Ben Crothers

How to construct a great story

31/05/2023 by Ben Crothers

As I’ve written about before (and in my Presto Sketching book!), storyboards give you great bang for buck when you want clarity and direction in any project, especially for product and service design. Here’s how to construct the most essential ingredient: the story itself.

Storyboards can guide you and your team from problem to solution to experience to execution. They serve as explainers for an existing experience (e.g. a customer experiencing a problem), or as prototypes for a future experience (a customer achieving their goal using a solution). And by ‘drawing it out’, you can spot gaps in your thinking, and invite more effective feedback from team members and stakeholders alike.

A hand-drawn image showing how ideas can flow between people with storyboards — *Storyboards are great for clarifying and refining problems, solutions and envisioned experiences as a team*

Get your story straight

Whether you’ve never drawn a storyboard before, or you’re a seasoned veteran, it can be daunting to put pen to paper, let alone show your storyboards to others!

Never fear.

The most fundamental element of a successful storyboard is not the actual drawing. It’s the story itself. I’ve seen storyboards that weren’t that useful, even though they were sketched by people who are ‘good at drawing’, because the story didn’t make sense.

It’s the story that joins all the frames together. It’s the story makes your audience care. It’s the story that feeds their curiosity, sparks imagination, and keeps them reading to find out what happens next.

Don’t go on the Hero’s Journey

As a designer, I was taught the Hero’s Journey story format, the Monomyth by author Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. On one level, it’s easy to see how you can use it as a way to tell your customers’ stories: by casting your customer as the hero, you can then illustrate a challenge they’re up against, and your solution as the Helper or Mentor.

Even when I first tried to apply it, I found it problematic. For a start, the way of using it I just described ignores most of what’s actually on the Hero’s Journey, including the whole point of it: the Hero returns not only conquering whatever Enemy needed conquering, but a transformed version of themselves. That’s what makes so many stories so endearing. Plus, do we really want our customers to go through the Abyss, and Atone for their mistakes…?

The diagram of The Hero's Journey, but annotated to show how it does not work well for UX journeys

And that’s only the start of it. It’s been rightfully claimed that when Joseph Campbell combed through the stories of all ages and cultures to derive a single Monomyth, he basically cherry-picked what already fit the prevailing cultural narrative of the ‘rugged individualist’. In this way, what he did was falsely reductive and colonialist.

Also: is conquering enemies – even metaphorical ones – the only way to resolve things? What about collective experiences, rather than individual ones?

If you want to pen the next Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, go for it. But I think our customers’ and communities’ stories deserve better.

The Freytag story arc

There’s no doubt that stories of challenge and achievement have a huge pull on us, and it’d be rude if I didn’t mention the arc from Gustav Freytag’s book Technique of the Drama. Freytag rationalised stories into 5 acts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action (or final suspense and resolution), and denouement (conclusion).

This might work well for the story you want to tell, but it always still fell short for me. Being mad keen on storyboarding my entire design career, and wanting to find a repeatable successful story framework that worked for me, my team, and other design teams, I extracted the best of what I could from these two and made my own narrative structure:

The Presto Sketching story structure

This story structure is purpose-built for product and service teams, but also works for change management projects as well, where you need to show an experience that involves either a problem with a negative impact, or a solution with a positive benefit.

And it goes thus:

A diagram showing the Presto Sketching 6-step story structure

I’ve done a screenshot of these stickies in Miro, to show that you can construct your story using words and simple sticky notes, whether real sticky notes, or digital. Let’s take a look:

CONTEXT – Set the scene. Who is the story about? Where is this character or protagonist? Why are they there, or what is their goal? This helps your audience to know exactly what’s going on.
TRIGGER – Show the motivation. What is the unmet need or problem? Without this, it’ll be hard for your audience to care about what’s going on.
SEARCH – Wind up your character, and let them go. What does your character do first (and do next), to try to solve their unmet need or problem?
KEY – Show what’s new. What’s the main feature or change that unlocks success from here on in?
ACTION – Let your character go again. What do they do next, that involves the feature or change that they have found?

At this point, your story structure will be different depending on what you intend to show:

WIN – Show the achievement. What’s the end-game, or benefit? How does your character achieve their goal? OR
LOSS – Show the frustration. What’s the negative impact? What is your character left with?

How to use this Presto Sketching story structure

You can use this structure as a way to synthesise and translate the various elements you have into a visual story that your audience can read and act on, based on the 6 ‘stages’ listed above.

Step 1: Set your goal

Decide what the goal of your story is going to be. This includes:

What is the main point you want to make with your story (and then storyboard)? Is it to explain a situation that needs attention/fixing? Is it to show a new idea in action?
Who is your main audience? What is their perspective on the subject of this story? How close or distant are they to the subject matter? What’s in it for them?
What action do you want them to take? As pleasant as it will be for people to read your story/storyboard, there needs to be a clear point to it. Do you need to raise awareness? Clarify and educate? Get them to empathise? If so, why? Do they need to make a decision of some sort?

Example:

Some how-to details on the Presto Sketching story structure

Step 2: Gather your material

You’ll probably need some material to translate into your story. This could include:

Customer interviews, survey responses, customer quotes, personas/archetypes, and other authentic user research and analysis
Product/service usage data
Existing journey maps and service blueprints
Existing or new ideas for user interfaces, processes, other other aspects of the experience or change you area designing
Existing or new product/service ideas, and ideas for how your customers/employees will use them

Step 3: Get 6 sticky notes

Whether you use physical or digital sticky notes is up to you. Both are quick and cheap to use.

Step 4: Get writing

Label each of the 6 sticky notes with the stage names above (including whether you choose WIN or LOSS). Then, try to write a succinct sentence describing each stage. Note: one stage doesn’t have to equal one scene in your storyboard; it might end up being one frame or several frames. That doesn’t matter right now.

Example:

Set yourself up for storyboarding success

Congratulations! Now you have the bones of your story. You have a sound, logical structure that has a beginning, middle and end, and that unites the various essential elements into a coherent whole.

From here, you’re ready to draw your storyboard. This can take several forms – office paper, large long gallery-style sheet of paper, PowerPoint slides, Miro canvas, you name it – but now you have a story that you can tell, and you can adapt to any of these media.

…and drawing the storyboard will be the subject of another blog post. 😉

So, what do you think of this structure? Try it out. I’m interested to know how it works for you, and how you might adapt it for your team and your project.

Why your project needs storyboarding

31/05/2023 by Ben Crothers

There’s that fantastic time in any product or service design project where an idea is just starting to take shape, and spread its wings. Will it be The Next Big Thing? Will it be able to stand up to the barrage of oncoming questions, like: will it resonate with your target audience? How will it work? Is it even feasible?

