Presto Sketching

A book to help you think and communicate better with drawing

Ben Crothers

Fun emoji facts

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Emoji number plates?! Level up your emoji mojo with these 15 nuggets of tasty tips, tricks and trivia about our favourite adorable little pictures.

To state the bleeding obvious, emoji are a thing. In a BIG way. Regular Presto Sketching newsletter readers might know that I have a soft spot for emoji. They’re an amazing, fun and flexible way to express ourselves visually. And emoji are pretty much our main international language; around 95% of humans online are now using these little characters.

So I thought I’d make your day with 15 nuggets of emoji trivia and links. Let’s get into it, shall we?

1. We are sending 60 million of them to each other on Facebook, and 5 billion on Facebook Messenger alone, EV. VER. REE. DAY. Over on Instagram, nearly half of all comments and captions contain emoji, and users from Finland 🇫🇮 are at the top of the table, using emoji in over 60% of text!

2. The most popular emoji (according to this Brandwatch report 📝) are the ‘Face with tears of joy’ 😂 (#1 on Instagram and Twitter), Heart ❤️, Sparkles ✨ and ‘Loudly crying face‘ 😭. And surprise surprise, most popular emoji differ in different countries. France, for example, is rather fond of the wink 😉, but Italy and Spain take it a bit further with a wink and a kiss!  😘

Top 10 most used emojis in the first half of 2021

3. Emoji were invented by Shigetaka Kurita in Japan, and were first seen on Japanese mobile phones in 1999. This interview with Kurita is brilliant, and his first sketches of emojis are absolute gold:

Shigeta Kurita’s original sketches for the first emoji set

The original set of 176 emoji now resides in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.🗽

4. Shigetaka Kurita’s favourite emoji? The heart ❤️. Awww.

5. The original smiley 😃 (perhaps the first emoji?) was invented by ad man and graphic designer Harvey Ross Ball in 1963. He was commissioned to create a graphic to raise morale among the employees of an insurance company after a series of difficult mergers and acquisitions. Ball finished the design in less than 10 minutes and was paid $45 for his work 💸.

6. Oxford Dictionaries named ‘Face with tears of joy’ 😂 its 2015 Word of the Year.

7. World Emoji Day is 17 July. Why? Because that’s the date shown on the ‘calendar’ emoji for Apple and Google 📅 (but not for Samsung, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms) And does World Emoji Day have an anthem you can sing along to? Why yes. Yes it does. 🎶

8. Do you want to know what emojis are being used on Twitter? In real time? Of course you do.

9. What about those times when you want to include emoji, but you’re in front of a regular keyboard? Got you covered! Head to getemoji.com or iemoji.com and copy-and-paste 📋 emojis to your heart’s content  👍.

10. Some emoji can have multiple meanings, or different meanings in different cultures. Turns out that this symbol ♻️ means ‘recycle’ in Western culture, but is commonly used for ‘share’ in Islamic  ☪️ cultures, like when people post prayers on social media, and encourage others to share. If ever in doubt of the meaning of what you’re sending, best to check using emojipedia.org.

11. Speaking of checking, it’s worth knowing that not all platforms use the same emoji for the same thing, so you might be inadvertently confusing receivers of your messages. For example, the ‘Grinning face with smiling eyes‘ might look like this 😬, or like this 😄, depending on the platform you view it on…. and depending on what you’re trying to say, it could carry a very different tone!

From Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji

12. You can read the entire Moby Dick story in emoji. I can’t wait to see the CliffsNotes of that. 😂😂😂

13. Emoji are being used to evade monitoring and censoring. The Chinese government regularly squashes anything in social media that would appear to be a threat to communist rule, like the growing women’s movement in China. For instance, China’s Twitter-like service Weibo shut down the Feminist Voices account, and then private messaging app WeChat did the same. FYI, Weibo also blocks the #metoo hashtag. But Chinese feminists found a way around it, by using #RiceBunny in its place along with the rice bowl and bunny face emoji. When spoken aloud the words for “rice bunny” are pronounced “mi tu,” a homophone for “me too” that cleverly evades detection.

(Side note: iPhone users in China are missing one specific emoji on their emoji keyboard that shows on all others: the flag for Taiwan.)

14. And what about emoji on number plates? That would be brilliant, if only it were true. As an April fools joke in 2016, the Honda website published a news item that they were introducing emoji number plates in the UK. But hey, you never know… 😉

Would you like an emoji numberplate?

