Pencil Me In: The Business Drawing Book Who Can’t Draw

© 2017 Christina Wodtke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be addressed in future editions.

ISBN 0-9960060-3-6

Designed by Michel Vrana / michelvrana.com

Published by Christina Wodtke / pencilmeinthebook.com

With Contributions From

Amelie Sarrazin, Aleksandra Micek, Taylor Reese, Dan Brown, Daniel Cook, Kate Rutter, Eva-Lotta Lamm, Matthew Magain, Sunni Brown, Cristina Negrut, Daryl Meier Fahrni, Marc Bourguignon, Laura Klein, David Gray, Melissa Kim, Jherin Miller, Mike Rohde, Brian Gulassa, Andrew Reid, Rolf Faste, Raph Koster, Stone Librande, Robin Hunicke, Alicia Loring, Erin Malone, Stephen P. Anderson, Giorgia Lupi, Alex Osterwalder, Noelle Stransky, James Young, and Dan Roam and examples from scientists, architects, chefs, architects, best-selling authors and more....

Dedication

For the students of California College of the Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies and my many workshops who kept asking for this book.

For my amazing beta-readers, who were generous with their time and feedback.

But mostly for my daughter Amelie, who drew with me, critiqued the pictures and the words, and astounds me every day with her insights and creativity. I love you, kitten.

Contents

Copyright

With Contributions From

Dedication

Introduction

Drawing, Drafting, and Doodling

Equipment

A History of Mark Making

Reason to Draw No. 1: Communication

Reason to Draw No. 2: Better Problem Solving

Dan Brown on Drawing to Solve Problems

Reason to Draw no. 3: Remember Better

Part 1: How to Draw

Are You Afraid to Draw?

Start with Lines

Exercises

Practice Making Shapes

3-D Shapes

Shadow & Texture

Exercise

Draw to Relax.

How Bad is Your Handwriting?

Personalize Your Alphabet

Exercise

Become a Fan of Good Enough

Exercise

Let’s Make People!

A Better Stick Figure

Hands

Faces

Part 2: What to draw When

Hard Problems Take a Better Kind of Thinking

Make Sketchnotes to Listen and Remember

What Should You Learn to Draw?

Fancy Sketchnote Elements...

Draw Your Customers

Empathy Maps

The Customer’s Story

Customer’s Journey Storyboard

Drawings You Need for Storyboarding

Draw Concept Sketches and Diagrams for Better Brainstorms

Draw Your Ideas!

Concept Sketches

Map All the Concepts!

Model Your Ideas

Examples from Game Design

Stone Librande

Daniel Cook

Robin Hunicke

Draw When You Are Creating New Products and Services

Three Useful Diagrams for Digital Product Design

Drawing Interfaces

Drawing Devices

Erin Malone

Alicia Loring

Make Complex Ideas and Data Make Sense!

Giorgia Lupi on Drawing Data

Dave Gray On Visual Thinking

Hold a Visual Meeting

James Young

Techniques for Visual Meetings

Canvases Shape Thinking

Put the Techniques Together and Hold a Design Charette

Alex Osterwalder on Why He Works Visually.

Dan Roam

Draw All the Things

Books I Read and You Should Too

Websites & Communities

Introduction

While I was writing I kept thinking, “Who am I to make this book?”

I studied painting in Art School and went on to have a great career in fine dining. Frustrated and footsore, I taught myself HTML and got into “this new internet thing.”

That worked out pretty well.

My parents used to tease me about how I was (not) using my degree. Over the years, I’ve realized they were wrong. There are so many things I learned in art school I use every day. For example, I learned grit, a.k.a. “How to keep making art after a critique had you weeping so hard you puked.”

Drawing was one of art school’s greatest gifts. When I was at Kansas City Art Institute, drawing was taught as a kind of Zen practice. You were taught that your idea of a face or a house got in the way of truly seeing it. You needed to stop thinking about what it was and relax into seeing what really was there.

For example, on the left is an idea of a house, the kind a kid draws. On the right is a house in my neighborhood. Houses rarely look like the one on the left.

When I started making websites in the ’90s, I found plenty of use for drawing. I made concept models, site maps, wireframes, and more! But I made them with software rather than with a pen and paper.

Much later, I realized that I was better off if I drew my ideas. I could explore a dozen ideas in the time it took me to open my software.

I drew at every company I worked with, from Yahoo to The New York Times. At tech companies, everyone draws on the whiteboard. When you make complex things, words eventually fail.

My sketches were pretty horrible. I knew how to draw things in the world, but not the things in my brain. I decided to learn how to draw ideas.

Me, Teaching, by Amelie, Age 8

I could have kept drawing badly –you can make bad pictures and communicate a lot! But I wondered... if bad pictures communicated a lot, what could good pictures do? I filled a dozen sketchbooks exploring and practicing. As I became fluent in visual communication, it was like learning a new language. I could communicate complex ideas clearly and simply.

Index card sketches by Aleksandra Micek, student at California College of the Arts

When I became a professor, I taught my students how to sketch ideas and model systems. One day a student came up to me and asked, “Is there a book on this kind of drawing?” All I could recommend was Ed Emberley’s Make a World. It’s a kid’s book.

Where are the simple books on how to draw for grown-ups? Most books that teach drawing are intimidating. They teach you how to draw buildings or race cars or realistic people, but that’s not what non-designers need to draw every day.

I decided to make a book for working professionals that wouldn’t scare anyone away and would teach you how to draw the kinds of things you need to think through product and business decisions.

Here we are! Let’s draw!

Drawing, Drafting, and Doodling

People talk about drawing and sketching as if it’s all the same kind of thing. But when I tried to draw my ideas, I struggled, even though I had studied painting.

I think there are three kinds of drawing (at least!).

Life Drawing

The art of looking at the world and shutting up your verbal brain so you can draw what you see. The best book for this is Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Technically, an extinct bird drawing.

Drafting

Used by architects and industrial designers, you use geometry and logic to render things as they eventually will appear in the world.

Idea Sketching (Also Called Doodling)

All about getting the stuff in your head out on the paper where you can see, evaluate, and share it.

This book is about that last kind.