That’s where storyboards are your friend, and the best way to help your idea spread those wings, and be ready for those questions.

Storyboards are sets of frames with pictures and narrative text, organised as a sequence to be read as a story. They’re very useful for when an idea is too hard or conceptual or expensive to prototype. You can sketch out your idea using a sequence of simple pictures arranged like a comic, to show the context of that idea: who is experiencing the idea, what they do, how they do it, when they do it, and why.

Why storyboarding is so effective for any team project

As far as design asset bang for buck goes, it’s hard to go past storyboards. They not only capture and communicate an experience so fast and so well, they also double as a prototyping tool; the act of drawing a storyboard helps you to understand and test your own ideas.

Storyboards came from the world of film. They bring the various elements of the craft of cinema – such as script, characters, location, and of course the plot – to life in a unified way that others can start to see how it all comes together.

An example of a storyboard I drew to bring an early mobile experience to life — A storyboard I drew to bring an early mobile experience to life

Storyboards are an important way to visualise stories involved in user experience design:

Illustrating an existing experience, often showing a particular problem in the experience, and its negative impact on people
Illustrating an envisioned experience, showing a solution and the benefits of that solution
Showing state differences in products and services where interface designs wouldn’t be enough, such as showing differences based on different times of the day, different locations, or different personas/archetypes

They are also very handy when it comes to envisioning, prototyping and planning other kinds of experiences, like:

Change management envisioning and roll-outs
E-learning content and training videos
Explainer videos and promotion videos
Games
Video advertisements

What storyboards are not

Here’s how storyboards differ from other assets created in the world of product and service design:

Journey maps – journey maps offer a schematic view of an experience from a single user’s perspective, showing how a string of actions leads (or in some cases doesn’t lead) to a goal, and often how that journey feels. Journey maps are useful for visually summarising many different aspects of an experience – such as pain points, opportunities, sentiment – as a single map, in a way that just wouldn’t fit on a storyboard.

Service blueprints – service blueprints are similar to journey maps, but usually replace indications of how the journey feels, with much more information about what the journey includes from a system perspective, covering all user types. This means that what happens behind the scenes (or off-stage) is visually captured as well as what happens from the user’s perspective (on-stage). This can include internal teams, processes and systems, such as customer support resources and approval processes.

User flows – user flows are a schematic view of the experience from a task perspective. They typically show a flowchart of the sequence of actions and decision points linked together, usually outside of time. They capture what happens, rather than how, or how long.

Screenflows – screenflows and user flows are often interchangeable, but screenflows show the experience from the interface perspective. They tend to be sets of simplified screen designs or wireframes. They are useful for understanding how a given task/s is/are achieved across various screens and interface elements on a website, application, or other product, rather than who is doing the actions, or when.

What makes a great storyboard for your project?

Storyboards are best used as instruments of process, not product. In other words, they are best used to stimulate discussion, not seek approval. They are best used as prototypes, sketches only, made to inform others and get feedback about how an idea works, rather than being a fully-formed aesthetically-pleasing product about what the idea is.

A photo of a team at Pixar discussing a movie, surrounded by storyboards — *Director Pete Docter during a meeting for Pixar’s Inside Out. Note the various storyboards around.*

Storyboards should focus on being:

Quick – they take hours – rather than days or weeks – to create

An example of a simple but effective storyboard — *This is a simple storyboard from a team at BBC. Note how rough and ready it is, and yet conveys the story it needs to.*

Cheap – they are created using simple tools like pencil, sticky notes and paper, possibly some pre-made templated elements (rather than needing sophisticated software and training), before needing to spend any great amounts of money.

Another example of a simple storyboard — *A simple storyboard by Bryant Hodson*

Evocative – they should capture your audience’s attention, and help anchor discussion to how to improve the experience, not how to make the solution. In a now-famous move, Airbnb hired Pixar animator Nick Sung to bring specific moments in their customers’ experiences to life (code-named “Snow White”), and posted them around the organisation’s office walls.

An example of a storyboard used in UX strategy at Airbnb — *A single frame and a look at some of the other storyboard frames from Nick Sung, for Airbnb*

Unifying – storyboards are great at giving everyone – from designers to developers to customer support agents to managers – a common language to use, to discuss and improve customer experiences or employee experiences.

An example storyboard with added UX details under each panel — *A storyboard for a fictitious startup called You’re In, by Jordan Husney. Notice how you can arrange other information (in this case potential projects to prioritise) under each frame.*

Minimal – they should focus on the essence of what needs to be communicated and validated. This includes the level of detail and draughtsmanship finesse; when it comes to communicating the idea of a house, a simple blocky rendering of a house is the same as a professionally-drawn house, or a computer-generated image of a house. In cases like these, simple drawings are usually better, because extraneous distracting details can be omitted, e.g. age and style, size, materials.

As author Scott McCloud says, they focus on amplification through simplification.

What you need to create a storyboard

I’ll get into how to draw storyboards in another post, but for now, it’s good to know that you need the following elements to set yourself – and the idea that you want to communicate – up for success:

A user type – Who is your main character?
A goal – Why is the character doing what they’re doing?
An audience – Who will read this storyboard, and what do you want from them? Are you wanting to persuade them about fixing a particular problem? Or for them to provide feedback on a particular solution? Or to empathise with customers in a particular way?
A story – All of these elements come together and are brought to life through the story itself, or a sequence of events that is usually meant to engage your audience’s head (how does it relate to their knowledge and experience), heart (what does it mean to them) and hands (what do you want them to do).

That last element – crafting your story – is the subject of another post too.

Here’s how AI visualises your company’s vision

12/08/2022 by Ben Crothers

UPDATE: I originally wrote this post in August 2022. AI-generated images have obviously come a long way since then. Please read this post with this in mind…

I had a play with MidJourney to find out if it would steal my job as a visual practitioner or not, and the results were – well – comforting…

Technology has always pushed our craft forward

Ever since we humans first started using stones rather than our hands to cut and shape things, technology has been advancing our capabilities. History is often marked by huge jumps in progress, thanks to one innovation unlocking more innovations. New technologies have always changed our impact on the world, on each other, and the way we think about ourselves, and our place in this world (and beyond).

Granted, some technologies have been pretty benign (I mean, bricks are a pretty awesome invention, if you think about it). Others have been ultra-disruptive (hello Gutenberg Press, the steam engine, nuclear fission, the Internet).

Think impact, not job

And technology has always shifted our thinking and assumptions of what any certain job should be. If you have a fixed job-oriented mindset, then you’re up for a world of anxiety, because it’s only a matter of time before any new technology challenges, disrupts, or even completely removes the need for that job.

