would you be open to doing that? If we do that, you'll be in the system, and then after that, then you can come and do my thing."
"Yeah, sure, let's go for it." And so, I was a little bit scared. I'm in New York City, there's, you know, tough New York City teachers, right? There's 600 of them out in this audience. Like, "Holy cow, this maybe is the biggest crowd that I've ever spoken to." I went back to what I know that there's something in here for somebody. Now, that might not be for everybody. There's gonna be people that will tune me out. That's just the way it is. But there's some people out here who are really gonna benefit.
And the way we had structured it too was I did the presentation about the story of sketchnotes and did some really basic drawing stuff with them. And then we had sessions afterwards where we had intense workshops where they actually did work building their sketchnoting skills. I was like, "Oh man, I'm gonna give this talk and there's 800 teachers here, no one's gonna come to my thing.
There's all these thoughts going through my head. Like, there's a lot of people. I'm gonna invite them to these—I think we had two classes, one before and one after lunch. Like, no one's gonna come. And it was like, people were saying how much they enjoyed it. The room was packed. They ran outta room, you know, and it really reinforced then that the principal had made a really good choice.
And then the next year, which was, I think that was the last travel I did before the pandemic in early 2020. So I went out and spent the day with his group. You think about that, if I had said no, just think of the opportunities that it would've closed off for me. And also, the confidence building. Like, hey, I can speak in front of eight, 900 tough New York City teachers. And they liked it and they packed up my classes. It was really encouraging. So it went from potentially scary to really encouraging by the end.
AP: Yeah. That's phenomenal. That's great. I love those stories because they definitely bring the point down, you know, bring the point up or I don't know, bring the point to highlight it that definitely things can turn way better than we expect if we just dare to try. I'm a firm believer that, and I've said this before, that the doors of opportunity may seem closed, but that doesn't mean that they're locked. I'm gonna say that again 'cause I butcher it.
The doors of opportunity may seem closed, but that doesn't mean that they're locked. And you can either knock on the door if you're able, or be friends with people in the neighborhood that can introduce you to it. But I realize many doors are just waiting to be knocked and we're just hesitant about it.
The first time we were in this podcast, I reach out to you. I hadn't done any podcast before and I was like, "What if I just reach out to the founder of Sketch notes and tell him, 'Hey, how would I do an interview?' Would he ignore me? Would he be too busy for me? I don't know. I'm just gonna try." And you were like, "Yeah, sure, let's do it." I was like, "Oh, he's actually excited about it."
After that I was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna start asking people for things." I'm not intruding, I'm just asking. And it turns out when you ask people answer and the answer is better than the silence that you get from not trying.
MR: Yeah. Even sometimes you get a no, but no, that doesn't fit for this. But hey, could you do this thing over here? This thing next week? Sometimes the thing that's a no can turn into a something else, or sometimes.
AP: Yeah. That's something that I've learned from sales 'cause that's one thing that I'm learning a lot right now. What I've learned in the past few weeks is the purpose of a sales conversation is to reach to a no or a yes. If you get a no or a yes, the conversation was worth it and was successful. If you get a maybe or an I don't know, that was unsuccessful. You need to figure out and help the client or the prospect arrive to a decision that is either no or yes.
For me, it's the same. I prefer when I ask anything to get a yes or a no, because a no gives me information that I need to learn. The yes gives me the opportunity, but the silence or the, maybe it's awful. You don't know how to deal with that. I figure like at the end of the day, it's better to ask than to just stay wondering what would've happened if I had tried.
MR: Yeah, those who ask get many times.
AP: Yep. Right. That's absolutely true.
MR: Well, in true nature, so this is a very different episode of the podcast than we normally do, which I love, right. We just had a good discussion and talking about these ideas, and I think they're helpful for anybody listening who's individual thinking it's a human problem, human challenge, right?
AP: Yeah.
MR: Let me ask you for three tips, and I want you to think of it this way, is Alejo just went on a journey from 2021, I think, to now, and there's some new tips that he is learned since the last time he was here. If you were to give three tips to people listening based on what you've learned to this point, what would those three tips be for them?
AP: The first one would be—okay, I'm gonna say the first one in the second place.
MR: Okay.
AP: The first one would actually be to show up. I firmly believe that success is not what you achieve once you do something, success is showing up. It's believing in yourself that you are enough to take space in the world and show what you do. I think that's the first thing. Just show up consistently, be present, care about what you do.
