VisualsSpeak blog

VizThink is a conference being held in San Francisco January 27-29, 2008. I will be one of the facilitators. This series of posts is designed to explore the topic of visual thinking, how it is taught, and how you can learn.

The series of posts was originally inspired by Tony Karrer’s, VizThink and Visual Thinking . It evoked responses from Tom Crawford, Brent Schlenker, and Dave Gray, who are all involved in the VizThink conference.

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As a visual communication resource I often suggest Horn’s book, Visual Language. In the ongoing discussion, Tony Karrer asks:

Interestingly, Christine, Tom and Dave Gray from Xplane all point to Bob Horn’s book as a great example. I’m a bit worried if that’s the example. I’m even more worried when I went to Bob’s web site. Dave Gray has always done incredible graphics that really help me to quickly understand a topic. Bob’s web site violates a lot of what I would consider to be good design. Please, tell me that I won’t think that’s good design by the end of this crash course? I can’t imagine that anyone thinks that good design?

In the comments of this post, I assured Tony I wasn’t recommending the book for it’s beauty. And I didn’t call it out for it’s design. Its brilliance is in it’s articulation of the elements of visual language. I am no fan of clip art, which illustrates this book, yet I understand it’s use in this instance.

It also raises a deeper question.

• Is there a difference between effective visual communication and effective visual design?

What we discovered developing VisualsSpeak images

When we were developing the VisualsSpeak process, we started out by cutting out photographs from books and magazines and laminating them. We tested about 10,000 images. Watching how people responded, adjusting the process to maximize the results. We were looking to deepen communication, spark insight, and give people a method that would aid in complex strategic thinking.

At first we weren’t sure exactly what the qualities were in an image that were going to make it effective. Since we were chopping up magazines, the collection included famous photos, breathtaking photos, and the work of some of the best photographers in the world. But we started to notice that when people would select many of those photos they would say things like I just liked it, it was pretty, I just like National Geographic. Or they would describe what they thought the photographer was saying. We weren’t hearing a lot of deep insight.

In contrast, the images that were more generic evoked all sorts of deep insights. It seemed almost like the more vague or ambiguous, the better they worked. This was independent of content. We tracked those factors separately. Technically, we used professional cameras and lenses, and when we printed we used high quality offset printing and good color.

When we started photographing, we had a sense of the type of images we were looking to capture. We took about 20,000 photographs to select the 200 needed for the VisualsSpeak ImageSet. So we had lots of stacks of similar images. We didn’t always pick the ‘best’ image from a design standpoint. Or the prettiest, or the most dramatic. Some of them are almost weird. And they work really well to deepen communication, spark insight, and aid in complex strategic thinking.

From the results we are trying to achieve with our visual tools, often it is NOT the prettiest picture that yields the greatest impact. It is the quality of the insights those images inspire in our clients and how all of the images interact with each other.

What are you trying to do?

As I mentioned before, I am no fan of clip art. I appreciate good design. However, I find myself compromising more and more when my focus shifts to effective learning, effective communication, and the relationship of cost to value. There is even a joke around our office about my RISD degree being revoked.

The questions are similar to the ones I ask when I begin designing a training or an organizational intervention.

• What is the impact I am trying to achieve?
• How am I going to measure it?
• How am I going to insure it makes economic sense?

So you have to ask yourself what are you trying to accomplish with your visuals. For us it means choosing the photos that enhance communication processes the most. At times we have to consciously get out of our own way to not choose the most aesthetically pleasing images from an art point of view. You may want to choose WOW kind of visuals, because they serve your purpose. Bob Horn chose to use clip art, because it helped illustrate the points he wanted to make.

What do you think? Do you find yourself struggling to define the line between good design and effectiveness in other areas?

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I do hope you will join us at the VizThink conference. If you use the code FCCM1 you can get $100 off your registration fee. I will be writing more about learning to think visually soon.

Tony Karrer wrote a post the other day wondering about the connection between visual thinking and e-learning. His questions were in relationship to the VizThink conference which will be held January 27-29, 2008 in San Fransisco.

The post has generated some very interesting conversation, and Tony asked some questions that I wanted to answer here, where I had more space and ability to add links and visuals.