15. And so, what lies ahead for us in Emoji-Land? If the latest incarnation of emoji and 3D technology are anything to go by, expect more and more animations, face filters, and other facial customisations on your messaging apps and elsewhere. The launch of Apple’s iPhone X brought with it the TrueDepth camera and Animoji, which simply has to be seen to be believed.

It’s worth having a play with these apps, just to get a feel for how your own face can morph into all sorts of expressive, entertaining — and in some cases VERY CREEPY — avatars and whatnot:

  • 💃 Gabsee: Put your 3D avatar in the real world
  • 😮 Mirror AI: Turn your selfie into an emoji
  • 🎤 MyIdol: I had loads of fun creeping out my family and friends with this one… you’ve been warned!

Emoji will be more and more inclusive and instructive

Expect emoji to also bring more of our beautiful diverse world to our keyboards, and therefore to our mindsets. The upcoming Unicode version 11 includes faces with red hair and curly hair, superheroes, more body parts, and more accessories. I think it’s actually good to see a ‘woman’s shoe’ that is flat-soled and blue, rather than the stereotypical (and some might say overly-sexualised) red stiletto heel.

Some new emoji actually take advantage of the way they can transcend language as we know it, especially for people who are illiterate. Earlier this year, Unicode approved the addition of the mosquito emoji, which can be used as a way to better describe mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and Zika.

And don’t forget: anyone can submit an emoji proposal. What would you submit?

Parting note: use emoji as inspiration ✨in your own sketching

As I’ve mentioned in Chapter 5 of Presto Sketching (Sketching Faces and Expressions), sketching emoji is a great way to broaden the range of facial expressions you can render in your own visual communication. Try copying the emoji that you see on your device today into a notebook, and then try incorporating them into other sketching and visualising you do. Before long, all of your sketches will have a lot more vitality and character! 👋

Nail your product strategy with the Product Pyramid

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Features! Story points! Sprints! UIs! It’s all too easy to let the detail of product management drown out the actual product strategy. The Product Pyramid can help.

Strategy is a tricky game. The more complicated the product(s), service(s) and business(es), and the more people involved, the trickier things get. Trying to get shared understanding about vision, direction, risk, priority, and so on is hard enough, let alone getting shared alignment, decision, and execution.

But so often I find that it’s all about connecting the various pieces of product management into a cohesive product strategy story. This usually involves visual framing, and getting everyone involved using a shared perspective and vocabulary that describes where we want to play and how we want to win.

Lots of product managers, designers and entrepreneurs struggle with strategy, because they jump into details too soon, or find it hard to separate what they know from what they believe/suspect/assume. Japanese master swordsman, author, philosopher and all round legend Miyamoto Musashi put it well: “Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things“.

What is the Product Pyramid sketch?

With that in mind, the Product Pyramid sketch is a way for product managers, designers and founders to visually relate the detail of any product (or service) to the rest of what’s important about that product: the experience it provides, the benefits it gives to customers, and the value it creates for customers and the business.

It’s a simple pattern that you can draw on a whiteboard in a strategy meeting, and it looks like this:

How does it work?

The Product Pyramid is a visual guide to remind you and others how all of the parts of your product are related.

  • P = PURPOSE of the product, usually to increase some value to your business and your customers; the change your product is trying to make in the world
  • B = BENEFITS to your customers; what they talk about to others that’s so good about your product
  • J = JOURNEY people go through when evaluating, buying, using, getting help and sharing your product
  • F = FEATURES of the product; what people use in the journey
  • P = PERSONAS that interact with the product; the different types of people that go through different parts of the journey. JTBD and needs (i.e. the jobs-to-be-done framework) fit in here.
  • C = COMPETITION that also attracts the same personas with the same needs

When should I use the Product Pyramid sketch?

Use this sketch (or visual framework) if these sorts of scenarios happen:

  • You can’t seem to focus product conversation at the right ‘level’ (i.e. people get bogged down in talking about user interfaces, bugs or features when you actually need to talk about benefits)
  • You don’t have a shared understanding of the product’s strategy across the team
  • You need to come up with good research questions
  • You can’t remember all your user stories

How do I use the Product Pyramid sketch?

