You sit down with your notebook and pen, ready to tackle that complex project that’s been bouncing around in your head. You’ve got a lot to figure out, and the …
The Two Words That Transform Any Visual Thinking Project
Here’s a simple question that can transform your next visual thinking project: Why are you sketching this out in the first place? You might think the answer is obvious. But …
Purpose, Not Pride
Recently I’ve been thinking about the barriers that keep us from making marks on the page, even when we know those marks will be helpful. One of the biggest that …
The Double Duty That Makes Notebooks So Powerful
When new ideas come to you, where do they go next? I address that question in one of the new lessons that I developed for the updated Verbal to Visual …
What Good Models Do
A food forest is a specific type of permaculture that blends together a fruit and nut orchard with a vegetable and flower garden. I’ve known that I’ve wanted to grow …
What We Build
I’ve recently realized that the visual thinking programs that I run are about three things: 1. Building Skills We gather together for the purpose of building visual thinking skills, to …
The Three Shifts
To become a visual thinker requires three shifts. The first shift is from consumption to creation. This is the decision to not just passively take in new information, but actively create …
Models Bridge the Gap
You know that feeling of anxiety that you get when you take on a project that’s outside your realm of expertise? You don’t know what tools, materials, or skills you …
The Antidote to Information Asymmetry
I recently had a conversation in which someone mentioned how on a trip to the doctor, the doctor pulled out a notebook and sketched out the parathyroid in support of …
How to Get to Essence
As visual thinkers, what we do is make sense of the world by making marks on the page. Those marks can take all sorts of different forms, from words, boxes, …