But if you have a more open impact-oriented mindset, then new technologies will always present new opportunities for you to make your mark in the world in new and better ways.

How will AI-powered image generators affect the visual practice field?

In recent years, AI and smart programs have been advancing in leaps and bounds, and every new app seems to make yet another industry really nervous about their livelihoods. The release of AI-powered image generators like DALL-E, DALL-E Mini, Imagen, and MidJourney is certainly making a lot of people in the fields of visualisation, illustration, art, design and photography pretty twitchy.

And no doubt about it, the images these service generate are pretty amazing. Here’s what you get when you prompt it with the word “happiness”:

An AI-generated image of 'happiness', depicting a smoky-looking meadow with flowers — *Happiness – generated by MidJourney*

There’s loads of commentary going on about what this means for the visual practice field (i.e. illustration, art, graphic recording, visual storytelling), but rather than just add more words to that, I thought I’d run a little experiment, to show some evidence to us as a community of what to be twitchy (or not twitchy) about…

An AI-augmented visualisation experiment: illustrating company visions

I thought I’d get the AI-powered image generator MidJourney to illustrate some company visions, to see what it created, and to see what I could learn from that.

Why company visions? I help teams gain clarity and direction through visualising their complex and often ambiguous and esoteric information and ideas. So, if I were to go toe-to-toe against MidJourney, I thought I’d choose something that we can all reference, as a starting point.

Using MidJourney is a bit tricky; it uses Discord as its interface, which means it’s easy to lose your creations (MidJourney’s creations?) amongst hundreds of other images going on in the same big stream of messages. There are tons of others in the same channel, and most of what they’re prompting MidJourney for are for pictures of cyberpunk cities, elves, hot medieval chicks and robots. Kids today, hey.

A screenshot of the Discord interface — *Creating MidJourney-generated images within the Discord interface*

Basically, you type imagine/ and then whatever text description you want as the prompt for the image generator. It then generates 4 ‘draft’ images. From there, you can opt for a variation on any one image, or select one image for it to create a final, larger, more detailed piece.

Here’s what MidJourney generated for Nike’s vision: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world“. As you can see in these shots, the images start as broad shapes and colours, and gain detail and specificity over about a minute.

Two AI-generated images of Nike's vision statement — *Rendering…. rendering…*

Another set of AI-generated images depicting Nike's vision statement — *The finished render of Nike’s vision, visualised*

What about Amazon? “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online”:

A set of AI-generated images depicting Amazon's vision statement — *These look like album covers of music I’d like to listen to!*

You wondering what Tesla’s vision “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” looks like? Here you go:

Another set of AI-generated images depicting Tesla's vision statement — Whoosh! Go-faster lines!

I dig the other-worldly-looking windmills in the lower-left version.

LinkedIn’s vision statement, “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce”:

Another set of AI-generated images depicting LinkedIn's vision statement — I’m all for employment opportunity for people with 3 legs

What can we make of these images?

Any image generation algorithm is written by at least one person, and drawing upon (pun intended) a vast collection of existing (human-made) images of various kinds to create any new image. Looking at these images (above), there seem to be some decisions about colour and composition that would have been informed by that collection, and perhaps the visual texture and form also.

The objects and shapes themselves rendered in these images seem pretty generic… but then again the prompts (i.e. the vision statements) use pretty generic language. Bland words yield bland images. That’s on the vision statements, not on the AI.

So, what does this mean? A few things jump out for me:

The images are novel, but not original

Every AI image is re-sampling images that already exist. Can original art come from existing art? Yes, absolutely. Music by DJs like Moby re-sampled existing tracks, but is still fresh and original; it’s music we haven’t heard before. But these are just derivative, by definition.

The people who make AI image generators steal from the original creators

Speaking of images that already exist, the images feeding the generator have been taken off the internet without permission and without payment, and there is no attribution given to the artists who created the original images. This is theft, plain and simple.

Which is not cool.

What’s more, it breeds the mindset that most people have about images online, and that is if it’s on the internet, it must be free. Not so.

The fight against this behaviour is on. For example, Getty Images is suing AI art generator Stable Diffusion in the US for copyright infringement. This article on The Verge is a great exploration about the issues at stake.

The magic is in our interpretation, not in their generation

The introduction of the camera catalysed a wild explosion of new thought about art, and a range of modern art movements, like impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, and cubism. We (i.e. human artists) reacted to this new technology, and intentionally challenged existing ideas of aesthetics, technique and composition, and created whole new ways of expressing ourselves visually.

AI-generated images don’t intentionally challenge existing patterns and compositions, or re-interpret existing metaphors or existing visual treatments of subject matter. The algorithms are serving up a range of calculated renderings, and then we choose what ‘stands out’ and what does not. Any freshness, originality, or aesthetic value we ascribe to any of these images comes from us, not the AI.

We are still doing the synthesis

These AI algorithms ape some of what we intuitively do when thinking how to visualise something, but not all of it. In Presto Sketching, I wrote about how we do that. Generally we:

Understand – We check that we ‘get’ the concepts that need to be visualised
Synthesise – Then, our clever brains make a multitude of choices about what those concepts mean, how are they connected, what to include, what not to include, what to emphasise, how to appeal to our intended audience, is there a metaphor at play, and so on.
Translate – Then, we think about how to visualise and communicate that synthesis. This is steered by our own memory and experiences, our visual diet, our confidence and competence in being able to render something (on paper or pixels).

I think AI-powered image generators do an amazing job of #3 Translate, but they can’t do #1 Understand or #2 Synthesise. You can see this when you look at the visual rendering of the vision statements above; yes, the text is very generic, so all it can do is algorithmically reach for a ‘stock’ object that fits a word, or render a ‘stock’ abstract symbol that represents a concept (e.g. the ‘go faster’ lines) for “innovation”).

Bottom line? It’s an illegal type of brush

As long as we demonstrate understanding and synthesis, I think we still have a massive edge over AI-powered image generation. I see it as a new type of brush that we can paint with, and it’s up to each of us and our conscience whether or not we use it. What ‘colours’ do you put on the brush? How do you wield the brush? It depends on the prompts you use.

But this (to me) calls for three pursuits:

Broaden your visual diet. Whatever your role is, intentionally go after a richer variety of visual stimuli. Go to nature, seek out different kinds of First Nation art, go through old art books… but do what it takes to feed your eyeballs and your brain with a wider range of visual layouts, colours, textures, treatments, and subject matter.

Cultivate your creativity. Intentionally colour outside the lines. Create things for the sheer heck of it, not for money or likes or any reward. Be impulsive. Swap out a familiar tool with an unfamiliar tool. Set yourself a new constraint for each project.

