Make Models: 9 Formats for Visual Thinking

If you’re working to learn something new or solve a complex problem or share some interesting ideas with others, and you’d like to make full use of your brain’s processing power, then my encouragement for you is this: make models.

Models bring together a complex set of information and help you to wrap your head around it. They require only pen and paper (or tablet and stylus) and can be sketched out on iterative basis – you don’t have to worry about getting it right.

Here I’d like to outline two broad categories of models that you can choose from. One leans toward the left side of your brain and taps into more logical thinking with the creation of diagrams. The other lives on the right side of the brain and taps into your emotions, and that’s the creation of drawings.

To create diagrams, you only need to step up the first two rungs of the Visual Language Ladder, making use of words and shapes. To create drawings, you need the next two: objects and people. What I’d like to do here is lay out a set of options for you to choose from – some common types of diagrams and some useful types of drawings – that you might use in the third step of the Sketch It Out framework. After defining your purpose and collecting the pieces, you then have to solve the puzzle.

Diagrams

What that solved puzzle could look like (on the diagram side) is a timeline. If it’s a when question that you’re answering, giving yourself a line to work with that represents the period of time that you’re interested in and then mapping out the sequence of events can be super useful.

A flowchart is another type of diagram that answers the question of how that can take the form of “If this, then that…” and explain a process for getting a specific type of thing done. Flowcharts help you to see where your actions fit within the bigger picture, and show you what to do in various circumstances.

A coordinate system is another great type of diagram, where you might map a topic along two axes. What happens when you put two spectrums together? What lives in each of the four quadrants that result?

Venn diagrams are another favorite of mine that make use of two or three circles (it gets a little tricky if you try to bump up to four or five). Pick the most important concepts that you’re working with and see what lives at the intersection.

A pyramid is another great option that has some simple geometry to it – just a triangle with some lines where you can build up from a foundation, layer by layer.

So with just lines and rectangles and circles and triangles you have a variety of ways that you can bring together a set of ideas into a logical model that can help you or others make sense of the information you’re working with.

Drawings

As we look next at drawings, we see our options expanding.

You’ve got what Dan Roam calls the portrait that involves the sketched representation of a single thing. It could be a person or an object. You sketch out that thing and then list some of its attributes. The Network Self is a good example of a portrait.

I consider the visual metaphor to be a step up from a portrait. With a visual metaphor you still make use of a single object (let’s use an onion as an example) but here you apply the structure and characteristics of that object to a different situation. So with a portrait you’re representing the actual thing, but with a visual metaphor you’re making a connection between two different things. You’re using the layers of an onion to talk through the barriers we put up as individuals to make us feel protected, but that when you strip those away, you get more to the core of who you are. Since any real object in the world has inherent characteristics to it, you can turn pretty much anything into a visual metaphor by breaking it down and then mapping those characteristics to something else.

Another type of drawing that you can create is a scene. A scene is where you think of a specific situation and you sketch it out, almost as if it were a photograph that you take that captures one moment in time. It depicts characters in a certain environment engaging in certain activities that help you to tell a story. So this often involves a person or group of people going on some sort of a journey.

What’s interesting about scenes is that they can either live in the realm of a portrait, where the scene represents the actual thing that you’re talking about – maybe it’s a journey that someone went on to go climb some actual mountains, or maybe it’s a snapshot of one stage of the customer journey. Or it can be metaphorical. What’s the metaphorical mountain someone is climbing? What is the rain that drops down on them during that journey? What lives at the top of that mountain once they reach the peak?

A related type of drawing is a map. Where a scene shows you the side view of a situation, a map shows you the top down view from a bit higher perspective. A map could include simply a collection of portraits that are sketched out in a way that shows how they’re related to each other in space. And just as with a scene, this map could be representational of an actual physical location, or it could be metaphorical.

When it comes to drawings, you can see that the portrait and the visual metaphor are easier starting points because in each case you just draw one thing big. With a scene or a map you draw multiple things and focus on how they’re related to each other, which can be a bit more challenging from a mark-making perspective.

But with drawings in general, I think you’ll find that it’s a little bit easier to be empathetic with whatever information is depicted when compared to a diagram, which focuses much more on logical processing. That’s where I think this breakdown from diagrams to drawings can be helpful. If you want to focus on more logical processing, go in the direction of a diagram. But if you want to tap into more emotional processing, drawings are great.

Note that here are plenty of ways to blend a diagram with a drawing. Within any of those boxes on your diagrams you can sketch out a portrait or even a simple scene. You can also start with a drawing (like that of a brain) and turn it into a diagram by adding a coordinate system to it.

With that in mind, I encourage you to experiment back and forth along this spectrum from diagrams to drawing. Maybe even try out a few different representations of the same set of ideas, so that you can pick which one resonates best with you or with the audience that you’re sharing those ideas with.

If the thought of sketching out these types of diagrams or drawings feels a little bit daunting, then you might enjoy The Verbal to Visual Notebook. That book will help you get comfortable making marks that aren’t just words, through a set of prompts and activities that will give you some space to play along the spectrum from diagrams to drawings.

Cheers,

-Doug