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Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010

View more webinars from Austin Kleon.

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Back in March, my friends Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray and I presented a panel to a packed house at the SXSW Interactive conference here in Austin, Texas. Last week, they posted a podcast of the session without visuals – so I spent some time syncing our slides to the audio.

Watch it above, or see the whole thing here: Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010.

Watch a short YouTube video of my faces exercise:

And learn more about visual note-taking:

• My notes on our 3-hour Vizthink webinar that got this whole thing started
• Visual Thinking for Writers – a talk I gave to our local Vizthink Austin group (see a few slides)
• My sketchbook and drawings from SXSW 2010
• Use the #viznotes tag to see what people posted on Twitter and Flickr

The coolest artifacts from the panel are the amazing Scout Books that Pinball Publishing had printed for us: read all about them.

I squirreled away a couple of them before we ran out — leave a comment below telling me why you want one okay those were making me feel too guilty that I only have four: how about a link to the coolest thing you’ve seen this week and I’ll pick four winners. Contest ends Monday, May 17th. (Be sure to include your e-mail — it won’t be published.)

In November I taught my second online course for Vizthink, “Visual Thinking for Writers.”

[ Description  ] [ Buy It ]

It was a catalogue of techniques I’ve discovered over the past couple of years that have helped me with my own writing.

I thought up the course after thinking a lot about the tools writers use, and how young writers are often scoffed at in Q&A sessions when they ask things like “Do you write by hand or on a computer?”

In my experience, it’s not a silly question at all: tools -> process -> writing.

The way you work is important.

My main idea was that the best thing you can do for your writing is step away from the computer, spend $10 in the school supply aisle of your local grocery store, and start making writing with your hands. (See this Wall Street Journal article that asked novelists how they write — well over half of them start with handwritten notes, index cards, etc.) If I was going to teach the workshop in the flesh, I would simply organize it by pens, index cards, post-it notes, scissors, tape, etc.

Here’s a reading list of blog posts I used as inspiration:

• Lay It All Out Where You Can Look At It
• Get Yourself A Calendar
• Mind Maps: Pictures and Words In Space
• Comics Without Pictures
• Writing The Fibonacci Sonnet
• Tools
• How-To Books
• Graph a Story with Mr. Vonnegut
• Maps of Fictional Worlds
• Writing on the Walls

I’ve posted some of my slides below.

UPDATE: Here’s some really nice praise from one of the webinar participants:

Austin Kleon’s webinar was engaging, energetic, and expert. My colleague and I went into the webinar thinking we were getting a $60 presentation. What we got was a learning experience that was intelligent, interesting, fresh, funny — yet grounded in solid research about the ways people think about and respond to their worlds. And it’s *immediately applicable* to both our professional and personal lives! If this is what VizThinkU provides, we’ll be back — a lot.- Denise Dilworth, Content Strategist

For this second batch of tea bag doodles, I merged a little activity I stole from Dave Gray via Bill Keaggy with another activity I stole from Matt Madden’s blog.

Here’s the drill:

1. Drop a tea bag randomly onto an index card and let it dry
2. Draw a grid of panels over the stain
3. Shop for images in the panels, and riff off those with some doodles and captions to make a mini-narrative

Like I said before: nothing serious, just a fun way to pass a couple minutes and find some ideas.

This last card I used to take notes on an article about how language shapes the way we think:

See the first batch.

Leonardo da Vinci used to suggest that art students “look at any walls spotted with various stains,” so as to “arouse the mind to various inventions.” Sandro Botticelli liked to throw a sponge wet with colored paints against a wall, then search out new landscapes in the resulting splatter.—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

This is a fun little cubicle Rorschach activity that I ripped off of Dave Gray. I found it while reading through Bill Keaggy‘s “100 Pieces of Paper and The Stories Behind Them.”

I switched from coffee to tea at work, so every morning I take an index card and set my tea bag down on it, letting the card soak up the tea. Then, I shop for images on the card, and riff off those with some doodles and captions.

Nothing serious, just fun way to pass a couple minutes and find some ideas. You could probably do it with coffee rings, too. They’d be like little ensos.

Related: Christoph Niemann’s coffee-on-napkin drawings.

Here are a couple more sneak-preview slides for my part of the VizthinkU Visual Note-Taking 101 seminar. I took my map of Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and broke it down into pictures, modifiers (speech balloons, captions, etc.) and words.