Example: Here’s what MidJourney makes with my nonsense prompt: “yuopoyy at bhlkip asd”:

AI-generated images for a nonsense text prompt — Behold, my own subconscious…

Interesting, hey?

Skill up in synthesis. Cultivate and improve your skills of listening and observing, questioning, empathising, critical thinking, (re)framing, (re)classifying, (re)grouping, (re)wording, and resampling.

And last thing: Check out the subtle art of prompt whispering. 😉

What are your thoughts? I’m keen to know!

5 principles of great layout for your visuals

14/01/2021 by Ben Crothers

Your visual communication pieces can land with your audience or miss them entirely, depending on what layout you choose. This post shows you the principles behind why some layouts work better than others.

Layout: your secret sauce for communication success

One of the questions I get asked a lot in the training sessions I do about sketchnoting (or visual note-taking) is: how do I organise content on the page?

Visual layout is really important. It’s what guides your audience’s eye around the page (or screen), and sends them a bunch of signals about what parts to pay more attention to than others. And it’s just as important regardless of size and medium, whether it’s small format (like sketchnoting), or larger-format, like scribing and graphic recording, and whether it’s physical or digital.

Some might say that layout doesn’t matter if you’re sketchnoting just for yourself, but I disagree. Once you finish a sketchnote, you actually swap from being the creator to the audience, i.e. you still have to read and understand it yourself. So, why wouldn’t you make it easier for yourself, as well as for others, to appreciate and understand your good work?

Introducing the 5 principles

Let’s jump into 5 principles of great layout. You’ll find that once you see these in other sketchnotes (or anything laid out in print or digital, really!), you won’t be able to unsee them.

A diagram of some gestalt layout principles — Some principles involved in layouts that make them work so well

These principles from from the world of graphic design, and are known as gestalt principles.

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Balance

Think of all the various words, images, lines, frames and whatnot that you draw in sketchnoting as having a visual weight, i.e. a mass and density that they take up on the page (or screen). Some elements – and groups of elements – are going to be visually heavier and denser than others, and this affects how our eyes and brain judge them to be in balance.

Elements that collectively have a visual balance tend to convey calmness, order, and stability. Elements that are not in balance tend to convey disorder, discomfort, and tension. You can use this to great effect, depending on your subject matter, and what you want to communicate!

Visual hierarchy

Our eyes will gravitate to larger visual elements (text or images) before smaller visual elements. That’s why titles are usually the largest thing on a page, and footnotes are the smallest. That’s the logic of having sub-titles smaller than the title, but larger than regular text (or ‘body copy’ in print design parlance). As visual note-takers and communicators, this visual hierarchy of elements is super important to understand and use. We can change the proportion of elements on our pages to guide our audience’s eyes around the page, and use variable proportions of elements to convey what’s more important.

Repetition

Related to visual hierarchy and proportion is repetition. Being consistent in the layout and proportion of elements is a great way to convey unity and in your visual note-taking and graphic recording work, and make them easier to read and remember. Examples:

Keeping all your sub-titles the same size and colour helps your audience to scan and understand the piece much more easily
Using one, two or three colours to set up a visual pattern is often better than trying to use every colour marker you’ve got in the one piece
Using a small set of different types of frames, separators and backgrounds in the one piece, rather than hitting your audience with a kaleidoscope of umpteen different elements

Flow

I mentioned how we can lead our audience’s eyes around a page using visual hierarchy. We can also do this by paying attention to the rhythm, proximity, and flow of visual elements (or groups of elements). Layouts help us ‘package’ groups of elements together, according to rhythm, proximity, and flow.

This makes it easier for our audience’s eyes to read the whole by intuitively knowing what order to read various groups of elements. If there is no layout in place, our eyes find it harder to know how to navigate the whole; if that happens we fall back to an intuitive default of scanning a page from the top left corner to the bottom right corner (for Western audiences at least).

As visual note-takers and recorders, we of course have other juicy elements that pop up in various layouts, to help with flow. These are super effective, and other visual communicators can’t often use these the way we can:

Arrows – arrows are purpose-built to guide the eye. They convey sequence, order, step logic, and progress. Sometimes they even convey speed. Sometimes the whole layout is just one big arrow!
Separators – we can use lines of all kinds and characters to visually separate and sequence ideas and content
Frames – we can add order, sequence and hierarchy using frames of different kinds. Frames can also help audiences know what type of content to expect to read, which helps understanding and recall.
Shapes – we can use different kinds of shapes to arrange and classify content types in layouts. Shapes can be schematic (rectangles and circles), but they can also be metaphorical (e.g. silhouettes of icebergs, hot air balloons, mountains and clouds).

White space

Closely related to flow is knowing how layouts use white space. Layouts have areas of white space built-in.

Use them wisely!

Now that you know these 5 principles, here are some tips to help you actually do something with them:

Take a look at others’ sketchnotes or graphic recordings, and ‘read’ them according to these principles, to help you understand how to apply them. What can you detect about the pieces you see, when it comes to Balance, Visual hierarchy, Repetition, Flow, and White Space?
Deconstruct some of your own sketchnotes or drawings. How might you improve them, according to each of the principles?
The next time you do a sketchnote or graphic recording, pick one principle, and try to do the best you can in expressing that one principle.

I hope this helps you improve in your visualisation and drawing journey!

…

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A guide to sketchnote layouts

14/01/2021 by Ben Crothers

Here’s a set of sketchnote layouts to try, plus some tips about which layouts to use for which particular purpose.

Lead them down the garden path

One of the questions I get asked a lot in the training sessions I do about sketchnoting (or visual note-taking) is: how do I organise content on the page?

The layout of your sketchnotes and graphic recordings is really important for guiding your audience around the information you want them to take in, much like paths in parks and gardens are designed to help people see the best of what’s on offer. The layout you choose also makes it easier for your audience’s eyes to read the whole by intuitively knowing what order to read various groups of elements. If there is no layout in place, our eyes find it harder to know how to navigate the whole; if that happens we fall back to an intuitive default of scanning a page from the top left corner to the bottom right corner (for Western audiences at least).

Sketchnote layouts to try

Here is a poster image of various kinds of layouts you might like to try. I know there are lots of these summaries around, but these are the ones I teach, that are most effective, most of the time.

Note that these layouts work well for portrait or landscape… or square, for that matter. They’re all based on some age-old gestalt principles, borrowed from the world of graphic design.

And don’t forget to continue reading past this image, because we’ll get into some ideas for which layouts to try for which purpose…

A visual summary of various sketchnote layouts to try

Which layouts to try for which purpose

Columns and grids are your gateway

If you’re fairly fresh to sketchnoting, all this layout business might seem a bit daunting! By now though, I hope you can appreciate that using different layouts isn’t just about making content look more attractive; it’s about adding order and sequence, to make the content more meaningful, more understandable, and more memorable.