Equipment

You will want a pencil, a pen and paper. I started with Sharpies and index cards. But Sharpies bleed through normal paper!

My favorite brands now are Micron and Tombow. If the pen’s product description says, “archival ink,” you won’t get in trouble with fading (or accidently washing).

When I get a new set of pens, I always test each size, to see how I feel about the lines.

My first notebook was a Moleskine. They’re in many stores, so they are easy to find. Now I use HandBook Travelogue and MUJI notebooks. MUJI are so cheap you feel good about making bad drawings! HandBook has the nicest paper, when you feel artsy.

My secret weapon is stencils. I love them for making geometric people.

A History of Mark Making

We have been drawing for over 40,000 years. It’s how we preserved our knowledge before writing.

Our brains have evolved to make and read pictures. So why do

we stop drawing after the first grade?

Little children and early civilizations make the same marks.

They all start with handprints.

Handprint… and marks.

Then we make scribbles, enjoying the pleasure of mark making for its own sake.

Scribbles become spirals and shapes, and shapes are refined into patterns.

As we play, we discover new cool patterns we can make.

We graduate into drawing the things we see in the world. We can’t help but include how we feel about the things we draw.

Finally, we start drawing our work life.

Petroglyphs from New Mexico, Arizona, Peru, Spain, Australia, Syria, New Hebrides, Mesopotamia, Oregon. Sketched from First Drawings by Sylvia Fein.

Great people have been using drawing to make sense of ideas throughout history.

Marie Curie thought in words, numbers and scribbles.

Merce Cunningham, famous choreographer, worked out his dances on paper.

Reason to Draw No. 1: Communication

Words are abstract. When I say “chair,” what do you picture?

Maybe neither of these?

If I asked you to buy a chair, how would you know what to get? Better draw a picture!

Michelin three-star chef Michel Bras uses drawings to communicate to his pastry chef exactly how his cake should look (from The Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts). M. Bras mixes words and images to make sure his team understands what he wants, and thus he keeps his three-star rating.

M. Bras sketch from The Notebooks of Michel Bras

Noelle Stransky, UX strategist, uses sketches to work through early ideas with her clients. Sketches invite non-drawers to join in, scribbling and annotating.

Taylor Reese, UX designer at Devfacto, draws pictures of key ideas during meetings. Draw what people say and everyone knows you’re talking about the same thing.

Reason to Draw No. 2: Better Problem Solving

Have you ever been stuck when trying to figure out a problem?

It’s hard to visualize all the details of a solution while simultaneously remembering all the parts of the issue.

But when you draw, you get things out of your head and into the world where you can see them. Hang your pictures on the wall to act as an external memory!

Throughout this book I’m going to have guest essays from people who using drawing in their work.

Here is the first one!

Dan Brown on Drawing to Solve Problems

Dan Brown is a founding partner in EightShapes, a Washington DC-based design consultancy. He is also the Author of Communicating Design, Designing Together and Practical Design Discovery.

Concept model: full (above), detail (right)

“A client challenged me to model a concept central to their business. We sought to improve the technical infrastructure for this concept, which they called rules engine. The final model displayed three actors as circular “swim lanes,” though perhaps “concentric wading pools” is better. The engine sat in the center of these, a hub through which information passed to each of these actors through different software components.”

“I dug up my initial sketches, which reveal how I came to understand the domain as well as modeling it. Each iteration added something different.”

“Drawing pictures helps me get my head around a new idea.”

Reason to Draw no. 3: Remember Better

I love listening to presentations, but I struggle with a couple of things:

1. Attention: It’s hard to focus! What’s happening on Twitter? Is that a squirrel outside?

2. Retention: I get inspired by a TED talk one week and can’t remember it the next one!

Doodling helps. People who doodle remember 29%1 more information than those who don’t.

Sometimes during a boring lecture I draw abstract forms just to quiet my mind. But if you want to get even better at listening, understanding and retaining information, try sketchnoting.

When you sketchnote, you draw pictures of the ideas you hear or read. More on page 79!

1. Andrade J. 2010 ‘What Does Doodling do?’ Applied Cognitive Psychology

Are You Afraid to Draw?

No one expects to sit down at a piano and play Chopin without practicing. So why do you expect to draw wonderfully without doing your scales?

Like any skill, from piano to basketball, you have to practice.

You will suck for a while.

But not forever.

Start with Lines

If learning to draw is like learning to play piano, then lines are our scales.

Do them every day.

Begin by drawing lines in sets of five. Go in both directions, up and down.

Try to make the lines equidistant. Try to make diagonal lines, too.

Play with drawing the lines very close to each other, and very far apart.

Overlap your lines to make grids. If the lines are equidistant, you’ll make tidy squares.

Try making lines very long.

Fill pages with lines during boring meetings.

Exercises

Listen to a song, and let your pen dance to it!

Practice Making Shapes

Start with boxes.

Let’s think about how we make a box. Do you draw it all in one go, not lifting your pen up? Is your last line sloppy?

Play with different ways to draw them. Draw the vertical lines equidistant, then the horizontals.

Try drawing two L shapes. Does a certain technique make a better box?

Are you more accurate when you pull or push the pen? Left to right? Right to left?

Try to make small boxes and big boxes, but always stay square!

From here, you can try making rectangles.

Next try circles. Circles are really hard to draw… if you rush.

Go slow!

Keep circles tidy. Make sure the end point neatly touches the beginning point.

You don’t want your circles embarrassed because the other kids at school say they are funny looking.

Finally, triangles. Making a triangle isn’t as hard as it looks.

Draw a line. Mark the midpoint. Make a dot above the midpoint where you want your point. Now all you have to do is connect each end with the dot.

Practice your triangles. Make sure you close the corners!

Sierpinski triangle, fractal fans!

Arrows are just rectangles and triangles together.

Or sometimes a triangle and a circle.

3-D Shapes

Sometimes you need to make things 3-D. For example, if you wanted to draw a package.

For a cube, draw a square, then half a square behind it. Connect the corners.

For a pyramid, the triangle’s bottom line gets a point as well.

Spheres don’t have hard edges to suggest 3-D surfaces. Give it a reflection, or consider shading.

