The Center for Graphic Facilitation

"Back of the Napkin" Gets Inside Your Brain

Alright. Enough already. Of all the people I have been jealous of, Dan Roam is gunning for the top of the list:

1. Dan wrote the book I always wanted to dang it!
2. Dan has got endorsements from Business 2.0 gurus also named Dan--Pink & Heath!
3. Dan has a swank Flash-animated website and way-clever blog!
4. Dan lives in San Francisco!

Mostly, I resent the fact that Dan has been able to do the impossible:

Dan describes why visual learning is the best way to work with others to make stuff happen in a way that we can actually understand!

Keep reading for a brief book review and fun interview with the author who talks about the influence of Einstein, his fighter pilot dad, Optimizers vs. Disruptors, and the heroes of the Russian space program.

I was invited to participate in this Virtual Book Tour by Paul Williams, the wild child behind Idea Sandbox. Here are the other bloggers who interviewed and reviewed Napkin:

Principled Innovation Blog
Jeff De Cagna

Design Crush
Kelly Beall

The Paddlewheel
Chris McCrory

Pureplay
Keith Bohanna

Blurb: As reviewed by Kevin Kelly

Kevin is a film buff, Senior Maverick for WIRED, photographer and self-proclaimed Geek Dad. With and without kids, he has traveled the globe (Afghanistan, Vietnam, China, Europe); he has launched publications (The Whole Earth Catalog, Wired); and, he continues to redefine how we think about technology and biology (Out of Control,  Encyclopedia of Life, The Long Now Foundation ). And, in case you haven't guessed, he's one of my heroes. He is also an avid self-publisher of personal projects. Check out his reviews of the various on-line in the blooming print-on-demand market.

clipped from www.kk.org My recommendation for the best personal color book printer is Blurb. Blurb produces color books very similar to the iPhoto books you can order from Apple. Using iPhoto Books is slightly easier than using Blurb's software, particularly if all your photos happen to already be in iPhoto, but it works well enough. The idea is that you can drag images (photos or illustrations) into template book pages, add text or captions where you want to, then hit a button and have the finished book mailed to you. (all these systems work with PCs and Macs) The results from both Apple and Blurb are marvelous. In fact, these books are astounding. That's because they both use the same back-room engine, the HP Indigo 5000 (as do the other color book makers like Snapfish and MyPublisher). The Indigio is essentially a high-speed, high-quality liquid-toner printer that will print your photo book several pages across. Blurb Photobook $19 base price Available from Blurb Blurb's How to Make a Book

 

Rapid Viz: A New Method for the Rapid Visualization of Ideas

Rapid Viz: A New Method for the Rapid Visualization of Ideas
This is a wonderful resource for learning the basics of quickly representing ideas, products, people, trees, buildings, cars, spaces, places,... you name it!

Amazon review: "Like his other books, this book is very well illustrated, conceptually & graphically. It's primary focus is introduction of a Rapid Visualisation Process, which one can learn easily & then use readily to capture thoughts in visual forms on paper. It is packed with ideas, games, puzzles & exercises to guide the reader. It is written for the novice in mind. It provides a step by step approach to the practical strategies of seeing, thinking, & drawing.  I must say: It is really great stuff to get you moving with visual thinking!" --Lee Say Keng

The Business Side of Creativity

For excellent advice on the business of the business of creativity, there is no better place to turn than... CreativeBusiness.com!

Cameron Foote is founder and editor and has forty years of industry experience including stints at small and large agencies, as creative director for a Fortune 500 firm, and running his own business.

His books,The Business Side of Creativity and The Creative Business Guide to Running a Graphic Design Business, are the industry's most authoritative, and best-selling business bibles. Nearly 40,000 copies have been sold.

On the site, there are literally hundreds of articles for sale that cover every aspect of being a creative professional, from accounting to  marketing to hiring/firing staff.

Handwritten Inspiration

At this week's IFVP Conference, there was quite a bit of exploration of handwriting and manual typography.

There was a bit of a divide between those who (rightfully) reverently adhere to the time-honored discipline of typography, and those of us who's ideals of lettering came from R. Crumb, Bugs Bunny, Schoolhouse Rock, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Electric Company.

This book does a great job bridging the gap.

[As reviewed on Amazon]

Heller and Ilic's book, Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age, is a collection of exemplary work in the world of graphic design in which the "handwritten" has been implemented in the artists' works.

Examples range from magazine covers, traditional advertisements, film festival posters, album covers, book covers and other media/art. There is a wide range of styles covered, and though there is not a lot of text that accompanies each featured piece, the descriptions of the work are insightful to how (in the opinion of the authors) the text/design work, and in what ways. For instance, the authors comment on one poster which used a childish scrawl saying, "Scrawl is most effective when located with a generous helping of negative space, as is portrayed elegantly in this poster etc.etc."
Though you might not agree with their observations, you will most definitely get something valuable out of your disagreement, wether it is a better sense of your own visions and style/likes/dislikes.