I suggested Bob Horn’s book, Visual Language as a resource Tony might consider to learn about visuals. Xplane recently republished it and you can purchase it from them. The book is written in visual language, yet it uses clip art. Dr. Horn wanted to show how visual language works, but he wanted to make sure it was accessible ie: didn’t require drawing. I have heard people dismiss the book on the basis of it not being aesthetically pleasing enough, but I think they are missing the point. Not using fabulous visuals keeps the focus on the theoretical construction of the visual language components. This is a book I read and study over and over. There is an incredible amount of information on every page.

Here are some resources where you can learn more about the book.

• Sample pages from the book
• Interview with Dr. Horn talking about the book
• my post Visual Language republished by Xplane

Reading and writing visual language

In the comments on Tony’s post, Dave Gray says:

We “read” visual language all the time. It surrounds us, in the form of billboards, TV, road signs, car dashboards, internet screens, etc.

But how many of us can “write” visual language? I submit to you that visual language is not, and should not be, the province of designers, but is a core skill as we enter the coming century, maybe THE core skill.

So, reading Robert Horn’s book on visual language will help you read visuals better. And I believe you have to be able read, and SEE in order to effectively write.

Creating Visuals

We all know understanding something does not necessarily translate into an ability to do. And I think there must be a guild of mean parents and art teachers out there somewhere who have traumatized a huge number of people when they were young by telling them trees aren’t purple and to color inside the lines. So you do need to put all that early childhood trauma aside and be willing to try again. I KNOW you can do it, we all can.

Tony asks:

For me, once I start to go after the visual (ugly as they are), then I find myself changing the diagram, adding, etc. I’m never happy with it. So, I tinker. Pretty soon that visual depiction falls apart. So I wasn’t clear on what it should have been at the start.

Or maybe it’s not that simple? It’s more iterative?

You might stop too soon. I have produced FAR more really bad ugly stuff than things that work. It’s all part of the process. Have you heard salespeople say they have to get 10 (or 100) no’s for every yes. Sometimes we have to create a lot of yuck. Every so often, you hit right away. Hopefully over time, you hit sooner more regularly.

Sometimes it’s more like a focus group. You keep gathering the data until patterns emerge and you can distill the kernels that are most important.

Try this

If you really want to learn to work with visuals, you have to do it. Yes, I know the mean parents and art teachers who told you trees aren’t purple and your masterpiece didn’t look like your dog are whispering in your ears again. You’ve got to put them aside and decide to reclaim your ability to work with visuals.

Take an ordinary object from your daily life, say your keychain. Start to look at it, and begin to record the visual qualities of it. All of them. When you run out, keep going and find more. Aim for 100. The first 20 or 30 may be pretty easy, but keep going. I assure you if you do, you will see that keychain in a totally new way. And most likely everything else in the world also.

Visual Qualities you might look for include:

• Line
• Shape
• Texture
• Highlight & Shadow

Don’t worry if you don’t know what all of these mean. I’ll be talking more about them in later posts.

How do you do this? Anyway you want. If you really want to challenge yourself, do it with just a pen or pencil on pieces of paper. You can also do it with photography, painting, or the computer. Whatever works, it’s not about the media.

It’s also not about Art. This is quick, maybe even ugly stuff, that only takes a few minutes. Keep your keys on your desk, look over between tasks and see what you notice. Scribble something down. These ugly sketches of mine took less than a minute.

Why might you want to make a whole series of ugly drawings? Well, if you were a musician you might play scales to build your skills. If you’re a novelist you might write several drafts. This is a visual version of these types of processes. It’s not about the result, it’s about the process of looking, looking again, and continuing to look to discover new things way beyond when you think you’ve seen it all.

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I do hope you will join us at VizThink. If you use the code FCCM1 you can get $100 off your registration fee. I will be writing more about learning to think visually soon.

Tony Karrer wrote a post the other day wondering about the connection between visual thinking and e-learning. He had been talking with Tom Crawford, who is the new CEO of VizThink in relationship to the conference which will be held January 27-29, 2008 in San Fransisco. I will be one of the facilitators at the conference. Tony wondered;

So, again, I highly respect Tom and the conference. And maybe it’s as simple as the fact that a lot of what we do in training, learning, education is try to crystallize the important points, and turn it into an engaging, meaningful learning experience. So, maybe it’s a parallel and very useful skill. But I have this sense that Tom thinks there’s more to it.

And, I just am still not sure I get what he’s seeing? What am I missing here?