Shadow & Texture

You can use lines to fill in shapes to create an illusion of shadow and depth.

In hatching, lines go one way. In cross hatching, they are perpendicular. Stippling is made with dots. Scribbling is scribbling. But thoughtful scribbling!

You can make the texture shadowy two ways. Lines that are closer together look darker.

You can also crosshatch in different directions, building up density. Experiment!

Exercise

Fill a page with squares, rectangles, circles and triangles. Play with rulers and try freehand. Shade them. Fill with texture.

Go back to your wandering lines (from page 29), and fill them in with patterns.

Draw to Relax.

There is a kind of drawing meditation called zentangles. In this practice, you fill shapes with patterns.

This is a great way for you to practice your hand control.

And chill out.

Go back to your wandering lines (from page 29), and fill them in with patterns.

“I’m obsessed with the grid pattern on the paper. Practicing with grids sometimes results in interesting mechanical insights thrice removed.”

—Daniel Cook, Chief Creative Officer (and Game Designer) at Spry Fox

How Bad is Your Handwriting?

Is it worse than mine was in 2014?

I can barely read my own journal. But with practice, things can change for the better.

By 2016, you can finally read it.

It’s been a long slow crawl to legibility. Practice!

Do you want to be understood?

The secret is to slow down and focus on the shape of the letters.

Practice lettering to relax and chill out, like you do with zentangles.

Focus on the shape of each letter.

Make round letters really round. Make pointy letters extra pointy.

Feel each shape.

Personalize Your Alphabet

Make the letters your own.

Kate Rutter, graphic facilitator extraordinaire, recommends starting with these variations.

They’re great for making strong headers on whiteboards!

Find your own style of writing. There are a lot of ways to make an “a”

Try slanting letters, or replacing some with a shape.

Find famous architect’s writing, and copy them!

Copied from Frank Lloyd Wright…

and from Bruce Goff

Try writing a favorite quote in your new style!

Exercise

Pick a font you like, and copy it by hand.

This is my take on Dave Pentland’s “Steadman,” a font based on the art of Ralph Steadman.

Become a Fan of Good Enough

We worry too much about drawing well. The human mind is great at seeing patterns everywhere.

We see faces in electrical sockets and cars (it’s called pareidolia).

Most people can understand even the worst drawing.

If you try to be perfect, you may give up, when good-enough drawings do the job.

Try it yourself!

1. Draw a squiggle.

2. Make something!

Exercise

Make these squiggles into faces, people, creatures, or even birds!

To become even better at drawing, use this human ability to see patterns and forms everywhere. In the next section, renowned visual thinker and graphic facilitator Kate Rutter will explain how. Learn more about Kate at http://intelleto.com

Let’s Make People!

Since we are all people, and your coworkers are probably people, and your customers are people, let’s learn to draw people.

Let’s start with tiny people. Imagine they are far, far away. Here are some styles to try.

Try drawing a page full of tiny people. What feels good? What looks good?

You can give Star Trek people better proportions, and they look like architecture drawings.

You can add personality by giving clothing to your star people.

A Better Stick Figure

Most folks default to stick figures if they have to draw a person. They are easy but boring. We can do better.

Dan Roam, author of “Back of the Napkin,” gives stick figures some personality by adding hands, feet and hair.

Dave Gray, founder of Xplane, starts with a parallelogram torso, then adds head and limbs.

Ivan Brunetti, New Yorker cartoonist, teaches his students to start with very simple geometric figures.

A circle, a triangle, and a few wavy lines and you can draw a person filled with existential angst.

Hands

Drawing hands can freak people out. They look so complicated!

But you don’t have to draw them perfectly to get your ideas across.

A hand is just a circle with some digits hanging off of it. Keep your drawings simple. Cartoonists do this all the time. They draw hands with three fingers, or none!

This guy, drawn in the style of David Sibbet, only needs a finger to make a point. Simplifying the hand to a blob with one digit helps put focus on the gesture.

Mr. Trunk and Mr. Beak say:

Drawn in the style of Lynda Barry. Read her books Picture This and What It Is for drawing confidence

You can either practice drawing hands until you master them, or stop worrying, and focus on just one finger.

Faces

Because of pareidolia, it doesn’t take much effort to make a face. Hugh Dubberly, information designer, makes faces with the letter “e.”

Bill Verplank, interaction designer, uses lighting and a dot. He often adds a hand so his people can act on the world.

I draw quick faces like this. It’s just a circle that ends a bit farther to the right, making a nose.

When I’m drawing on the whiteboard, I don’t want to think about how to draw a person. I just focus on the ideas.

When people draw a smiley face, they often put the eyes too high. This makes the face look inhuman.

The eyes should be in the middle of the head.

If you put them lower, though, the face will look like a child’s.

Here I am, to explain face proportion!

My eyes are in the middle of my face.

My nose is between my eyes and my chin.

My mouth is at the midpoint between the tip of my nose and my chin.

Our bodies have a standard proportion as well.

Humans are 7 “heads” tall.

Our legs take up half of our bodies.

Stand up and let your arms hang naturally. Your hands fall at your thighs.

The top part and bottom part of arms and legs are the same length.

It’s not just me, all faces and body proportions are the same... if they are average.

But why be average?

Heroic figures are drawn as being 8.5 heads high.

This Wonder Woman drawing I copied from a coloring book appears to get all her extra height from her legs.

Children and cute cartoon characters (in manga, they are called “chibi”) are 5 or 6 heads high.

Wonder Woman © DC Comics, Inc

Childish proportions places emphasis on the face, which shows emotion.

Play with proportion!

What does changing the mouth size do?

How about the eyes?

Eyes and mouths message emotion!

Try playing with the eyes, but leaving the rest of the face the same.

Now try combining mouth and eyes. How many emotions can you represent? How about other features?

Noses rarely show emotion, but they do give a hint about the character.

Exercise: Eyebrows

This is an exercise from cartoonist Chris Ware. Fill a page with circle faces, and try just changing eyebrows. How many emotions can you create?

Next! Illustrator Eva-Lotta Lamm explains how to take your drawing to the next level! (see more at http://www.evalotta.net)

Hard Problems Take a Better Kind of Thinking

Scientists used to believe we used just our brain to think. But when problems get tricky, we use our brains and our bodies.