Make sure you have a whiteboard. If any of the symptoms above start to happen in a meeting:

  • Draw a nice big triangle
  • Draw in some horizontal lines to separate the triangle into the different zones (Benefits, Journey, etc)
  • Make some notes in the zone (or beside the zone) that reflect the conversation you’re hearing. It could be questions, assumptions, or things you’re trying to understand better
  • Listen for connections in what’s being talking about, and visually reflect this with arrows from one zone to another

The Product Pyramid is a map

The Product Pyramid is a map. It’s there to help you know where you’re at in a product discussion, and where you want to be. It’s not meant to contain lots of detail, but it does serve to point the way to that detail (that would live elsewhere). For example, the Journey layer should ‘link’ to any customer journey maps you have created.

It’s also there to highlight any gaps, vagueness, or disagreement in your product strategy.

The Product Pyramid is a story

Because the Product Pyramid ‘connects the dots’ of your product’s purpose, benefits, journey and features, it also doubles as a great way to tell your product strategy as a cohesive logical story. Two examples:

Pitch to leaders (top-to-bottom) – “The most important change we want to make in this business is [Purpose]. To do that, we need to help [Persona(s)] with [Benefits]. As they use our product, they [Journey], and they way they experience [Benefit] is through [Features]. If we invest in [Feature], this will unlock greater [Benefit].”

Rationale for a feature improvement sprint to engineering (bottom-to-top) – “This particular [Feature] in our product might be small, but it’s the source of a disproportionate amount of support requests. At the moment, it gets in the way of [Journey], and stops too many customers from realising [Benefit]. That’s why we need to focus on improving it this quarter, so that [Purpose].”

Try it yourself

So, the next time any of your product team meetings include even a bit of product strategy – e.g. sprint planning, feature brainstorming, business review meeting – your team can now have a way to keep all the various parts of the product related, and optimise discussion for business benefit and customer benefit.

Foundation lines: the killer technique for better sketching

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If you struggle to draw from imagination – or even what’s right in front of you! – the foundation lines drawing technique is made for you. Try it yourself, and gain greater confidence and ability, with more satisfying results.

[UPDATED] Quite a while ago I was filling my Presto Sketching Instagram account with a big collection of 4-step how-to practice drawings, like this one:

How to draw a bowl of ramen in 4 steps

I started doing these ages ago, as a way to build a visual library of things that were (and still are) useful to mentally ‘reach for’ when sketching at work. This is handy for journey mapping, graphic recording, sketchnoting, storyboarding, or anything else where you need to communicate ideas and messages to others. I still do a lot of these during any training sessions I do about drawing, but especially back then I added a lot to Instagram, and then made an e-book out of 100 of them, called Draw in 4.

Draw in 4 e-book, available anywhere you buy your e-books

Extra plug: If black-and-white e-book doesn’t suit your style, you can also get the deluxe colour PDF version of Draw in 4 here.

These 4-step drawings use a technique in Chapter 6 of the Presto Sketching book, called foundation lines (or construction lines) as a way to increase ability and confidence in sketching. And it goes a bit like this:

  • Look at the object you want to draw, and in your mind’s eye, break it into basic geometric shapes. I recommend doing this with objects in front of you first, before trying to do it from imagination.
  • Draw those basic shapes with a light-coloured pencil or marker (or a very thin marker). The shapes themselves shouldn’t be perfect; it’s perfectly fine to draw them a few times, to help you place them right where you want them to go. My dearest old art teacher used to call this “finding the line”.
  • Once you’re happy with the main shapes, draw in any more lines that help to give you more guidelines to draw over, such as the lines indicating the ramen contents and chopsticks in the example above.
  • Now, start drawing with your darker marker, over the top of those foundation lines. You’ll see how the dark marks spring forward, and the lighter, coloured lines recede.
  • Finish your drawing with any detail you like. Sometimes it’s nice to add some shading or colouring using the colour you used for the foundation lines.

Nice, hey? By breaking anything down into shapes first, you help your mind observe, deconstruct, and then reconstruct the object for you to draw, to get a much more satisfying result.

I love this technique because it gets you to exercise a part of drawing that doesn’t get enough air-time: your observation skills. In other words, really seeing and paying attention to what you want to draw is just as valuable as how you end up drawing it.