The thing about text-based communication is that it treats any topic the same way. Whether it’s a news article, a how-to guide, a work email, or a letter from your grandmother (this blog post, even!), it’s all arranged the same (barring being broken up with images). Paragraphs always come one after the other. To consume a text communication, you start at the top, and work your way through in a linear fashion.

I’m certainly not hating on this format (I rely on it for this post, after all!) but it’s very limiting. By contrast, using different layouts helps us to break out of that linear flow, and lay out our ideas in a sequence and space that often makes communication more effective and more meaningful.

Column layouts are your gateway to this new world! This is the easiest way to start the progression from the regular habit of text-based note-taking, and communicating everything in the same format of slabs of text:

Just like we can break up our text and images into columns, we can also break them up into rows…. although not too many, otherwise it turns into a spreadsheet! 😉

2×2 grids and 3×2 are very popular for communicating content that can be mapped on 2 spectra/axes, or for displaying content in a storyboard-like set of panels.

Radial layouts for guides

Continuing with the theme of freeing up content from the linear railway-carriage style of text-based communication, you might like to indulge in a radial layout.

Radial layouts come in handy when there is a set of principles or ideas related to one overall concept or message, in no particular order. You see this at work in listicles (I mean, try not to click on 20 Lipstick Names That Are Awkward As Hell), and in some public talks and podcast sessions.

Start with the title in the middle of the page (rather than at the top of the page), and capture each idea around the title. Link them with lines and arrows if you want to. Need to go over more than one page? No problem. Just repeat the title in the middle of the next page, and away you go.

Pathway layouts for stories and sequences

If there is a set of ideas that need to be in a specific sequence, then you probably need something like a pathway layout. Pathway layouts are especially good when you know the main topic of what you are capturing is a story of some kind, but you’re not sure where it’s going to go.

Stories and journeys pop up in books (surprise surprise), public talks, podcast sessions, blog posts… you name it! It’s a great format to listen to, and to remember sequences of ideas and events, and pathway layouts lend themselves well to visually capturing these sequences.

Basic layouts for business meetings

Visually capturing the progress and results of business meetings is a huge win for you, and (in my humble opinion) for your team as well. If you jot down your thoughts and reflections of what you experience in a meeting just for yourself, that will definitely improve your focus and your productivity. But if you capture progress and results for everyone else too, in view of everyone as the meeting progresses, you will definitely help everyone’s focus and productivity.

This is a HUGE part of visual thinking and communication to get into, so let me just offer a first step into getting started, with a few examples of simple layouts for a few different kinds of meetings:

Do you need help everyone to:

Define a guiding vision and purpose? Draw the object and subject as a basic map, where object = your customers, clients or community, and subject = you, your team, your product, your service. Draw in the reason driving the object and subject (WHY) perhaps as a mountain. Leave a space for HOW you’re going to achieve this vision.
Analyse the progress of their team or project? Visualise a retrospective by dividing a page into two space to capture your notes: looking back and looking forward
Get clarity and alignment on a topic or scope? Draw two concentric circles, label the outer circle OUT and the inner circle IN. Use this as a guide to help people define (and align on) what’s out of scope and what’s in scope.

Experiment!

I don’t want you walking away from this post thinking that this layout game has super strict rules. Au contraire, rules – once understood – are made to be broken, and one of the great gifts that sketchnoting has given us is its freedom and fluidity! So go ahead and have a play, try different layouts, make them, break them, and see each one as an experiment.

Mapping your user’s day with the User Clock Sketch

28/06/2019 by Ben Crothers

See your user’s experience of their day through their eyes with the User Clock Sketch.

The power of mapping user experiences

Are you involved in making products and services for customers and communities? If so, you’ll know how important it is to make sure your offering matches what they need. A standard way of connecting user research to making products and services is to visually map out the journeys that they go through, using techniques like journey mapping, user story mapping, and service blueprinting.

The synthesis stage in the Double Diamond of design, showing where journey mapping usually happens

These visual tools are really effective. They’re a great way to – quite literally – get people from various parts of the business ‘on the same page’. They help everyone to see where the pain points are in a user journey, and where opportunities might be, too. Often more importantly, they help everyone to get a shared understanding of how all the various individual parts (from their perspective) relate as a whole, according to a common reference point. The user’s perspective.

A user journey map (or customer journey map), for example, is more than just boxes and arrows. It can show what a particular persona/user type is doing (tasks), thinking (expectations, decisions) and feeling, as they use one or more of your products and services. This is a bit different to user story maps and Indi Young’s mental model diagrams, which are usually independent of your product.

User journey mapping is versatile

User journey maps, and the act of mapping as a team, can be applied in different ways. You can map out existing experiences, along with pain points, workarounds that the user type is doing, and opportunities for improvement. You can also map out envisioned experiences, where you have redesigned the experience to fix those pain points and take hold of those opportunities. In fact, an envisioned user journey map is like a new prototype, to show all the benefits of the new experience before going ahead and building anything.

Limitations with some mapping

As great as these patterns are, though, the way the information is arranged is still often according to your particular product or service. This means that there are some limitations:

Hard to scope – It’s sometimes hard to know where the journey map should start and stop, and can seem somewhat contrived
Susceptible to bias – The nature of scoping a map to show a particular type of user achieving a particular goal in a particular ‘happy’ scenario means we’re making lots of decisions to keep it convenient for us to map. This can open the door to unconscious bias.
They don’t take external factors into account – It’s usually too hard to visualise all the other factors contributing to that journey (e.g. other products and services that the user type interacts with), to achieve the user type’s goal you are focused on
Branching, cycles, multi-tasking, oh my! – Some journeys just aren’t linear (i.e. this action then that action then the next action and stop), or there may be multiple tasks going on at the same time. This can sometimes be excruciating to try to map!

Try adding the User Clock Sketch to visualise the ‘customer journey’

I remember trying to do journey mapping for some scenarios where people use Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki/documentation software. It got super-complicated really quickly, because people tend not to just do one linear this-then-that task. Instead, people tend to read several pages in different web browser tabs, search for some page in some other tab, and edit another page in yet another tab… all for different tasks and different goals! And then the following day, they do it all over again! Agh!

So, I asked: “What if we changed the perspective we’re taking, from Confluence’s point-of-view to the user’s point-of-view? What if we mapped a day in the life of the user type we are focused on (in that case it was project managers), to see what that looked like?”