Who’s never counted on their fingers and toes?

When problems are really tough, we need to get drawing. We draw to see what we think, in order to evaluate those ideas.

When ideas are made physical, they are tangible enough to understand and communicate. Scientists call this “distributed cognition.” Business people call it “design thinking.” Whatever you call it, it works!

In the second half of this book, you’ll learn techniques used by a variety of professions to solve problems and invent new products. In each section, I’ll show you real world examples as well as how to do the drawings yourself.

First, learn sketchnoting to understand and remember things we hear and read. Then learn to draw your customers, to better understand them.

Next, draw to brainstorm! We’ll look at drawing for product design, and how we can use drawing to make sense of big data and complex ideas.

Finally, we’ll transform our meetings with pictures.

Are you ready to turn your new skill into a superpower?

Make Sketchnotes to Listen and Remember

When I first started teaching at California College of the Arts, I was told the students wouldn’t do the reading. And in the first class I taught, it proved to be true.

So when I taught a class again, I assigned the students to sketchnote all the reading.

Sketchnotes by Jherin Miller from my Creative Founder class. Above is from Alex Osterwalder’s talk on the Business Model Canvas, below is from Adam Nash’s Five Sources of Traffic.

Sketchnotes provided more than a way for me to check homework. Not only did they do the reading, they understood it more thoroughly and remembered it after.

What is sketchnoting? It’s taking notes by drawing pictures of the ideas and words you hear. The Sketchnote Handbook, by Mike Rohde, had inspired an army of creative listeners to illustrate talks.

How do we do it? Let’s ask Matthew Magain....

What Should You Learn to Draw?

Sunni Brown, author of Doodle Revolution, recommends getting good at six types of sketchnote elements. Of course, your imagination is your only limit!

Fancy Sketchnote Elements...

You can sketchnote speeches, books, or even your ideas. Now let’s look at some sketchnote examples!

Sketchnotes from Cristina Negrut, creator & founder of www.graduationwisdom.com

A sketchnote of a book I wrote, Radical Focus, drawn by Daryl Meier Fahrni

Advice from Marc Bourguignon http://sketchnotearmy.com/blog/2015/11/13/sketchnoters-stories-sketchnoting-at-work-marc-bourguignon.html

Draw Your Customers

User Map from the book Build Better Products, created by Laura Klein and illustrated by Kate Rutter because Laura does not draw if she doesn’t have to.

Even people who do not like to draw can use a customer canvas to visualize their customer’s needs and wants and how those change over time.

Laura Klein is a product executive and bestselling author. She doesn’t consider herself good at drawing, but she believes in its effectiveness. She partnered with Kate Rutter to create this canvas to make better product decisions. Simple drawings can create a powerful framework for understanding.

Sketch it on a whiteboard, and answer the questions on Post-its, then place them on the canvas.

Also, you can create empathy maps to understand customer psychographics and storyboards to understand customer behaviors.

Empathy Maps

Let’s start simply. Let’s make a picture of our customer point of view.

This tool is called the Empathy Map. It was invented by Dave Gray (his drawing above). You draw a quick sketch of your customer in the center, then use Post-its to develop a portrait of them in a moment in time.

Below is an empathy map created by my CCA students for customers of an audio management tool.

Student empathy map by Ridwan Pothigara, Tiffany Wang and Nathaniel Smith

The Customer’s Story

We can further understand customers by making storyboards. First, let me tell you about stories. All compelling stories share the same elements. Start with a character who wants something for a reason the audience can recognize. Harry Potter wants to defeat Voldemort to protect his new found home, Hogwarts.

The character struggles toward the goal, almost fails, but then succeeds through her own abilities, or with help. The story then resolves any open questions, and the character is changed.

Our customers go through a similar journey...

Customer’s Journey Storyboard

To help your team at work understand how your product fits into your customer’s lives, draw it out!

Panel One: Show your key customer, their goal and motivation. What do they want? Why? Here we see a mom: “I want to lose weight to be healthy, so I can dance at my daughter’s wedding someday.”

Panel Two: The inciting incident. What makes the customer decide to journey toward her goal. “Oh my! I weigh what?!?”

Panel Three: How she currently tries to reach her goal, and how it fails her: “Exercise doesn’t work!”

Panel Four: Show what is at stake if she fails to reach her goal: “Oh no, high blood pressure!”

Panel Five: Now your product or service can save the day.

“Diet bento boxes? Who knew!”

Panel Six: Show how the customer’s life is improved.

Wei-Wei Hsu and Melissa Kim share storyboards for their new product.

Drawings You Need for Storyboarding

Communication Balloons: these symbols represent thinking, talks, whispering and shouting.

Emanata:

This is a term from cartoonist Mort Walker. It describes when the characters interior state manifests externally and visually.

Can you guess what’s going on with these guys?

Layouts:

You could make a simple 6x6 by folding the paper in half, then in thirds. But what if you want to make one panel more prominent? Try different sizes and play with offsetting the panels to support your storytelling.

You may also need:

Objects from life, like a treadmill, or a doctor, or a scale giving up the ghost. Look for what makes the item recognizable.

Doctors have stethoscopes!

Collect drawings you make from life into an image library. Mike Rohde, author of The Sketchnote Handbook, tells you how!

Draw Concept Sketches and Diagrams for Better Brainstorms

Draw Your Ideas!

People who invent new things use drawings to explore ideas quickly, from cutting edge chefs to architects.

Building idea from Zaha Hadid, architect

Paper is cheap. Starting with a drawing allows you to wander down blind alleys, explore impossible concepts, and play!

There are two particularly useful types of drawings you use to brainstorm: concept sketches and concept models.

Sketch for a new cocktail by Grant Achatz of Alinea

Concept Sketches

If you want to make something really innovative, you need to explore a lot of different ideas. Designer Damien Newman describes the creative process with this diagram. If I can paraphrase: You start a new project wandering around a bit, trying new things. Then you can pick the right idea to refine.

Drawing makes ideas tangible, so you can evaluate them. Then go go go!

