For folks that are just getting into visual thinking, it can be hard to know where to start, what type of mark making to practice, and what kinds of visuals you might create when you’re working to understand something new that you’re learning, solve a problem that you’re working on, or communicate some important ideas to others.
I’d like to share with you a tool that I’ve developed, a framework to help you think about what we do as visual thinkers and some of the core skills worth developing. That framework is called the Visual Language Ladder – four specific types of marks that you can make to become a better visual thinker.
Thankfully, the first rung is going to be pretty familiar to you. It’s just about writing words. And yes, you might need a bit of practice writing more legibly, and you might even decide to develop a few different writing styles so that you can distinguish between big and bold titles and smaller details. But you don’t even have to get fancy with your letters. You can just use size as a way to distinguish between the big ideas and the smaller details.
The second rung of the Visual Language Ladder is about making simple shapes like circles and triangles and rectangles, and perhaps some simple variations. What I appreciate about just these first two rungs of the ladder is that with them, you’ve already unlocked the ability to create diagrams, like Venn diagrams or flow charts or mind maps that help you to map out a set of ideas that you’re working with and show the connections between them.
But we’re not going to stop at diagrams because there’s a lot of visual processing potential in the next two rungs, like adding the ability to draw simple objects. This is a slight step up from drawing shapes, but it’s doable. Like drawing yourself a coffee cup or a basketball or maybe the lamp on your desk for when you’re reading late at night or early in the morning.
You can probably tell already that even simply-drawn objects hit your brain a little bit differently than words and shapes. They can be the starting point of a story that brings you more specifically into that situation, rather than staying in a more of an abstract place with words and shapes in the form of diagrams.
But to fully unlock the power of visual storytelling, you need to bring some people into the picture too. These don’t have to be fancy or illustrative, they can be simple stick figures. You don’t even have to draw hands and feet if you don’t want. You can give the body a little bit more of a representation in what the folks at Scriberia call brick people or by sketching out star people.
What the third and fourth rungs of the Visual Language Ladder unlock are (of course) drawings. Where diagrams light up the left half of the brain with more of a logical approach to the topics being explored, drawings activate the right side of the brain and tap into more of the emotional experience.
Neither drawings nor diagrams are is necessarily better than the other. It’s not that you should always work up to the top of the ladder. Instead, it’s meant to show that sketching out objects and people is a more challenging mark-making task than writing words and creating simple shapes. But it also shows that it’s not as big of a leap as you might think, moving from words to shapes to simple objects to simply-drawn people.
If you’re new to this world of mark making, then feel free to hang out for a while in the space of words and shapes as you build out diagrams. But once that becomes comfortable, then start developing a library of simply drawn objects and start playing around with drawn people.
Along the way, remember that our goal as visual thinkers isn’t to draw a pretty picture, it’s to make a useful model, a model like the Sketch It Out framework that I’ve described in a previous video, or a model like Dave Gray’s Pyramid of Belief, or a model like this language ladder that involves one simple object (a ladder) and a simply-drawn person, or drawing out two people riding a tandem bicycle as an entry point into Daniel Pink’s book To Sell Is Human.
So what we’re doing here is making marks that fall into one of these four categories, and in the process, you’re making models in the form of a diagram or a drawing or some combination of the two. But really, what this is about is making meaning. You’re making sense of a complex topic, a new topic that you’re learning about or a topic that you’re exploring with others.
My goal in presenting the Visual Language Ladder is to help you wrap your head around the mark-making process and give some structure to how you can build your mark making skills, but always in service of making models that make meaning.
Sometimes you’re making meaning for yourself as you’re processing new ideas that you’re learning about or working through a particular situation in your life. If that’s what you’re up to, check out my program Sketch Instinct, which will help you to make this type of mark-making second nature again, like it was when you were a kid.
But sometimes you’re making meaning for and with others, and that’s what my program Sketch Strategy is all about, which focuses on bringing these skills into the workplace to help leaders in particular make models that will be useful for the folks they’re working with. That will help to keep everyone on the same page and keep the efforts of your team members aligned so that you can work toward a common goal.
I wish you luck in your mark-making endeavors as you climb up the Visual Language Ladder.
Cheers,
-Doug