The Economist had me out to their Ideas Economy “Human Potential” conference in New York last week. I gave a talk on Newspaper Blackout and Steal Like An Artist, but I also did some drawings on my iPad during the other talks, and posted them to Twitter as I drew. (Still getting used to drawing live on the iPad — not sure I love it, but I thought I’d experiment.) I’ve cleaned them up a little and collected them here.

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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.)

Our Visual Note-Taking 101 panel made the cut for the first batch of 2010 SXSW programming!

Here’s the description:

Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters: how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them.

The lineup isn’t finalized yet, but I’m hoping that Sunni Brown, Dave Gray, and Mike Rohde will all be able to sit on it. Read about our previous work together on the topic.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted!

Other panels I’m interested in seeing: Dan Roam‘s “Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won’t Work” and Casey Caplowe from GOOD Magazine on “Interactive Infographics.”

See my visual notes from SXSW 2009.

Please do me a huge favor and head over to the SXSW Panel Picker site to vote for a SXSW panel on visual note-taking that will include me, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray, and Mike Rohde. Here’s the description:

Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters: how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them.

Even if you’re not planning on going to SXSW this year, if you’ve enjoyed my mind maps, my SXSW visual notes, or drawing tutorials, please head over to the SXSW site, put in a vote, and leave a comment!

Thanks so much!

Vote now!

Over 100 people signed up for Tuesday’s Vizthink “Visual Note-taking 101″ webinar put on by me, Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, and moderated by Dave Gray (with great support from Ryan Coleman and Chris Pascucci…thanks, guys!)

It was a rad way to spend 3 hours: I taught the first section called “But I Can’t Draw!” that tried to get people thinking about drawing as building or collage using a simple alphabet (line, point, circle, square, triangle). We learned to draw stick figures and faces…oh, it was good fun. AND I found out that I really, really love teaching: what could be better than sharing your passion with eager students?

Here are a couple of screengrabs from my session:

UPDATE: Here’s a short version of my “How To Draw Faces” activity:

I drew live in Sketchbook Pro during Mike and Sunni’s presentation, and here are the results:

Mike Rohde’s Sketchnoting presentation

(see it bigger)

Map of Sunni Brown’s, “The Art of Listening” presentation

see it bigger

Here are two thrilling shots of me in action:

And here’s my webinar setup:

Mike has a good recap that pretty much covers everything that went down, including notes from my section and notes from the awesome participants, and Sunni has posted her tips on listening for graphic recording and visual note-taking.

I also highly recommend checking out the notes tagged viznotes on Flickr and all the great Twitter chatter about the event.

(And for fun, go see Rob Court‘s cartoon of my dog Milo, who started whimpering about 2/3 of the way through.)

You can see two little slideshow excerpts from my presentation: “The Battle Between Pictures and Words” and “Anatomy of a Mind Map”

And be sure to check out VizThink!