Brian Gulassa is an award winning toy designer. He begins designing a new toy by creating dozens of Post-its holding tiny ideas represented with words and pictures.

He then fleshes out the ideas that show promise on index cards.

Index cards have a nice surface for drawing, yet the small size keeps him from getting too caught up in details too early. Small paper keeps you working big picture.

Eventually Brian creates detailed sketches to explore the most interesting ideas and to share with his clients.

Map All the Concepts!

When you start a new project, it’s important to get your ideas out of your head and on to paper where you can see them.

MindMaps are a good place to start. They are like brainstorming on paper, free form and fast.

Start with an important idea. Free-associate more ideas, and connect them with lines.

A MindMap for a game about water pollution by Andrew Reid

Rolf Faste, 1993. Courtesy of the Rolf A. Faste Foundation for Design Creativity.

Model Your Ideas

A concept model helps us understand a complex system via pictures. We make concept models for ourselves, as we try to understand something. We make them for others to give them a framework for understanding what we’ve figured out. Concept models are not a complete map of a system, but rather an edited selection that tells a story.

They typically take one of three forms:

1. Elements

This model shows the elements of a system and the elements’ relationships to each other. You might draw a game or a website or a business model—anything complicated is more easily understood with a model.

The elements can be layered, or parts of a whole, or overlapping. Vary the size of each element to express importance.

Stone Librande design, for SimCity

Even storytellers use concept models! A million drama teachers have drawn Freytag’s triangle to explain the three act structure.

2. Processes

How do the elements change over time? Draw this, and you’re drawing a process concept model. Game designers draw the core play loop, and process innovators draw a better way to work. The Lean Startup model (below) shows how companies can get smarter over time.

3. Comparisons

How does the screen look before and after the customer has logged in? What is the difference between us and our competitors? What do different kinds of customers prefer?

The 2x2 is a common comparison format. It can be drawn different ways, but it always represents opposing concepts, and where elements exist along a continuum.

Here is Bartle’s taxonomy of players. Richard Bartle researched online roleplaying games, and discovered that people played for different reasons. Some were competitive, some were social, and others just wanted to explore. He wrote up a long research report, but it’s his diagram that led his ideas to be widely adopted even beyond game design.

We make concept models for customers to explain our value. We make them for peers to share a new ideas.

We make concept models for teammates, when we want everyone to be on the same page.

And we make models when we are brainstorming new ideas, games, products and services!

Bill Verplank’s Model of Interaction Design

Examples from Game Design

Game designs often create complex systems and economies. Think of SimCity or Civilization.

Game designers draw concept models and concept sketches to design how the game works, and then to communicate that vision to their team.

Here is a selection of examples from the sketchbooks of game designers. We can learn a lot from how they work.

Daniel Cook’s Concept Sketches for SteamBirds.

Stone Librande

Lead designer at Riot Games. Games include SimCity, Spore, Diablo III and more!

Early brainstorming to explore the resource flows in SimCity.

I’m a visual thinker. In order to solve complex problems I need to see a picture of the solution. Although I have plenty of software tools at my disposal to accomplish this, the majority of my early design work begins in a small sketchbook that I carry with me.

A mechanical pencil is clipped to the inside of the spiral so that I always have a sharp point and eraser at the ready.

The sketching process is incredibly fast. When I am in “sketchbook mode,” I am only concerned with explaining things to myself. Knowing that the sketches aren’t meant for anyone else is liberating and absolves me from my perfectionist tendencies.

From sketch to deliverable for an unpublished expansion pack for the game Spore

I scribble, cross-out, refine, erase and move onto a clean page when I can no longer decipher my own scrawls. When I get to the point where the vision is clear to me then I’ll translate everything over to Adobe Illustrator and clean things up to make it understandable for others.

This technique works great on whiteboards, too. While not as private as a sketchbook, it is a great way for the team to brainstorm and contribute to the early design process. Everyone is given a marker and allowed to draw and erase interactively.

High level ideas for an unpublished Spore expansion pack.

When we are all in agreement about the basic structure of the task then I copy it into a formal design document.

On a smaller team I’ve found that I can skip the clean-up step and let the “document” live on the whiteboard. When we are ready to move onto the next task, we take a photograph of the whiteboard for the archive, erase everything, and start on the next project with a clean slate.

Daniel Cook

Chief Creative Officer of Spry Fox. Games include Triple Town and Alphabear.

I’m usually working on multiple projects at once. As well as brainstorming future projects. I tend to mix drawings freely, jumping from one topic to the next depending on who I’m talking to or what task comes up. A lot like a white board really. The paper is just there as an external cache to facilitate distributed cognition.

Brainstorming a game. This has a mix of scheduling details, thumbnail of what the game might look like and mechanical concepts or key questions that determine the constraints.

Above: Another prototype concept. Very early stage. Includes both mechanics and world building. Scene: Campfire. Cowboys around the fire drinking coffee. Beasts resting.

Below: A kitten farming game.

Robin Hunicke

Founder of Funomena, professor at UC Santa Cruz. Designer of Journey, Flower and Flow

I like to draw because it helps me clarify the shape of things. Specifically—I like to work out the symbols, patterns and forms that will recur throughout the experience.

These are drawings of things for Luna, and I drew them while talking with the team about what kinds of things we wanted to include in our demo level for PAX 2016.

I also want to think about layouts, level designs, ways in which the player will perceive change as they move through the world. Sketching/storyboarding out moments that are in my head also helps me collect feedback and brainstorm with the artists, designers and engineers on a project.

This process continues throughout the game’s development. In fact, I would say that during a typical meeting, I will draw at least once or twice in my notebook, on a whiteboard or sticky-note just to promote clarity and help solidify the ideas as they coalesce. Often, drawings are better than words

Final art work for Luna, with Glenn Hernandez—Art Director

Draw When You Are Creating New Products and Services

There are two types of sketch scenarios for me:

1. I’m talking through a problem with someone who is helping me figure it out. We’re riffing together and I’m working very quickly, so those sketches are ultra messy. Some of my sketches are also quick re-creations of what’s happening on a whiteboard.

