Karl Gude

(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.