I wanted to say, a whole world. But that isn’t very helpful.

The beginnings of the conversation

First Brent Schlenker dropped by to comment on Tony’s post and talked about the importance of design, and noticed that very few instructional designers are trained with these skills. I know when I speak for groups of e-learning professionals, they often are unaware of visual communication basics. But Tony then asked if visual thinking and design were the same skills?

I don’t think so, but often people who have learned one have also learned the other so it becomes difficult to separate at times. I do know in e-learning in particular, I often see programs that may be well designed from a graphic perspective while they show no understanding of how visual language could have made their learning better. I left a comment about this, and Tony came back with another round of questions

• I wonder though how teachable it is?
• And can I learn it from a conference?
• Without going to the conference, how could I get a sense of whether I could learn it (whatever it is)?

I answered these simply, and you can go over to Tony’s blog to see the short answer. But his questions really helped me see an opportunity for a series of posts that speak to this in more depth.

• Yes, it is teachable.
• Yes, you can learn parts of it at a conference
• Yes, there are things you can do to learn

Tony came back with some other questions which I will address in subsequent posts.

Dave Gray from Xplane stopped by next to comment, and opened with

I have so many questions and thoughts for you that I don’t know where to begin.

Me too. Which is why I decided I better write a series of posts. Dave has some great thoughts about the assumptions built about communication, the screen being visual and lots more that make it worth going over to read the comments. He will be one of the pre-conference and main facilitators at the VizThink conference.

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I do hope you will join us at VizThink. If you use the code FCCM1 you can get $100 off your registration fee. I will be writing more about learning to think visually soon.

Be part of a new Professional Visual Thinking Community

For anyone interested in visual communication, there is an exciting development. VizThink, a new visual thinking community is kicking off a global community with a conference in San Francisco Jan 27-29, 2007. I am one of the people who will be facilitating a session at the conference. Dave Gray over at Communication Nation: VizThink takes off! has a whole list of ways people are getting involved.

Tom Crawford is the CEO of the new organization, and he posted this on their blog the other day:

Who are visual thinkers? Anybody who uses any of the visual arts for learning or communication. Easy said, hard to picture.

He also posted his first pass at creating an image of what the community might look like, seen below. Tom comes out of the gaming and computer programming worlds, so it is no great surprise that he conceived of this challenge in nice neat rows of boxes.

Ok, so it’s an understatement to say this didn’t work for me. I immediately felt my creative identity threatened by being put in a box. At the same time, I greatly appreciate Tom’s ability to break the pieces into segments and sort them. And I know someone who creates an image like this will be really good at organizing the conference. The details will be taken into account, which always makes it nicer for a facilitator.

It also got me thinking about other aspects of what it means to form a visual thinking community. After all, there isn’t a profession called ‘Visual Thinker’. For the purpose of thinking through this challenge, I decided to focus on the group of people who are facilitating at the VizThink conference as representatives of a visual thinking community. What is it that ties us together?

Do we all use visuals as a means to get to the story?

It’s not just about the visuals, it’s how the visuals spark or enhance the story. We live in the intersection between the visual and the verbal. But we each come at it from a different entry point.

I don’t have the answer any more than Tom does, but I do have some ideas to add to the mix. I’m confident the vision will emerge from the dialogue, in the spaces between us all, in the emerging visual thinking community.

Exercises in Visual Thinking

A graphic from Ralph E. Wileman’s book, Exercises in Visual Thinking, kept popping into my head. It’s about the relationship between the abstract verbal and the concrete visual. You can click on the image to see it large enough to read it.

In the original chart, the verbal to visual is depicted as a continuum with a top and bottom. What if we looked at it as a spiraling pathway? I then created a spiral of visual techniques, then one of methods.

Each person enters the story through their method, from a different place in relationship to the visuals. I have put the names of people on the spokes, since community is about the people. I admit that I know more about what some individuals do than others, so I may not have everyone placed quite right. And I selected the aspect of the work that I was familiar with.

So this raises another round of questions:

• Where do all the other related areas Tom identified fit? Or do they?
• This is words and lines, what are the other visual elements a depiction would need to truly represent the range of professions in the community?
• Is it about story for others? Or am I bringing too much of my own lens?
• What else am I missing?

I toss it back to you Tom, and the rest of the VizThink community.