Karl Gude

Want me to cover an election? No sweat. A plane crash? Piece of cake! Explain genomics or nanotechnology? Child’s play!!

Organize a five week trip to Spain with a bunch of college students?

Put a bullet in my head…

I didn’t even MEAN to set up a study abroad program. I just thought everyone at here had one. Duh. The professor who lured me away from Newsweek to academia was passing me in the halls one day at Michigan State’s School of Journalism when he snapped his finger and pointed at me saying, “Hey, we need to get together to discuss your study abroad plans.”

Huh?

“Okay, cool!” I answered, wanting to fit in my first semester on the job.

“You gotta pick a country, figure out what you want to teach…”

“Right, yeah, cool, sure, wow, okay…Lunch?”

That was over a year ago, and my life has become a logistical nightmare. I’m not a detail person, really, except when I make graphics. I leave the planning of our lives to my wife. I’m forgetful, a procrastinator and frighteningly unpredictable regarding how I make decisions about important things. One night, as my wife was quietly reading Newsweek and studying one of my larger graphics that, according to her, clearly explained some complex subject in a tight, orderly way, she looked up at me (as I was reading some newspaper comics), held up Newsweek and asked, “WHERE’S the KARL that made this. I don’t KNOW this guy!”

Putting together this study abroad course on visual thinking required a focus and attention to detail unrivaled in my life: a visit to Spain, meetings and agreements with universities there, marketing (videos, Google maps, posters…), budgets, a million emails between students, my on-site coordinator (THANKS Nancy!), professors in Spain and the office of Study Abroad, housing and transportation issues, etc.

But I pulled if off. Somehow.

I’m writing this from Chicago’s O’Hare airport about to board my flight to Madrid. I haven’t had a knot of excitement in my stomach like this since, well, too much information!

Dave’s the tall one…!
May 2 (New York) and May 7, Chicago. Details at Vizthink.com

I invented the term “location challenged” yesterday. I needed to complain about the flabbergasting cab driver who became hopelessly lost looking for –and I kid you not– the enormous University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where I was co-conducting an SND workshop on information graphics.

My driver boasted, in a distracted kind way that I began to find disheartening as our blue minivan shot down I-40 and he fumbled with his war-torn atlas, that he preferred good old paper maps to the costly GPS system his taxi company wanted him to get. With the alertness of an alarmed antelope that senses danger, I sat bolt-upright and forward in the back seat as I slid the atlas from his distracted fingers during one of the rare, and greatly appreciated instances when he had chosen to give the road a dim moment of his attention. I dictated directions without masking my irritation, which he accepted gratefully. I got the impression this happened with him lot.

As I spilled out of the cab into a crowd of UNC students, I suggested to my driver, with substantially more kindness than I was feeling, that he reconsider his cartographic priorities and get some help. There was no need to be so ineffective in his work and lost and stressed out all the time! I hinted that GPS stood for Get Places Sooner.

Like my driver (and I mean this loosely!) people who are “visually challenged” can get help, too. No, we don’t teach you how to use GPS, just how to communicate using good old fashion drawings and other tools. Dave Gray, the founder of Xplane and I are putting on the first two of many workshops for people from all industries who need to communicate their ideas visually but lack the proper training to do so.

(Karl Gude runs his workshop at VizThink)

A wave of dread came over me. I had no idea how to begin my workshop. Thirty-five people, many of them non-artists and designers whose jobs were a complete mystery to me, waited with expectation in the first moments of the two-day workshop. They wanted me, a guy who drew mostly plane crashes and shootings, to show them how to visualize their ideas on paper so that they could better communicate with their corporate clients or their starched boards of directors.

These were business people, not the regular sort of professional I was used to dealing with, who used terms like “intellectual capital,” “knowledge management” and “mission-critical.”

Say what?

I’m on a flight returning home after attending the brand-spanking new VizThink conference (on visual thinking, in case the name doesn’t do it for you) in San Francisco. The organizer of the event, Tom Crawford, asked me to run a two day workshop, which I did with my new best friend Pai, the Graphics Director of the San Jose Mercury News. I also gave a talk and participated in an ethics panel with people who I admire greatly: Bryan Christie, John Grimwade and Nigel Holmes. As it goes with conferences, I met a bunch of terrific people, forgot a lot of names, avoided one stalker, and got buzzzzed in a bar.

I was lucky that Pai had agreed to work with me on this. He had some great ideas that helped shape the workshop, like starting off with a quick game of Pictionary to get the visual juices going, after which we never looked back. As a teacher I am committed to employing the Walt Disney saying that it’s better to entertain people and hope they learn something than to teach to them and hope they’re entertained. That’s my style here at Michigan State University and, in a way, it was also how I managed my art staffs at Newsweek magazine and the Associated Press. My plan in workshops is to get people feeling like it’s a safe place where they can expose their true looney selves and have fun and be productive. Fortunately, that’s what happened here. It wasn’t long before everyone was on the floor drawing murals like a bunch of kids, laughing, making friends and maybe even learning a few things.

And it turned out that the types of graphics that Pai and I did in the field of news translated amazingly well into the business experience.