The second one with that, I think it's kinda like a requisite, and that's why I'm merging it kind of weird, but be kind to yourself. I say this, you know, maybe if you're listening and you're a little bit like me, just a little bit like me, you struggle with some insecurities, not because you feel like you're not capable or because you're afraid of how people might perceive you.
I have been for ages kind of people pleaser. I love to make people feel well. I love it. I love to give a good impression for people, but I've had to learn in next few years that I also need to think about my own wellbeing. Sometimes not not doing my best or not approaching something makes me kind of doubt myself or be too hard on myself.
This idea of being kind to yourself, I think it's at the core of whatever you're gonna try. Because if you're doing something for the first time, or you're doing something that you haven't done a lot, it's just logical that you're probably gonna suck at it. You know, you're gonna be very bad. You're probably gonna fail a lot. And that's okay.
So while you are attempting these new things, be kind to yourself to remember, I'm learning, I'm trying, I'm doing my best, I'm growing, and this is moving me forward. Because if you're not kind with yourself, you're gonna stop showing up. And that will be a shame because people will miss you. The world will miss your gift. So show your gift, you know, show up consistently. Be kind to yourself.
The third one could be I guess, I'm gonna frame it as the golden rule sort of thing. Maybe it's just a platinum rule. The golden rule is do unto others what you would have done unto yourself. I like to challenge that a little bit because if I were to treat people how I like to be treated, some people will not get it right. I'm a very—and this is a funny story parenthesis here. In Costa Rica and Latin America in general, we're very touchy. You know, we hug, you know, we're very, "Hey, how you doing?"
The first time that I was here in the United States, I had a friend that took me to his college and introduced me some people there. There were these three ladies on a table, they were having lunch. And he was like, "Hey, this is Alejo. He's my friend Costa Rica." And I immediately went and say hi with a kiss in the cheek. And they were like, "What just happened?" And I was like, "Did I do something wrong? What happened?" He said, "We don't do that here. I was like, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't—that's how we do it. It's probably very naive of me, but now I know like, not everybody likes to be greeted that way. That's a boundary that I respect.
So I don't treat people how I would like them to treat me. I try to figure out how they want to be treated and then treat them that way. So I will say the third one would be—well, the second one is be kind to yourself. And the third one would be be curious about other people so that you can learn how to treat them better so that you can learn how to make them feel appreciated, Loved. Because that not only goes for personal relationships, very close, you know, like a partner or family or stuff like that.
But you know, we are in business, you know, most of the people that listen here have some sort of business or are working in some capacity. And when you treat other people according to how they need to be treated, you're showing them that you care for them, that you respect them, and that creates a better relationship that can enhance the you know, the work that you have with them and can even make you like you so much that they can recommend you to others. So you never know how this gonna happen.
In general, I feel like just being a nice person, it's a good thing. So, try to be a nice person. Onto the point of like, I am being nice, but I'm not being nice for people to like me. I'm just being nice because I like people. It's very different. I'm gonna say that again probably, you know, because it might take some time to let it sink in. Being nice because you like other people, not because you're trying to make them like you. Two very different things. The second one is people pleasing. The first one is just an attitude of you are a loving person.
And it changes completely. You're not approaching things as if you were needy or craving for attention. You're just trying to be helpful. And that makes that, if somebody doesn't appreciate what you give or is being disrespectful with you, you can put boundaries and you can, you know, keep your cool, I would say, without feeling attacked or sad or, you know, depressed or anything like that.
MR: It takes away the burden, right? You can be nice to people because it's just the right thing to do without any strings to say, you have to like me now. That's the trade where the unspoken trade is I'm gonna be nice to you, but you have to like me. And you can just let go of that, right. Like this is just the way I am. Whether you're mean to me or you're nice to me, I'm gonna still be consistent. I'm gonna still treat you the right way because that's the way my mom and dad taught me. That's the way I think is the right way. I want my kids to treat people that way and that's the way it's gonna be. So how you react has nothing to do with how I treat you kind of almost.
AP: Absolutely. I had this conversation recently on LinkedIn 'cause I shared a few—there was somebody who put like a list of the most prominent or cool visual artist in LinkedIn and stuff like that. And I was like, "Oh, I like this. I'm gonna tag some people that I know. And I tagged some, my son was like, "Hey papa, come play with me." So I didn't write everybody that I could think of. I just wrote a few and then send it. And then somebody started adding up. It's like, "Oh, there's so many people doing this thing. This is amazing. Let's just share and, you know, highlight everybody."
And then somebody wrote me personally and this person was a little bit conflicted. It was like, "I didn't add anybody there." This person just became very honest with me. It's like, "There's a lot of great people doing these things, but I feel like some people, some of them, they just don't reciprocate. You know, some of them are just doing their own thing, or I feel like they're plain ignore me," or, you know, something like that.