Once you sketch anything using foundation lines a couple of times, your mind’s eye automagically ‘sees’ the foundation lines on the paper, tablet or whiteboard, and you can then draw whatever the object is with more confidence. You can also develop your own style, based on a more solid understanding of what it is you want to show.

I hope these examples tempt you to try this method yourself, the next time you draw. Before long, you’ll be able to sketch up an ice cream, a moped, a kraken — or whatever it is you want to draw — in no time at all!

3 ways to add extra impact to figures

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Whether you draw for a living, or you just want to increase engagement in your work by making it more visual (or both!) adding figures and faces to your communications makes a big impact. Our eyes can’t help but lock into the eyes of another face, or the pose of a figure, to seek meaning and affinity.

As well as adding figures, we can also pay attention to enriching those figures with more character and meaning, to boost the impact of your communication:

  • Are you communicating a plan or strategy to the organisation? Add figures to show where and how different teams ‘fit into the picture’.
  • Do you want to highlight a particular product/service problem to stakeholders? Show people being impacted by that problem.
  • Do you want to sell a benefit of a new product or process? Show people being happy when they use it.

Good news: you can draw more interesting figures and faces yourself, and it’s easier than you think. We’re not aiming for anatomically correct works of art here; we’re just aiming for the essence of a figure, or an expression. In this post, I’m going to focus on figures, and show you 3 secrets to drawing more impactful figures.

1. Draw the body language

Most of what we communicate to each other is non-verbal, and a big part of that is through body language. This differs depending on context, but essentially: what we say with our bodies matters. So, the poses of the figures you draw matters, too!

Compare the pairs of figures below. Even though they’re really simple, the second figure of each pair communicates a lot more, doesn’t it? Your figures will have more character and appear more real (no matter how simple they are), which makes your message much more compelling to your viewers.

2. Draw people in their natural habitat

Think about where your figure is, and what they’re doing. People rarely just stand bolt upright not doing anything; showing them moving around, slouching, sitting, lying down, or doing various things adds so much more vitality. Add a hint of an accessory or something to add a bit more interest, too. When you use your imagination in your sketching, you’ll ignite your viewers’ imaginations, which will make your message more memorable.

3. Dial up the drama

Use a trick that cartoonists know really well, and try exaggerating the poses of your figures. This works really well when you want to cut through the noise of other communications, and imply drama and urgency.

Your turn

My challenge to you: if you’ve never included your sketches in a presentation or on a whiteboard, try it out, and let me know how it goes! You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the positive attention it gets. And if you’re pretty seasoned at drawing figures at work, then think about how you can add more body language, habitat and drama, for added impact.

Have fun with it!

3 ways to visualise psychological safety for better team performance

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Think about you and your team at work for a minute. How supportive would you say it is for everyone to speak their mind, try new things, and learn from mistakes? Is it a pretty open, encouraging team, or is it rife with politics? Do you feel like you can be yourself there?

This is what psychological safety is all about: having a culture where you and your team can bring your whole selves to work, speak your mind with respect for each other, trust each other, be curious, be assured that it’s okay to try new things, and not be penalised speaking out, or for taking small risks. Psychological safety is essential if an organisation wants to have a culture where inventing and implementing breakthrough ideas can thrive.

Using sketching to promote and embed psychological safety

That sounds like a pretty good culture to work in, doesn’t it? So how can you promote and embed that sort of culture? By using more sketching and visualising in your team, of course! Here are 3 ideas to get you going.

1. Draw project ‘horror movie’ posters

I’m a big fan of awesome movie posters, as well as pre-mortem activities, where a team can discuss what they think could go wrong in a project at the beginning of the project, and then discuss what they can do to avoid those things. This is a great way for everyone to be more real with each other, air those anxieties, and be more connected by realising that everyone probably feels the same anxieties.

At the beginning of a project as part of a kick-off meeting, ask everyone to imagine (in silence) the project as a horror movie or disaster movie, where everything they think could go wrong HAS gone wrong. Then, give everyone a sheet of paper and a pencil or marker, and ask them to each draw a promo poster for that movie, showing what has gone wrong.

The drawing doesn’t have to be good at all; just enough to get their idea across. And like all visualisations, just getting those vague thoughts out of people’s heads and out in the open can be really clarifying. You can put everyone at ease by showing them a rough drawing you’ve done yourself, earlier.