And that’s how the User Clock Sketch was born. And it looks like this:

The User Clock Sketch – mapping an experience around the face of a ‘clock’

This is particularly useful for journeys that are pretty much the same, day after day (ergh, that sounds so depressing, but it’s not meant to!). It maps the actions of a particular user type from the point where they wake up in the morning, to the point where they go to sleep. Rather than getting into the nitty gritty of each task they do, it groups actions according to significant chunks of the day that matter to them, according to their context. AND it quite literally puts the ‘user at the centre’ of the picture, how good’s that? 😉

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Draw your user type in the centre of a big circle

Whether you’re using one sheet of paper or a large whiteboard, draw a large circle, and then draw a simple figure in the centre. You can label the figure as a role, persona, or whatever way you are identifying that particular user type.

Step 2: Draw a line up to the ‘12’ position

Draw a vertical line from the user type up to where the ‘12’ would normally go on a clock. This is the point where your user type wakes up.

Step 3: Section the ‘clock’ into significant sections

I tend to draw a line radiating up from the centre to about the ‘9’ position, to show the time where the user type would be asleep. After you’ve done that, draw radiating lines around the face of your ‘clock’. Each line will separate a particular ‘stage of the day’ that matters to that user type and their role. If it’s an office worker, it’ll tend to include commuting time and a lunch time. It might be important that you include small but significant moments, like a daily stand-up with the team, or an important meeting with executives.

Label each of the slices of the clock. Dress up the labels with some simple drawings that show real things going on: the type(s) of devices being used, their location and environment, and other significant factors.

Step 4: Overlay your product’s/service’s context

Notice that so far you haven’t included your product or service at all; this has been all about them and their goal, their tasks, their job, and so on. Now, you can grab a different colour, go back over the ‘clock’, and add in significant information according to your product/service context.

This might include particular product tasks that the user type needs to get done using your product at that particular time of the day. Or it might include specific features that get used a lot at specific times, or specific parts of your service that get hammered more than others.

Step 5: Explore, explain, enrich

Now is the point where you can start to ‘see’ your product being used in a new ‘re-framed’ way. Either individually or as a group, you can explore the ‘clock’ you have drawn as a map of time, to provoke more insightful questions and enrich your understanding of your users.

I’ve seen this visual pattern come in handy for anyone in a multi-disciplinary team, but as a start:

Researchers can share insights from research and tell a story according to this ‘day in the life of’ picture, so that others can relate to it from the user type’s point of view more easily, and empathise more easily
Product managers can gain a deeper sense of what features the user type depends on more often and why (and if there are gaps), and where the moments of greatest value to the user are, so that you can align strategy, plans and roadmaps to real value metrics
Designers and content writers can make connections from feature usage (or lack of a feature) to importance and urgency, from a user point-of view, so that you can prioritise where you want to spend the most creative energy

Adapting the User Clock Sketch

Every time I demonstrate this sketch to others, there always seem to be more uses for it… which is a good sign! Since the pattern relies on a journey being cyclical, it can come in handy in a way that a strictly linear map might not. You can also change the ‘resolution’ of the time, too. It could show a typical week for a user type, or a financial year, or for as long as it takes to order a meal and have it delivered… it’s up to you and your context. Here are a couple of variations:

Two User Clock Sketch usage alternatives

Enrich the way you ‘see’ your customers

What I’m really getting at here is this: we have to see our customers as real people, not just consumers of our products. We have to see the world through their eyes, not just through the eyes of our products. And we have to use multiple various ‘frames’ on how we see them, by visualising them and describing them in different ways, and not just reducing them to conceptual abstractions using one familiar pattern or the other.

According to Capgemini research (back in 2017, at least), 75 percent of companies considered themselves to be customer-centric, but only a measly 30 percent of customers agreed. I suspect this gap is because a lot of companies mentally and physically engage with customers on a pretty superficial level, and view them as replaceable parts of the whole (as seen on a chart), rather than as individuals with genuine goals and needs to fulfil.

But I’m hoping that using patterns like the User Clock Sketch (along with other mapping tools) can help this! By changing up the way we visualise customers, I think we can inoculate ourselves against this superficial kind of thinking, and enrich our mental models of our customers and users.

This will not only improve the quality of what we offer our customers, but will ultimately make our own businesses more successful.

…

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Better visual brainstorming with the Concept Canvas

27/01/2019 by Ben Crothers

Making big decisions about which idea or option to invest in amongst a group is really hard. Using the Concept Canvas to visually compare apples to apples makes it a bit easier (includes free PDF).

I was in a brainstorming session from hell once. I was part of a team to help a telecommunications company redesign several of its systems into a seamless customer experience. The stakes were high, and the salaries in the room were pretty high too. The facilitator (a project manager from another agency) started us off by describing the state of the existing systems. Then with whiteboard marker in hand, asked us for ideas.

My heart sank.

I love brainstorming, I really do. I know some people will gnash their teeth and tell you that brainstorming never works, but it can and does work really well, if you ask the right questions, and have just a bit of structure. But alas, we didn’t have the right questions or structure in that session. And the only thing I remember that vaguely sounded like an idea that was written on the whiteboard was QR codes.

That was it, really. QR codes.

The problem with picking out one idea from many… will everyone else understand what it is and why?

I’m sure it made perfect sense to the regional manager that kept clanking on about it, but that’s all we had by the end of the session. I remember thinking that QR codes weren’t connected to the problem we were there to solve (nor to the customers and their situations) at all.

The problem with ideas

Ideas are awesome. An idea can be as vague and unrelated to anything as — yes — QR codes, or as grand and bold as democracy itself. A great idea can come from anywhere as they say, and the more ideas we have, the more chance we have of striking the right idea that will become the right solution.

But as great as ideas are, they can wither and die a premature death if others can’t ‘get it’ the way you do. An idea might seem clear and actionable to you, but it’s usually very tricky for everyone else to ‘see’ what you ‘see’ in your head. How is it connected to the original challenge? How does it work? What’s the risk? What’s in it for me?

Stakeholders may not understand your idea (let alone get onboard), but framing it as a concept helps!

Ideas usually need to be combined and refined into concepts. A concepts is what links one or more ideas into a structured actionable solution. It contains a lot more information that fleshes things out in such a way that you and a team could then execute on it. If you only ever go as far as generating ideas, it can be hard trying to refine and combine them, and it gets really hard to then make any decisions based on them, such as comparing one over another, or estimating how long it might take to make, or which market to take that idea into.

Refine and combine your ideas into concepts

The Concept Canvas

That’s where the Concept Canvas comes in. The Concept Canvas gives you and your team a way to add enough structure to your ideas, so that you can evaluate them more confidently. Like all canvases used in design and business strategy, you can draw it up on a whiteboard for a group to use, or draw it on single sheets of paper for individuals to use. And it looks like this:

The Presto Sketching Concept Canvas: This is an easy template to use to turn several vague ideas into a consistently structured set that you can then compare for value, risk, or any other factor you need

(By the way, you can also read about this canvas in Presto Sketching, the book).