And I was telling this person, "It's their problem, and maybe they're just too busy or maybe they just don't like social media and it's not anything personal. So I'd rather give them the benefit of the doubt." And be like, "Well, I'm doing this because of who I am, because I want to help my audience by showing them people that I admire. Even if some of these people might never return any favors to me, I don't care. It's me, the one who's being generous and that's who I care about." So, you know, if somebody's being straight up bully with you, then, you know, of course that's—
MR: That's a long story. Yeah, yeah.
AP: But you know, besides that, I think from your heart of generosity, nothing bad can come.
MR: Yeah. I think it's just a good way to operate in the world. I've just seen it open too many good opportunities. Even just being nice to the person at the—I picked up a prescription the other day and I was chatting with the lady and she said, "Drive safely." Like, you know, just there's opportunities everywhere. A lot of times we are so in our head or we're so afraid to mess up. We don't say anything. And there's opportunities to be nice and maybe you made somebody's day. I don't know. I mean, so great tips. These are great tips. Thank you so much.
AP: Sure thing. I'm glad it'll be helpful.
MR: I'm looking at the old episode and we have links to your website and Twitter and Instagram. What's the best place to reach you and are there places you hang out the most? Sounds like LinkedIn probably has moved up the list a little bit for you. I suppose.
AP: Yeah. Now I do have a caveat for LinkedIn because I've shared some stuff that people have reshared and have gotten to so many eyeballs out there. I have at this moment 300 requests for connection.
MR: Oh, wow.
AP: And most of them, I've never seen them in my life, I don't know who they are, and I don't know why they want to reach out to me. What I say is like, "Hey, you can follow people everywhere." That sounds very creepy, but you know, you can follow people on Instagram. You can follow people on LinkedIn if you're interested in their content. If you want to connect, then I think the first step is just to have conversations.
So gauge, you know, show up in the comments, show up that you're interested and show up as a valuable person. Because at the end of the day, we want to spend time with people that add value to our lives. We can love everybody, but we're gonna spend time with people who add value to our lives.
MR: Right. You have to make a decision.
AP: Yeah. Exactly. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, make sure that first you engage with my content and you comment and you make yourself known. And when you send a request, send a message that says—
MR: Yes, that's key.
AP: Hey, you know, I've been following you for a while.
MR: Context. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. And the context is not just, "I love your work, let's connect." Okay, if you love my work, you're following, you can keep loving my work, but what are you trying to add to my life? That is not selfish at all 'cause also I have connections. Are you just trying to access my connections, you know? I don't know. So I have that rule, like it's just a policy, you know, I call it. I don't accept connection requests unless I know this person. And they have given me a clear reason why they want to connect with me with, not just with the idea of getting something from me, but also, they're trying to be, you know, mutual.
So that's my thing. But I love to say that Instagram is my neighborhood and LinkedIn is downtown where I go to work. I take the business part of LinkedIn very seriously and Instagram is a little bit more loose in that regard. You can send me messages on LinkedIn and I will—eh, on Instagram and I will definitely newer there. So, but those are the two places where I'm at. I'm on Threads too, but not too often.
MR: That's basically Instagram with text only, I suppose.
AP: Yeah.
MR: What's the old phrase? Party in the front business in the back or business In the front party in the back.
AP: Yeah. Or like those, you have the restaurant on the first floor and the—
MR: Residence on the second floor.
AP: - resident second floor or something like that, I guess. I don't know.
MR: I dunno. We're stretching the metaphor now.
AP: We're stretching. Yeah.
MR: It's about to break, which is an indication that maybe we should wrap this up.
AP: Yep. Yep.
MR: Well, hey, Alejo, this has been so great to have you on. Thank you for all you do. I'm so happy that we've connected these many years ago, and so proud of the work you're doing. I just wanna let you know, thank you for all the great work you're doing to move the community forward and to help people, and to encourage people, and just really super happy with the way you're living your life in the world. So thank you for that.
AP: Thank you. Thank you. I see it as a privilege and I take it seriously. I want to be able to, even if it's by a small degree, to help somebody's life be better. I have a lot of people who pour out on me and make my life better because they just decided to show up. So I'm showing up, and I hope that it really helps other people, even if it's just a small degree. I feel like that would be a life worth living.
MR: That sounds great. Well, thanks. And for anyone who's watching or listening to the show, this is another episode. Until the next episode of Sketchnote Army Podcast, talk to you soon.
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