2. I’m completely stuck on a problem with no idea how to proceed. Chatting with colleagues has not led to any particular insights, so I’m alone with my head down throwing out lots of paper. These sketches are just as messy, but usually contain a bit more detail.
-- Alicia Loring, User Experience Designer

Three Useful Diagrams for Digital Product Design

If you work with a multidisciplinary team, you need a way to communicate clearly about the decisions you are making about your product.

Let’s pretend we’re making a cooking application!

1. Flowcharts & Relationship Diagrams

The flowchart (or “flow” for short) is for user tasks. It’s how you draw interaction. Is the user logged in? If not, show the log in screen.

The relationship diagram shows how the content is organized. Is tomato categorized as a fruit or vegetable?

For example, you use the hierarchy diagram to show what categories are available when people are browsing recipes. You’d use a flow to show how the customer saves that recipe.

2. Wireflows

Add a little details to those flows and you’ve got wireflows.

These are useful to draw on a white board when collaborating with your team.

Use just enough details so your team knows what screens you are discussing.

3. Wireframes

You make these when you are figuring out the layout of your interface. There are a more detailed version of a wire flow screen.

Don’t worry about being perfect. You’re just thinking with a pencil. When you start getting fussy, it’s time to add color, type and finalize the look and feel.

So what goes in those wireframes?

Drawing Interfaces

There are some shortcuts that designers use when sketching interfaces!

A box with an “X” means it’s a picture. 3-D boxes are buttons. Parallel lines are the symbol for text blocks. A zigzag at the bottom means more beneath (for scrolling!)

Draw dropdowns or radio buttons for mutually exclusive choices, or check boxes for when you can pick more than one item in the list... you can even show what’s in your dropdown.

Drawing Devices

You’ll want to be able to draw devices when you are storyboarding your product.

Don’t worry, the new devices are much easier to draw than the old ones were. For example, they have fewer buttons. Smart phones are just rectangles within rectangles.

A laptop is easier to draw than a desktop!

Exercise

Pick a website you visit every day, and sketch a wireframe.

Erin Malone

Erin Malone is a partner at Tangible UX, a professor at California College of the Arts, and author of Designing Social Experiences.

I draw to quickly capture ideas about interaction and language, and to explore the story of a person working through a system or application. When I am alone, I draw on paper—lately using 5x8 index cards or post it notes— that I can gather together and reshape and reorder.”

When I am working with clients, I draw on large post-it white paper or on white boards. Post-it paper lets me ideate around a topic or theme and gives me enough space for flows but are still movable and can be saved.

In team meetings, I draw on the white board to visually express the ideas we are exploring. This helps validate the shared understanding or lets us see if we are on wrong track.

Drawing helps clarify and crystallize an idea that the other person may have problems explaining. Sometimes I draw in tandem with someone else, sketching, erasing, oversketching/overlapping, as we get into a flow of ideas. That process is very empowering. What we co-create is stronger than work either would have created alone.

The images are from a project looking at how to encourage social engagement around selling items and using referral emails and email digests to show a community around a topic.

Alicia Loring

Alice Loring is a User Experience Designer with 10 years experience in front-end mobile & web. She currently works at Riot Games.

I’ve worked with designers I regarded highly, who seemed to crank out impossible work overnight. Even with the 8 years of experience I had at that point, it was a total mystery to me how they did it. They’d show up at the 10AM meeting with brand new, camera-ready work--as though they were geniuses who saw things in their mind’s eye and made it exist simply by snapping their fingers.

Meanwhile, I sat at my desk struggling with design like a Rubix cube—no idea what the answer was, getting it wrong over and over.

Eventually I got a peek behind the curtain, and their process was more or less as imperfect and organic as my own. In fact, one of them told me I’d become a better designer by allowing my process to be even more messy, more unrefined.

Sometimes designers face a degree of social pressure to appear as though they have all the answers, and to let design resemble an ineffable black box to others. By sharing my sketches, I hope to upend that notion, and show that the early creative process is not glamorous; it’s jumbled and uncertain; it’s getting things wrong over and over... and maybe the occasional thing right.

All drawings: Ideation work for DeviantArt.com and DreamUp.

Make Complex Ideas and Data Make Sense!

Proving your point with hard data is powerful, but lists of numbers are dull and confusing. Drawings are more compelling and easier to understand.

You might think scientists take thousands of points of data and pour them into an algorithm and magically out comes a chart, but you’d be wrong. It takes a human hand to explore potential metaphors and make raw data into a story.

Visualization Sketches by Giorgia Lupi for the magazine Peninsula Hotel.

In Good Charts, Scott Berinato says there are four types of charts. You are either thinking, or you are communicating. You are either working with ideas, or with data.

We looked at drawing for thinking when we made concept models for brainstorming.

Now let’s look at charts that communicate. Stephen P. Anderson will start us off with the basics of designing infographics.

Stephen P. Anderson is a renowned visual thinker. He is widely admired for his information design skills, on display in his book, Seductive Interaction Design.

Giorgia Lupi on Drawing Data

Information designer. Cofounder and design director at @accuratstudio. Coauthor of Dear Data

For many, the word ‘data-visualization’ is associated with heavy programming skills, complex software and huge numbers. Believe it or not, lots of data visualization designers use old-fashioned sketching and drawing techniques on paper as their primary design tool.

In the first phase of data exploration, I am interested in the organization of the information, i.e. the kind of topics we are investigating, the correlations and the number of elements we are working with. I rarely use real data here, I am just giving shape to first visual possibilities about the ‘architecture’ of the visualization while having the data in mind.

In those phases, drawing with data can help raise new questions about the data itself.

In designing data visualizations, a very common approach is to start from the tools you have. This can lead you to adopt the easiest—but maybe not the best— solution to represent important aspects of the information.

As opposite, when I am sketching to explore the dimensions of a data set, I don’t have access to the actual data with my pen and paper, but only to its logical organizations. This is an invaluable asset to help me focus on the meaning of information and not on numbers out of context.

Drawing is a primary form of understanding reality and expressing thoughts and ideas. Drawing, in any practice, helps you freely navigate possibilities and to visually think without limitations and boundaries. It allows connections to be made, it opens mental spaces.

And drawing also helps you to discover something you probably don’t have in mind yet.

