One page of my visual notes from Dan Roam’s excellent workshop in SF – the pilot for The Back of the Napkin. I appreciate that Dan’s putting visual thinking front and center in the business world. It helps me keep MY day job, too. See the rest of the visual notes here.
The first bits of coolness around SXSW Interactive 2010: a baby graphic giving some insight into the contents of our Visual Notetaking Panel. The panel, Visual Notetaking 101, is on Monday, March 15 at 3:30 pm, so join us for a conversation on how to stop taking notes that look like punishment. I’m joined on the panel by my co-author Dave Gray, and by sketchnote masters Mike Rohde and Austin Kleon. Visual thinkers, come out of the closet. And be rewarded with excellent content when you do.
HMSA (Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Hawai’i) has risen to the top of my client list due to the nature of the projects we’re involved with and my deep respect for the efforts of the leadership and the Innovation Team. They are transforming the organization in service to their customers and I’ve been lucky enough to become a part of their team, partnering with them on visual thinking training, graphic recording for leadership meetings, design consultations on presentations and workshops and a large history mapping project in the making. My projects with them are always rewarding and I appreciate the partnership. I also appreciate that I get to go to Hawaii to work with them. Nothing wrong with doing the hula while you work.
BrightSpot had its first international invitation this year, to attend the CLIC Conference at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India. The conference was hosted by the Centre for Leadership, Innovation and Change and it gave a forum to CEOs and other high-level execs to discuss business and spirituality – yes Americans, I did use them in the same sentence. Each presenter in his or her own way described the possibilities for overlaps in those two fields. It was very inspirational content and I did my best to graphically capture it given that I’m not a cultural native and the acoustics were, ahem, insane. But I was so happy to be invited to work for the Indian School of Business that I could have gotten a parasite and still felt it was worthwhile. Click here to see the murals I created as well the conference itself. And Namaste to you and yours.
A most interesting project came through Somnio, an Austin-based sales and marketing company that was hired by HP to support a sales training. Somnio specializes in unique sales and marketing solutions, so their idea was that BrightSpot create twitpics – pictures that could be periodically tweeted to the participants of a sales training to (1) keep them interested, (2) reinforce the content, and (3) use an empathetic Twitter persona to relate to the experience that many of the participants were probably having. Somnio wanted a visual narrative that reflected the (probable) emotional ride of the employees and they wanted it to look like handwritten notes coming out of someone’s notebook. So Erik Kuntz, BrightSpot’s principal illustrator, took on that project and did, as always, a superb job. (And consequently, created a new Brightspot offering – TWEETNOTES.) Did I just invent a new word? Doubtful. But I love the output.