All in all, this book is worth the money.  It is bound to inspired you to break out a pencil and your sketchbook again. 

Presidential Doodles

From Yahoo News:

Presidential Doodles, just released by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, collects the random sketches and drawings of Hoover and most of his fellow commanders in chief, from Hoover's elaborate shapes and swirls to the isolated squiggles of Abraham Lincoln. The book expands upon an issue of Cabinet Magazine, a quarterly of "Arts & Culture" that featured the jottings of eight presidents.

"Just as our dreams and little Freudian slips can mean something about us, doodles can be indicative of the person and issues and things that he is dealing with," says Cabinet editor-in-chief Sina Najafi.

Personalities emerge at a glance: John Adams' hard, straight lines and precise geometrical patterns; Theodore Roosevelt's rugged sketch of two dogs staring across a campfire; Dwight Eisenhower's plain, practical illustrations; Ronald Reagan's childlike portraits, including of himself in a cowboy hat.

President Kennedy, known for separating his life into compartments, would enclose words and numbers inside circles and boxes. Events long after his death give one doodle an unintended chill: A small circle with the numbers "9-11" contained within. Just to the lower left on the page, the word "conspiracy" is underlined.

[thanks to Leah Silverman]

Permanent Innovation by Langdon Morris

New book from Langdon Morris of InnovationLabs LLC.

Innovation is the process of creating new ideas and turning them into new business value.   

Permanent Innovation is the process of doing it continuously, by developing an organizational culture that embraces innovation as a core value, practices innovation as a core methodology, and produces innovation as a consistent output.

The notion of permanent innovation may at first be startling, in that the concept of permanence implies stability and the absence of change, while the concept of innovation implies constancy of change and novelty.

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Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?

What liabilities do you open yourself up to if you catch someone's mother answering her cellphone on video?

In a piece titled, Fair Use Follies, Brooke Gladstone interviews two experts on the fair use issue. What can be freely reproduced? What snippets of song or text need to be paid for? In the case of the documentarian mentioned above, three words can cost upwards of $5000! What tragedy is unfolding in what Lawrence Lessig has renamed the Comedy of the Commons?

From On the Media, May 19, 2006:

Simply put, “fair use” is a legal principle that allows copyrighted material to be used without permission from or payment to the owner. But a recent symposium on the subject at New York University demonstrated just how difficult it is to know what constitutes fair. And in the meantime, many creative types are left in the lurch. Amy Sewell, producer of the documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom", shares some war stories with Brooke.
LISTEN >>

One of the panel is Duke Law professor, Jamie Boyle, one of the leading experts in the creation and usage of ideas and art in the public domain.

To help people like us who go cross-eyed when confronted with legal prose, he has put out a graphic novel on the topic: Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?

Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas

Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas
by Nancy Margulies, Christine Valenza

This book is a dream come true for graphic facilitators.

It supplies you with hundreds of symbols and simple drawings that you can immediately apply to your own work, expanding the effectiveness of your work and building new skills.

There are a number of templates in the book as well and a good explanation of visual thinking, an explanation that you may want to quote to your clients.

This book is a must for your reference library. Written by two of our own, Nancy Margulies ( who also wrote "Mapping Inner Space") and Christine Valenza.

[Condolences to Christine who this January lost her husband, Albert Morse, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "an intellectual property lawyer for underground cartoonists, was many things: self-publisher of a pioneer book about tattoo art, collector of 17th and 18th century chastity belts and Oceanic sculpture, son of Man Ray's model of erotic photographs, a self-described voyeur, Bohemian and bon vivant."]

Else/Where: Mapping

[Thanks to Jason Simmons of GradientLabs]

Suffice it to say, we live in the Age of the Mash-Up. Technologies continue to converge. Emergent technologies such as GPS and RFID are swiftly becoming embedded in just about every consumer good imaginable, from rowboats to robot dogs. As data visualization becomes increasingly more real-time, instant access to easy-to-read data maps are essential to both individuals and economies.

And, designers (being the gurus of last resort) are being asked to be much more multi-disciplined in both thought and deed. Consequently, a new breed of interface designer and digital geographer is going to be in high demand.

Else/Where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories as an interdisciplinary anthology on mapping from urban cartography to data visualization.

Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, editors
Deborah Littlejohn, designer
ISBN 0-9729696-2-4
$49.95
320 pages, paper
Published by the University of Minnesota Design Institute
Distributed for the Design Institute by the University of Minnesota Press 

The second book to be published by the Design Institute, Else/Where is a scholarly anthology on techniques and contemporary applications of mapping, in four sections:  

MAPPING NETWORKS
MAPPING CONVERSATIONS
MAPPING TERRITORIES
MAPPING MAPPING