Once everyone has finished (after 5 or so minutes), get everyone to stick them up on the wall, and let everyone tell each other about what they’ve drawn. Then, discuss as a team how to avoid those things going wrong. It’s fun, it’s really revealing, and it bonds the team a bit closer together.

2. Do a ‘Circle of expectations’ sketch

Another good activity to do during a project kick-off, or whenever someone new starts on the team, is to do a ‘Circle of expectations’ sketch. Draw a big circle on a whiteboard, and write ‘IN’ in it. Outside the circle on one side, write ‘OUT’.

Set the scene by saying that everyone has a part to play in the culture of the team, and this is the opportunity to state what behaviour expectations we all have. It’s a good idea to demonstrate what you’d like everyone else to do, so go ahead and write something like ‘WE DO THE TASKS WE SAY WE’LL DO’ inside the circle.

Ask everyone to grab a whiteboard marker and write what behaviour they think everyone should have in the team inside the circle. And then ask everyone to write what they don’t want outside the circle.

Discuss as a group how to make sure that everyone does what is inside the circle, and avoid what’s outside the circle. This is a great way to foster honesty, and having each others’ backs.

3. Draw a superhero drawing of yourself

This is a fun and very insightful 15-minute ice-breaker activity to do with your team. Ask everyone to draw a simple outline of a superhero on a sheet of paper (you can use something like the image below as a template if you want).

  • Ask everyone to imagine themselves as a superhero, and then write or draw their own SUPER POWERS around the outline. It’s totally fine to be a bit silly with this; it gives people a chance to get past any awkwardness about drawing and sharing this sort of stuff.
  • Then, ask people to write or draw what they really value inside the outline; this is the POWER SOURCE of you as a superhero. You might want to drop hints by including things like authenticity, honesty… things that reveal what really motivates you.
  • Thirdly, ask everyone to write or draw their KRYPTONITE, the things that make you anxious, annoyed…the things that sap your mojo.

As with all of these activities, get everyone to talk through what they’ve drawn, and discuss as a group how you can support each other to stay connected to your power sources, use your super powers to help each other, and avoid the kryptonites.

Your turn

The only way these activities will bring better psychological safety to your team is for you to actually do them. Maybe try them alone first to get the hang of them, and then do them with your team. I’ve used these over and over again, I’ve seen them bring great benefit to teams, and I guarantee you that they will improve your team’s psychological safety too.

So if you do try any of these activities with your team, let me know, send me a photo… it’d be great to hear how they’ve worked for you!

5 easy ways to give your sketches more WOW factor

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Have you been working away on improving your sketching, and looking for ways to up your game a little? If that’s the case, grab a marker and some paper, and try these 5 easy ways to add more life and character to your sketches. Actually, it’s more like 5.5 ways… You’ll see…

1. Add a dash of detail that tells a story

Surprise is always a great trick to help embed your message or idea deeper into your viewers’ brains. Push your powers of imagination a little further, and add something fresh and unexpected to an otherwise regular icon to enhance the meaning, or hint at a story.

2. Make it move

Sketching things that look like they’re moving always adds energy. What would the thing you’re sketching look like if it were stretching, or bouncing? Wiggling, or racing ahead at break-neck pace?

3. Excite the eyes with some EXAGGERATION!

Whatever you’re sketching, think: what could I exaggerate to add more interest? Think about the relative size of some parts, or the pose of a figure, or even the texture of an object.

4. Snazz it up with a splash of colour

Any sketch is going to be more eye-catching with a splash of colour. You don’t have to go overboard; even just one colour can turn a humble hat from “ho-hum” to “HUZZAH!”

It’s worth paying attention to the way you apply the colour: strong decisive areas and lines are much more visually appealing than thin scratchy marks.

And here’s the bonus half a tip: dial up the contrast with areas of black, or dark colour. Our eyes are drawn to areas of high contrast; if you’re sketching in black, don’t be afraid of using strong areas of black. This will really make your sketches more eye-catching.

5. Put a face on it

Ever since I saw that Portlandia episode, I’ve always remembered that phrase “Put a bird on it!”. Just like putting a picture of a bird on any objet de home décor makes it more hipster, putting a face on any inanimate object instantly adds charm and character.

Here’s the magic: we can’t help seeing faces in things, and as soon as we see a face on something, we can’t help but attribute a personality to it, depending on the face’s expression. So, make your sketches and whiteboard drawings instantly more fun, attention-grabbing and memorable with faces!