Explorations for “Selling at Sundance.”

Dave Gray On Visual Thinking

Dave Gray is the Founder of XPLANE, a visual thinking company, and author of GameStorming, the Connected Company and Liminal Thinking.

Since childhood, I have always had a habit of drawing to understand new ideas. My teachers looked on this as everything from a mild distraction to downright disruptive. Sometimes they forbid me from drawing in class. But it was so core to me, so essential to my learning process, that I did it whenever I could.

I learned, though, that my drawings were often wrong. One day when I showed one of my drawings to my teacher after class and asked if I had understood it correctly. She told me my drawing was wrong, and that I had misunderstood. But at that point something magic happened: she picked up my pencil and started to correct my drawing, and I started to understand.”

I learned a few things that day. First, learning works best when it is not a one-way thing. One person doesn’t just pour knowledge into another person’s head, like you pour tea into a teacup. It’s a dialogue. Second, I learned that I could teach people how to teach me. By making a rough sketch of an idea, I could create a picture that functioned as a learning space where knowledge, and insights could be co-created with other people.”

I vowed to make this co-creation a regular part of my learning process, and in doing so I soon learned that I was wrong far more often than I had realized.

But the learning method that I had discovered was so powerful that it became the foundation of my life and work. And when I was ready to start a company, it became the foundation of that too.”

Hold a Visual Meeting

Meetings are boring. Blah blah blah. Meetings are frustrating. People keep misunderstanding each other.

That’s because words are not enough. Using paper and walls and drawing, we can make it better.

If your teammates are shy about drawing, you can hire a graphic facilitator to visualize the meeting as you have it (or you can do it!.)

And no one is shy about writing Post-its. It’s an easy way to edge into working more visually. Post-its are modular, letting you use the wall to think spatially.

James Young

Partner at Tangible UX

James likes to hire a graphic facilitator for important client workshops. Graphic facilitators sketchnote the meeting’s big ideas as they happen.

Above: A recording of a meeting on the “Life of a Check” held at a financial company.

Here are two reasons why visual listening is a key element of the workshop:

1. It helps participants be present in the moment, as they don’t have to worry about documenting anything.

2. It serves as an “artifact” that can be referenced during and after the workshop.

When I use graphical facilitators in meetings it helps everyone be on the same page as to what is said and discussed. If there are contradictions or details that are overlooked, the graphical facilitator quickly identifies them and the group discusses them.

Because the documentation is visual and being done in the moment, it simplifies the gnarliest problem into something that is digestible for the whole team. We can put it up on the wall and come back to it to discuss components of the drawing.

By giving the team a holistic picture of the problem or system it allows the team to move to solutions faster in a way that words and PowerPoint presentations cannot.

Techniques for Visual Meetings

First, you want to get your ideas out of your head and on to paper where you can see them. Try freelisting! Silently write down as many ideas as you can, one per Post-it.

Next, we want to find patterns in the ideas! Try grouping them into similar groups. This is called affinity grouping. Everyone should go at once, then take a look to see what’s out of place.

Finally, you can try mapping your ideas to a canvas. A canvas is like a visual worksheet you fill out with Post-it notes.

Canvases Shape Thinking

Canvases were pioneered by Dave Sibbet at his company The Grove. This is his planning template from his book, Visual Meetings.

The Empathy Map is a canvas.

The best known Canvas is probably the Business Model Canvas (explained on page 158)

Put the Techniques Together and Hold a Design Charette

A charette is a short intense period of collaborative creation. Nowadays it’s often called a design sprint, but I like the old name.

Let’s pretend we’re making a new product for travelers. We need some data to work with. We could freelist ideas about what people like and hate about travel. Or we can take user research and fragment it onto Post-its. One insight per Post-it!

Next, let’s use our new found skill of affinity grouping to find the patterns in the data.

As well as finding patterns, let’s organize the data based on factors we know are important to customers. A great one is a timeline. Try organizing the data by when it happens. For example, when traveling, first you plan. Then you pack. Then you go. If something happens more than once on the timeline, make a copy.

Another classic organizing principle is the 2x2 matrix.

My favorite 2x2 for designing start-ups is a frequency/ passion matrix. Go through your research, find all the things people care about when traveling and write them on post-its. Eating! Exchange rates! Language! Suitcases! Quiet hotels!

Place the issues on the matrix. We eat three times a day, but book a flight once. We sleep every night, but break a heel... maybe?

If the issue happens often and people care about it (like eating), it might be a problem worth building a business around.

Next you can map your data to some useful canvases. We could use the empathy map, from the previous page. Or we could try out one of Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur’s canvases.

Use this canvas from Alex and Yves’s book Value Proposition Design to understand what the right products and services are for your customers.

Next, draw a Storyboard (“Customer’s Journey Storyboard” on page 96) showing the customer receiving the value.

Sometimes it’s hard for introverts to contribute to brainstorms. Working silently when you freelist or draw can really help. You’ll get more and better ideas!

In my classes our motto is: Generate apart, Evaluate together.

Next, we’ll figure out how the product works! Draw a wireflow (page 123.) Draw your vision for the product silently and separately first. Then share and combine ideas.

The schedule for drawing exercises are:

1. Draw: 10 minutes

2. Explain: 1 minute each

3. Vote on which drawing you want to build on (you can steal good ideas from anyone, but it’s good to have a common base)

4. Draw again, either a revision of the last idea or a new one—like designing the packaging or the landing page.
Make a wireframe (page 96) of the page where customers learn about how great your product is!

Finally let’s take that value proposition and explain it to customers! Show potential customers tidy versions of:

* Your elevator pitch

* Your storyboard

* Your wireflows

* Your wireframe of a landing page or package.

These drawings help potential customers understand what you plan to make. Give the customers time to ask questions, or correct you on your assumptions.

Then show them the roadmap of features you plan to build. Let them swap the features they want with those they don’t.

On the left are the features you plan to build first. In the middle the ones you expect people will want. On the right, crazy stuff one team member dreams of making someday!

Run this exercise with five to ten representatives of each market segment. Listen to what they say about the features. You can learn about what they really care about before you choose what to build.

Finally, it’s time to use the Business Model Canvas to figure out how we’ll make money.