Here’s a free PDF of the Concept Canvas for you to download and use yourself. 🙂

The Concept Canvas helps you to keep a ‘line of sight’ from the original problem you’re trying to solve and/or value proposition, to the solution you set up, through to the shipped product, service or process.

How to use the Concept Canvas

For the purposes of explanation, let’s assume you’re doing some sort of brainstorming session with a group to generate ideas on how to solve a particular problem, or meet a certain customer need.

Start your session with a clear problem statement or design challenge that the group must tackle.

Example: “We believe that people under 25 want to invest in property, but id it too expensive to even begin. We can help them by selling them small pieces of existing properties and then giving them the proportional share of any net rental income. We’ll know we’re right when first-time buyers of one piece return to buy more pieces.”

Ask everyone to individually come up with as many ideas as possible, on any particular aspect of this challenge. Wild and random; boring and expected; big, little… it doesn’t matter. Help get them started with more focused creative “How…?” questions, like these:

How can we attract prospective customers who have never considered this as a service?
How can we encourage existing customers to buy more pieces?
How do existing customers sell their pieces?

Now, of course people will (hopefully) come up with all sorts of ideas early on, and it’s great to capture those as phrases on sticky notes, whiteboard scrawls and sketches on paper. But watch out for ideas that are just one word. For example, I can just imagine my QR Code Guy blurting out “Referrals!” If this does happen, ask the person to add a bit more detail according to the “How…?” question, the audience and its goal.

Ask everyone to refine and combine all those ‘small’ ideas into their strongest three ideas, and fill in a Concept Canvas (above) to flesh out each of those ideas into a more realised concept.

Begin by copying the hypothesis into the Hypothesis section of the canvas.
Write in which particular audience type each idea is suited to in the Audience section (e.g. “Cynical evaluator, Brand new customer, Champion regular customer).
In the Goal section, write what that audience type’s goal is. It should be specific to the audience, and not a business or product goal. This helps everyone to really think hard about connecting their idea properly to the initial challenge.
In the Channels section, write in what channels are involved in the concept. How does the customer actually experience/use this concept? Is it through the existing company website? A new app on her mobile phone? On her laptop at work?
Now, use the main area of the canvas (Experience section) to describe and illustrate what the actual experience is. This could be a bulleted list, a flowchart, a storyboard, a set of wireframes… whatever helps to really bring this concept to life, and add rigour to your group’s thinking.
Finally, put a mark on each of the sliding scales in the Scope Sliders section for how ‘big’ the concept is. Just rough guesses is fine at this stage. You can use the existing sliders (risk, effort, value, resourcing, timing), or replace them with your own factors that would be important to you and your project.

Because everyone is using a common structure, the Concept Canvas now makes it easier for everyone to read and understand everyone else’s concepts. As a way of refining the output of the group, you can get each person to briefly pitch their concepts to everyone, and then them give them all three sticky dots to ‘vote’ on the concepts that they think are the strongest.

What you should now have is a refined ‘gallery’ of Concept Canvases. Even though the contents of each main Experience section might visually vary, you’ve given everyone just enough structure to help you sort through them and start sizing them for risk, effort, value, resourcing, and timing (or any other factors that you might have used).

Give it a try

As with all the canvases and whiteboard patterns that I share, why not download the free PDF of the Concept Canvas and try it yourself? There’s no harm in trying it out on paper yourself first, and then with your team on the whiteboard; I guarantee that visually structuring your ideas as fleshed out concepts will help everyone ‘get’ your ideas a whole lot more.

…

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Easy ways to show more diversity in your sketches

27/01/2018 by Ben Crothers

Life is full of all kinds of people, and your sketches can be too, with these ideas and examples.

Do you want your presentations and business communications to be more inclusive, and show more diversity, but you don’t want to use those cheesy contrived multi-racial stock photos?

Well, help is here! Let’s look at simple ways to sketch diversity in simple figures and faces for your presentations, and other things like whiteboard drawings in meetings, user interface designs, journey maps, and storyboards.

Let’s back up a minute. What do I mean by ‘diversity’? Rather than every figure in your drawing being a white male, I mean showing a variety of figures and faces, in terms of gender, age and life stage, ethnicity and sociodemographic background. This makes your communications much more inclusive.

“Whoah, Ben!” you might be gasping, “That’s a tall order! I can barely draw a figure that looks human, let alone a variety of humans!” Good news – it’s easier than you think. Once you start doing some simple sketches like these (instead of using hilariously bad stock photography), the greater your confidence will be to share them and use them in your own work.

In sketching, detail and diversity go together

Look at the range of faces below. The more abstract a face, the less you need to worry about diversity, but the more detail you add, the more diversity — or lack thereof — will become an issue. Work on a sketching style (or fidelity) that’s got only a little bit of detail; that way, you can suggest diversity in easy, economical ways.

Think about head shape

All of the examples I show you here are using a low level of fidelity; simple lines, no mouths, that sort of thing. This is great for anything from whiteboard drawings in meetings, to slide presentations and design work. Firstly, think about the shapes of the heads you draw. Almond-shaped heads with slightly pointy chins appear more feminine, squarer-shaped heads appear more masculine. Weird-shaped heads appear alien (hey, we’re being inclusive here, right?).

Hair’s the easiest way to variety

Drawing a variety of hair is the easiest way to indicate a variety of gender, age, and ethnicity. The picture below shows how adding just a simple line here and there can indicate things like plaits, a ponytail, or a bun (a man-bun, maybe?).

Once you master those simple lines, try drawing different shapes and varieties of hair as seen below: young spiky hair, long wavy feminine hair, emo hair with a streak through it, permed hair or balding hair. Close-cropped curly hair is also a good way to show someone whose gender is not identified by hair shape.

Beards, facial hair, and accessories like headbands, glasses, caps and other headwear are also great ways to indicate various nationalities, ethnicities, styles, and ages:

Little details mean a lot for different ethnicities and religions

It’s worth investing a little bit of time practising the faces below, so that you can include different ethnicities and religions in your drawings.

Seen here in the top row from left to right: a Sikh turban (the dastar), a Muslim skullcap (taqiyah or topi), two Indian head coverings (chunni), and an Indian woman with a tikka and sari. In the second row from left to right: a Buddhist wearing a Kasaya, an Asian female (the clothing is simple enough to be a Vietnamese áo dài or a Chinese cheongsam), two hijabs (simple enough to be Al-Amira or Shayla style), and a niqab.