Try these tricks out today. The more you bring life, story and character to your sketches, the more people will take notice of them, and the more they’ll remember them, and therefore the more they’ll remember your message and your ideas.

Have fun with it, and don’t be shy about letting me know how you went with applying these tips.

Use the Product Box sketch to improve any product or service

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Picture yourself strolling down the aisle of your local supermarket, looking at the various products on the shelves. What catches your eye? What is it about the boxes, packaging and labels that gets that product into your trolley?

Not many of us get to design those boxes and packaging, but imagine if you got to do exactly that for your business, product or service?

Or imagine if you got to design a box for you?

That’s exactly what this Product Box sketch trick is all about. It’s a way to help you think about whatever it is that you’re selling, from a fresh point of view. You use the visual ‘language’ of boxed product design (like a box of cereal) as a way to express your product’s value to customers. And it goes a bit like this:

Decide on what it is that you want to sell. As an example, I’m going to use ‘Project Manager’ (I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about how she’s trying to help her team understand how a project manager can help them).

1. Start the box

Sketch a nice big rectangle. This is going to be the front of your boxed product.

2. Sketch the front of the box

Now it’s time to start getting creative! Write the name of the ‘product’ at the top of the box in nice big letters (in my case it\’s ‘Project Manager’), and sketch whatever your product is. Make sure you leave some area blank for the next step. Note how I\’m keeping my sketching really simple:

3. Add the benefits

Next, think about the benefits of your product. What’s your product going to do for your customers? Why should they care? Write those benefits on the front of the box, too (up to 3 benefits is fine). Try not to agonise over the benefits (or your sketching) too much. Progress is better than perfection at this point!

4. Add the ‘ingredients’

Now, let’s get 3D: draw a bit of a parallelogram on one side of your ‘box’. This is the side of the box where your ‘ingredients’ go. This can be the main features of your product; the sort of things that customers want to check that your product includes, when they’re comparing your product with others. Go ahead and write whatever those ‘ingredients’ are.

5. ‘Open here’

Finish off the box by drawing the top (like you can see below). Add in something about how customers start using your product. Do they just open the box and away they go? Or do you want to add the price?

6. Refine your design

As you sketch this ‘product box’, you may well have more ideas about how to make it better. You might also get into the metaphor of the product box a bit more too, and you might want to riff off product-y things like ‘batteries not included’, or ‘assembly instructions’, and so on. Go ahead and do another sketch, and work in your refinements. Here’s mine:

And there you have it! It’s amazing how often we forget to think about our business, our product, our service — whatever it is — from a customer’s point of view, and the product box is a great metaphor for getting us thinking differently. Here are some ways you can use this Product Box sketch as an activity:

  • Help you and your team get a shared understanding about what your product/service is now
  • Help you and your team think in a fresh way about what it could become
  • Galvanize your team, and get them thinking about their internal value to your organization in a new way
  • Help you think about yourself. What value do you want to be in the world? Why should people ‘buy’ you?
  • Sharpen up your resume: what are the benefits to your new employer if they were to give you the job?

So, give the Product Box sketch a go, first by yourself and then with your team. As always, let me know if you try it out, and how it went.

Amaze your team mates with radar charts

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If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, by now you know that I’m keen on helping you use simple sketching in your work, to explore problems, explain concepts, and generate ideas. I cover a range of topics, including drawing icons, whiteboarding, making meetings more effective, exploring problems and plans with metaphor, and visualising data.

This post looks at a particular data visualisation pattern that is really useful but often gets forgotten.

Step forward if you would, radar chart, a.k.a. spider chart, star chart or polar chart. The radar chart is great for plotting multivariate data, or in other words: those times where there is more than one value or factor that you need to measure and compare. Plus, they just look really cool.

And they look a bit like this (left) or this (right):

Snazzy, hey? Each value you’re measuring has an axis that radiates out from a point (typically of value zero), with equivalent increments along each axis. Radar charts give you a much more compelling way of looking at data, rather than just in a table. Let’s take a look at where you can use radar charts, shall we?

Great for analysing products

Are you a product manager, researcher or designer? You’ll know that you can’t judge your product’s performance on just one metric; there might be a range of heuristics that you use, to do with usability, customer satisfaction, up-time, task completion speed, and so on. And sometimes these are a bit semi-quantitative, and a bit hard to hook a definite number on. Radar charts give you the flexibility to use other values like ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’, or ‘happy’, ‘meh’, and ‘anxious.