The business model canvas is composed of nine regions, organized by how they affect each other. The right side of the canvas is outward looking, toward the customer. The left is inward looking, toward the company.

The customer is connected to the company’s value proposition by channels (how we get the customer) and relationships (how we keep the customer,) which results in revenue.

The value proposition is realized by the company, composed of activities (hires), resources (materials and services) and partnerships. This results in costs. If costs are less than revenue, you have a viable business.

“Never write on the BMC. That’s why God gave us Post-its.” —Alex Osterwalder.

Noam Zomerfeld, creating a Business Model Canvas in my Creative Entrepreneur class.

Alex Osterwalder on Why He Works Visually.

Author of “Business Model Generation” and Founder of Strategyzer, Alex co-wrote the best-selling Business Model Generation with Yves Pigneur (and 470 practitioners from 45 counties.) While most business books are just text, Alex and Yves wanted theirs to have photos and diagrams. They had to self-publish the first edition in order to realize their vision.

Visuals help simplify and explain the complex in a way that words will never be able to. To understand something I need to understand the pieces and how they relate to each other. I can’t do that in my head, so I use sticky notes and visuals to turn the abstract into something visual, visible, and tangible.

For example, when I design a workshop, write a book or text, or define our company’s strategy, I use sticky notes and visuals to structure the ideas in my head. I do a brain dump by creating an individual sticky note for everything I can think of related to the challenge I’m facing. Then I put them all on a large wall and cluster them until a structure emerges. That’s how I make sense of any type of challenge I’m facing.

The wall is my desk.

Dan Roam

Author of Back of the Napkin, Show and Tell and Draw to Win, Dan Roam has built a career in teaching executives to express themselves more clearly using drawings.

What is the simplest way to see if a leadership team is up-to-speed, on the same page, and in possession of an achievable vision? Ask them to draw.”

Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve worked with executive teams around the world. The scariest lesson is how often teams that thought they knew what they were thinking realize they really don’t have a clear idea what each other just said.

A solution? Ask each member of the team to contribute the just one picture that best illustrates their individual contribution to the team and the organization.

The Chief Executive Officer draws the Visual Equation.

As the leader of the organization, all eyes fall turn to the CEO whenever anything happens—good or bad. The best way the CEO can show why she has made the decisions she has is by showing a simple “visual equation.”

Think of this as the moral of the story made visual; the simplest possible visual that says the most in the clearest possible way.”

The Chief Marketing Officer draws the Portrait.

If there is anybody in the organization who better know who our audiences are and what we are offering them, it’s the CMO. (How can we market if we don’t know to whom? Or what we’re trying to tell them?)”

When the CMO needs to say “we are doing this for these people,” nothing beats a simple, iconic portrait illustrating the who and the what.

The Chief Financial Officer draws the Chart.

Who owns the top line, the bottom line, and every line in-between? The CFO does. So when Wall Street or the investors comes knocking, it’s time for the CFO to share the charts. How much? This much. What are the financial trends? These lines.

If the CEO can’t show the numbers in a way that makes sense, how can we be sure he knows them himself?

The Chief Strategy Officer draws the Map.

It is the job of the CSO to sketch out the opportunity landscape, plot in the competitions’ positions, and map in the right moves. That requires a map. The CSO better be able to draw it.

It is also the CSO’s job to make sure everyone else sees where those moves are going to take the organization —so that map better be clear, readable—and show the mine fields.”

The Chief Operations Officer draws the Timeline.

Only 60% of Fortune 500 companies have a COO, but that number is rising again. Why? Because getting everything done in sequence and on time is only getting harder.

That’s why the COO’ best friend is the timeline: the single picture that shows what needs to get done, who is doing it, and most important: in what order.

The Chief Technical Officer draws the Flowchart.

The vision is clear, the numbers are there, and the process is mapped. What remains? Building the systems and architecture that makes it technologically feasible. That’s the job of the CTO.

The picture she draws? The flowchart; it shows how the pieces interact, how the information flows, and how to monitor all the incoming data. It’s usually the most complex picture, so demands unusual attention to clarity.

The pictures don’t need to be elaborate, don’t need to be polished, and don’t need to be perfect. But they do need to be created, they do need to be shared, and they absolutely need to be seen.

Draw All the Things

Don’t forget! Drawing isn’t just some creative thing artist people do. It’s a way to make ideas tangible, to get the stuff in our head out so we can figure out what to do with it.

The world has gotten so complicated. Work is full of reports and analyses and emails and it’s hard to make sense of it all, much less make anything new and useful.

We need ways to make work make sense. Drawing is my favorite. Not just because it’s effective, but because it’s fun too. We spend at least eight hours a day at work. Shouldn’t we enjoy it?

Draw every day. Make better stuff. Make sense of all the crazy. Celebrate the wonderous.

Be happy.

Books I Read and You Should Too

Berinato, Scott. Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations. Harvard Business Review, 2016.

Brown, Sunni. Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently. Portfolio Penguin, 2015.

Brunetti, Ivan. Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. Yale UP, 2011.

Crowe, Norman, and Paul Laseau. Visual Notes for Architects and Designers. Wiley, 2012.

Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Tarcher/Penguin, 2012.

Kliment, Stephen A. Architectural Sketching and Rendering: Techniques for Designers and Artists. Whitney Library of Design, 1984.

Nicolaïdes, Kimon. The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study. Morison Press, 2013.

Roam, Dan. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Portfolio/Penguin, 2013.

Rohde, Mike. The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking. Peachpit, 2013.

Seddon, Tony. Draw Your Own Alphabets: Thirty Fonts to Scribble, Sketch, & Make Your Own. Princeton Architectural, 2013.

Websites & Communities

Urban Sketchers community: http://www.urbansketchers.org

Sketchnote Army http://sketchnotearmy.com/

The work of Kate Rutter http://intelleto.com/

The work of Danny Gregory: http://www.dannygregory.com

The work of Wendy McNaughton: http://wendymacnaughton.com

The Work of Dave Gray: http://www.xplaner.com/

Pencil Me In

I love teaching drawing to help people answer hard questions.

For updates and more exercises, visit pencilmeinthebook.com