Being more inclusive when sketching figures

Just like the faces above, the figures drawn here are really simple. By thinking about different ages and stages (childhood, parenting, older age), we can add a whole lot more variety to the figures we sketch. Here are just a few examples:

Think about different life situations (like parenthood), and different levels of ability and mobility as well.

One thing I like to think about when doing more inclusive figures like this: even if I do a figure with a walking stick or in a wheelchair, I never want that thing to define them as OLD or DISABLED. That’s a stereotype. Instead, I like to include a little detail to show some character in some way, so that they’re not perceived as a stereotype (e.g. old people use smartphones too! A woman in a wheelchair can zip along pretty fast!).

Similarly to the faces you saw, adding a bit of detail to indicate different dress can indicate more inclusivity too (in the case above, the female figure is wearing a sari and maybe a choli).

Your turn

I hope this helps you think about how you might be more inclusive in the way you draw, wherever you draw, and whatever you draw. And I bet you that everyone around you will really appreciate it, too.

10 ideas to get you inspired to sketch

28/08/2017 by Ben Crothers

You want to sketch more…or just start sketching… but it’s hard to know where to start. I hear you. Here’s 10 things to draw, when you don’t know what to draw.

I know what it’s like. You want to sketch (or you want to sketch more often), but you can’t really think of what to sketch, so it’s just really hard to get started. Or you’re looking at other sketches you see, and you can’t help thinking that you have to sketch like that first time, which holds you back as well.

A big part of just getting going is saying to yourself that whatever you sketch is not going to be perfect. It’s just not. But it can be not perfect and still be satisfying! That awesome sketch by someone else you saw on that Instagram post? That’s sketch No. 10 or 11. You’re never going see sketches No. 1 to No. 9, because they were too crappy to show to the world. But sketches No. 1 to No. 9 had to happen first, to get to that awesome sketch No. 10.

So with that in mind, here we go: 10 ideas for what to draw when you don’t know what to draw.

1. Get your Kandinsky on

Start with a fresh sheet of paper, or a fresh page in your sketchbook. Take your marker or pencil of choice, and let your hand draw some flowy curly lines around the page. Draw some straight lines, too. Then, colour in (or make some parallel line marks) in all the little spaces enclosed by the lines. And behold! You’re an Abstract Expressionist!

You too can be an Abstract Expressionist, like Vasily Kandinsky (painting shown: Composition 8, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris)

If someone gives you funny looks while you do this on the train, just tell them you’re studying the renowned Russian Abstract Expressionist Vasily Kandinsky, who did this sort of thing all the time (that’s his Composition 8 in the image above, painted in 1923).

2. Find meaning in the scribbles

This is another idea to help you park your own self-judgement, and to just get going drawing something. Start with your marker in the middle of a fresh blank page, and just do loose scribbles for a minute or two, without taking your marker off the page. It’s better if you don’t even look at what you’re drawing. Make sure you fill the page. Then, look at what you’ve drawn, and see if you can find some meaningful shapes among the scribbles. Is that a face there? Or a rabbit? Whatever you find, make them stand out more by outlining them with your marker. Fun, hey?

Here’s my example. What can you see in the scribbles? I saw a weird horse-like thing, a dude with angel wings, and a ribbon of some sort.

3. Sketch 3D crystal patterns

This is another idea to help you replace self-judgement with a sense of creativity and discovery. Fill the middle of the paper with some randomly-placed dots. Connect the dots in a way that makes lots of triangles and other random 4- or 5-sided shapes. Then, shade some of the shapes in a mid tone, and some other shapes in a darker tone. Before long, you might see a weird crystalline shape emerge, like these 3D crystal phone covers.

4. Sketch a wine bottle 5 times

Alright, let’s move on into sketching actual things. This one’s about giving your hand a chance to practice rendering what you ‘see’ in your head. Draw a wine bottle. It can be as sloppy as you want. Then draw another, and another, and so on. Each time, pay more attention to the quality of the line. Your wine bottle number 5 is better than number 1, isn’t it?

5. Sketch different sorts of pot plants

This is a simple and fun one. Sketch different sorts of plants in pots. They can be simple or complex, beautiful or ugly, regular or hipster… it’s just a chance for you to draw a similar thing over and over, and inject a little bit of creativity or a lot!

6. Look at all the trophies you won!

Time for a motivational one. What’s something you want to be famous for? Sketch a trophy for that thing, with your name on it. What’s something you want to achieve at work? Write that down, add your name, and sketch a trophy around it. Don’t worry, no-one else is going to see these trophies; it’s just a really good idea to visualise your goals to help you make them happen.

7. Try a bit of Zentangling

Zentangles are abstract creative drawings that are made by sketching random creative patterns. They can start with a real-life object, or they can be completely abstract… it’s up to you. Draw a simple object (fairly large on the paper), like a fish, a tree, a figure, headphones…it could be something that’s sitting right next to you, or something you’re thinking about. Then, sketch in a few structural lines inside any of the larger shapes of your drawing, as if it’s made out of a wooden frame. Then, fill each shape with random lines, loops, circles… wherever your hand takes you! Loads of fun.

This page on WikiHow is a nice place to help you learn more about this absorbing way of sketching.

8. Visualise your day as a flow sketch

Take a look at your calendar for today. What sort of day are you going to have? Or what sort of day did you have? Using a fresh page, draw each event as a small picture of some sort, moving from one side of the page to another. You could just sketch symbols (like stars and boxes), or you could sketch simple icon-like pictures (like people in a meeting, or a document, and so on), it’s up to you. Then, connect the pictures together in a way that shows the flow of your day.

9. Sketch skylines

Sketches of skylines are really fun. They can be fairly complex and detailed, but even just light simple silhouettes just look crazy cool. Wherever you’re at — on the bus, at home, at work — look outside at the skyline, and draw it. If you want to enhance it a bit with extra buildings (or UFOs and Godzillas), that’s cool too.

10. Sketch something from your social media stream

Do you spend time thumbing through social media streams of images and updates, like on Instagram, Facebook, and so on? Stop at a particular image you like, and sketch it. Remember, your sketch doesn’t have to be good, just sketch it anyway. Do this a few times, and try not to keep thumbing through looking for an ‘easy’ one, or a ‘cool’ one. Just sketch a few.

This is sketch of a photo of my mate Josh Stinton and his buddies, who have just completed a 190k mountain bike race in the Arctic, to raise money for charity. Amazing!

And there you have it! 10 ideas to get you sketching, and sketching more often. As always, drop me a line if this has been useful for you. I’ve got bags and bags of ideas like this, so if you want 10 more ideas, let me know, too.