(The participants produced several narrative murals)

Karl’s photos
Pai’s photos

During my 27 years in journalism I started to feel like there were fewer and fewer surprises for me in my field (information graphics) and that I wanted to learn more about what kinds of things were being done to visualize content in other industries. I wondered whether artists and designers who make things like legal graphics, medical illustration and the like face the same challenges as I did. Were they using the same software? How did they manage their creative staffs?

Enter VizThink, the brainchild of Dave Gray who runs Xplane graphics, is funded by a visually committed Spaniard named Rodolfo Carpintier, President of Madrid based Digital Assets Deployment (thank Santa for the Spaniards, who have really helped this field, particularly in journalism), and made a reality by the hyperhuman Tom Crawford. The idea isn’t even a year old, and they had nearly 400 people attend the first conference, which is unheard of for a new new thing like this. Clearly, there is a market for it.

Build it, and they will come, especially if you have a great mailing list.

This time, the legal and medical people weren’t really there. But that’s okay. They’ll hear about it eventually. Mostly, it was corporate America (and China, and New Zealand, and South Africa, and…). More than half of the people attending were not professionals like myself. They were non-artists who desperately wanted to learn how to draw because they believed that drawing was a better way to communicate, a new “visual language.”

At the morning welcome, Dave Gray gave the audience a waaay simple confidence building drawing lesson by showing them how to draw things like “ant” people (slightly more complex stick figures), triangles and squares morphing into pyramids and cubes and a table using “Egyptian” perspective (new term for me), which is how a four-year-old might draw one. Many of these people were execs who had experienced the horror of standing white-faced at a whiteboard needing to sketch out an idea for a new restructuring plan for their colleagues and having no idea how to do that.

The VizThink message was: we’re all in this together and no one will laugh at your drawing. So get to it!

And it worked. People were drawing on massive sheets of paper everywhere: the floor, the walls, every table surface, even their hands. There was a fairly impressive lineup of facilitators, mostly from the corporate environment, although I questioned the decision to invite one or two of them whose bad work wasn’t what these eager, drawing-challenged attendees should be exposed to. I couldn’t experience many of the workshops myself because I was doing my own thing, but I know that Nigel Holmes had his class exercising on towels on the floor of his room, which was wonderful (he appeared afterward onstage for our ethics discussion in workout shorts (blue, of course) and I suggested that our first ethics topic be his decision to do so).

No computers here, except for the vendors who had some cool stuff (Empressr, AutoDesk, Wacom, TechSmith…). The participants learned to put their new, Dave-taught geometric drawing skills to use by sketching things like flow charts using “lymphs and nodes” (or is it “lines and nodes”?) and arrows pointing every which way. They mapped out “journey” graphics using metaphoric visual cliches like executives “parachuting” into meetings and highways leading to a brighter future (yes, distant mountains and a sunrise). I learned that there were absolutely cool things that presentation softwares like Powerpoint and internet-based Empressr could do. The Brazilians showed me some super creative work that inspired me.

I heard lots of good theories on visual communication here, but some jarring ones, too, like “clarity does NOT engage people,” which goes against everything I learned in journalism. I think the theory is that if a graphic presentation is a colliding mass of arrows, pointers, type, clip art, boxes, gaudy colors, lymphs and nodes and parachuting executives it will spark discussion in a boardroom. I agree. The first question would be, “What the heck is that?” But that’s what’s interesting about this conference. Not everyone thinks alike and these theories appear to be tried and true, including the use of visual clichés, so there are plenty of exciting opportunities for discussion, heated or not, and for understanding and growth.

In a weird way, it began to feel a bit cultish with all that drawing. One guy, who was explaining something incredibly simple to me that I was understanding just fine (it’s that, ehem, super intellect of mine) stopped mid-sentence, pulled out a small pad and began sketching a goofy little drawing, a sort of visual sing-along bouncing ball that punctuated his every point as he spoke. I felt as though this was a meeting of the Sciendrawlogists. But that’s just what the organizers, and the participants wanted, to build a community of the enthusiastic and the converted.

And speaking of terminology, I learned a whole new lingo unheard of in news. Why say to a client like IBM, “Dude, we should talk about what to put in this graphic” when you can request a “discovery meeting”? Believe me, IBM wants to hear the latter. This corporate game is all about professionalism and confidence building and, when you speak using important sounding terms like “mind mapping and content analysis,” you can up your price about a zillion dollars. In journalism, we’ve always done the things these terms refer to (the editors were our “clients”) but we never had the labels, and I’m sure it will stay that way. If I had knocked on the sports editor’s door at Newsweek and asked if she had a moment for a “discovery session,” she would have choked on her bagel!

VizThink hopes to be a unifying entity that will embrace a wide range of industries that employ some form of visual thinking and ultimately create a culture of sharing and growth. They want to spread the visual gospel, and I’m with them on that.

Me with a Bryan Christie illustration

(hear Bryan discuss his 3-D work on a live video webcast this Thursday, Oct. 25, 4:30 p.m. at www.wmsu.org)

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TWO summers ago, as I sat on a green plastic chair in a bowling alley willing myself not to puke onto the pink Formica table that supported me, my two teenage sons and a small group of gawkers hovered around me. After witnessing the accident and then realizing that I would live, my boys’ initial concern had given way to boredom as we waited for the ambulance.

Dad’s making jokes - all is well. Where’s my PS2?

The pink faces of the strangers watching me were twisted with bad-actor concern that masked the amusement I knew they were feeling inside, all except for the wiry bowling alley manager. He had yelled at me earlier for interrupting him with my ‘problem’ while he was showing some kids how to bowl and his now-pained expression betrayed his internal guilt after realizing that I had been hurt and was seeking his help. Good! The kids had abandoned their lesson and were now observing me with knotted brows, scanning my face for the slightest sign that I was about to pass out from the pain slicing through my shoulder. It would make for some great story telling around the dinner table later on.

If I were to faint, though, it would not be from pain but from the immense feeling of imbecility that was swooning through my head.

This could not have happened at a worse time. The boys and I were in the middle of a no-moms-allowed trip from Connecticut to Maine in our new Toyota. They were too young to drive the car and we were now stuck somewhere in the middle of who-knows-where New Hampshire.

I’d been doing handstands successfully all of my life …

This time though, something went terribly wrong. (Karl! Why in hell were you doing handstands in a bowling alley? Well, why not?) To do a good handstand, you have to throw your upper body down onto a firm surface with tremendous force while simultaneously whipping your legs up to where your head should be. Your arms are relied upon to absorb all of this energy.

This time, though, my left arm buckled like a wet noodle, like it wasn’t even there. (So much for three years of not missing a gym date.) My left shoulder hit the crazy-patterned bowling alley carpet with magnum force and, instead of my body bouncing off to one side, it kept going downward beyond what was sensible, crushing into the carpet as its underlying bone structure caved and snapped inside me. My collarbone sheared off and the powerful ligaments holding it in place were severed.

I had popped the collarbone so severely that it created a visible bump an inch high that jutted out of the top of my shoulder.

- ERIK (age 12, sitting next to me, calls his mother at home): ‘Hi mom, it’s Erik - Yeah, everything’s fine. We’re just waiting for the ambulance to come pick up dad.’

- MOM: ‘WHAT???’

As it turns out, there’s nothing much any doctor can really do for this type of injury, certainly not in an emergency room. On the drive over (I drove myself there once the ambulance drivers told me it would cost $850 to drive four blocks!) I had imagined two burly nurses clutching my arm, planting their feet against my chest and then ripping my shoulder back the way it was when everything in life was normal. That was the way it always worked in the movies.

No such luck. The hospital said that when I got home to Connecticut a doctor could maybe screw the collarbone down, but that seldom really worked because the constant movement of the shoulder would soon snap off all the screw heads. In the end, they advised me to learn to live with a bump.

Incredulously, I left the emergency room just a little better off than when I entered it, with a shattered shoulder but a pocketfull of powerful painkillers (the non-drowsy type). And so, with one arm pinned to my chest and nestled in a blue sling, I maneuvered myself into the driver’s seat. Erik closed my door for me and Cole buckled my seatbelt before we took off for Maine. Why I continued on I still don’t know.

Well, why not?

Later, sitting at my home computer in Connecticut, I searched for graphics that would illuminate my injury but all that I could find were a lot of horrid, amateurish medical illustrations that grossed me out, mostly because of the bad artwork.

‘What would Bryan Christie do,’ I wondered? While I was the Graphics Director at Newsweek, Bryan had created some of the most beautiful 3-D medical drawings the magazine had ever published, certainly a whole lot better than anything I had ever done, and I had made a lot over the years, from showing how Reagan, Lennon and the Pope were shot to how the Jarvik 7 artificial heart was installed (with the disclaimer, ‘Kids - don’t try this at home!’).

Bryan had developed a unique and elegant technique for rendering images of the human form.

I started to think that it would be cool to have an original depiction of my injury drawn by Bryan hanging on the wall of my office, or even better at my home, just so that people could say, ‘Eeeeeeeww, gross!’ followed quickly by ‘But cool drawing!’

And so the idea of hanging Bryan’s images on walls was born.

Months later, as I was making the transition from Newsweek to teach at Michigan State’s School of Journalism last year, I visited Bryan and told him that I wanted to have an exhibit of his 3-D artwork at the university. I knew nothing of academia or putting up an exhibit, but I figured they’d have a blank wall somewhere, or, even better, a real gallery. In my college, the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, they had no gallery, but the dean let me make one - out of a classroom.

I covered the cinderblock walls with foamcore board, made prints, and hung the show. Bryan’s coming to MSU to speak about his work on Thursday, and I hope he likes it the exhibit.

The brochure (designed by Bryan)

http://igconference.org/bryan_brochure.pdf

His talk will be broadcast live (audio and video) over the web, so please tune in: www.wmsu.org. Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007 at 4:30 p.m. and the show runs through November 16.

Luckily, the new gallery has a really soft carpet . . .

No good for handstands.

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An article about the exhibit:
http://streetanatomy.com/blog/?p=193