Here’s an example from a fictional social media website, where you can see how user satisfaction is rating for four major functions of the website:

Great for analysing you

Are you working on your own professional development? Plotting your skills on a radar chart is a quick and engaging way to see where you’re at now, and where you want to grow. Here’s another fictional example, using a mix of user experience designer skills:

Great for analysing staff and teams

Sports players and coaches have used radar charts to analyse players and teams for ages (and if bringing data and sports together is pure nerdy heaven for you, check out these charts for hockey and soccer/football!) This visual way of assessing team members’ skills is really handy for candidate interviewing in recruitment, and for helping team members to balance where they want to grow, and where the team needs skills.

What’s really nifty is that you can overlay several team members on the same radar chart, to build up a story of aggregate sets of skills in a team:

In the example above, we can instantly see the different levels of ability in teamwork, design and sketching, as well as where these two team members are complementary. Plus, this also helps us see that we don’t have much by way of development ability in the team.

So there you have it; aren’t radar charts amazing? Start using them by analysing yourself and your skills, then see how you can apply them in other areas of your work.

5 MORE tips for better whiteboarding awesomeness

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My last post about whiteboard tips seemed to really strike a chord with a lot of readers, so here for your further whiteboard mastering pleasure are 5 MORE tips. If you missed out on the first 5, don’t worry; you can read them here.

There’s no harm in saying again that writing and drawing on a whiteboard is not only a great way to visually reflect what’s being said in the meeting, it’s a great way to command the meeting. By that I don’t mean making YOU the centre of attention; I mean making the IDEA, or the QUESTION, or the DECISION the centre of attention.

So, here are 5 more ways you can rock the whiteboard, to make sure everyone in the meeting focuses on what really matters.

1: Plan the structure  of your whiteboard space

It’s really easy to let a meeting take your hand all over the whiteboard. Before you know it, you’ve scrawled willy-nilly all over it like a bee on Red Bull, darting from flower to flower. This might feel good, in a Beautiful Mind aren’t-we-brilliant kind of way, but it may not help everyone in the meeting to get more clarity, meaning, structure, and connection from what’s being discussed.

Instead, plan the spatial structure of what you’re going to write and draw on your whiteboard ahead of time. Using either a dashed line, or just your mind’s eye, mark out a set of smaller areas on the whiteboard, where each area will correspond to a particular part of the meeting or workshop, like this:

This will help everyone understand and remember the various parts of the meeting much better. Also, try to make the shapes photo-friendly, to make taking photos of them easier (see point #5 below).

2: Use colour to add meaning and emphasis

Now, I’m assuming you’ve done tip #2 of the last 5 tips for whiteboarding awesomeness, and you have several good-quality whiteboard markers in several colours at the ready. Choose one marker for the bulk of what you write and draw (hint: black), and then choose a colour or two to use with the black, to represent specific meaning(s).

In the example below, I’ve used red to emphasise some elements of an outcomes hierarchy that I would need the room of people to pay attention to:

In this example, the red emphasises 3 things at a glance: There’s a box in the bottom right corner that isn’t connected to anything (this could represent a project that isn’t contributing any outcomes); another project added to the left that we’ve forgotten about; and the highest-level outcome is in a warning-state somehow.

3: Breathe life into those boxes and arrows

If I had a dollar for every box and arrow I’ve ever drawn on a whiteboard, I could definitely buy an island right now, and I’m guessing you’d probably be on your way, too. Boxes and arrows are the bread-and-butter of whiteboard discussions, so why not give them a lot more life and meaning?

You’re probably used to sketching something like this on your whiteboard, or seen it done:

But what if you did something like this:

There are several extra things going on here:

The shape of the arrows adds more meaning – The middle arrow is in a spiral, indicating something that’s either iterative, or complex, or just plain dizzy. The top arrow arcs up and over, indicating a part of the process that soars over the rest, leading to a positive outcome.

The boxes have character – Simply adding a face to a box gives it life, character, and meaning. Depending on what you want to communicate, this sort of tip can be a powerful ally for helping people to remember certain concepts and ideas.

Colour is used to indicate meaning – Red is used for something unfavourable, while green is used for something – well – good!

4: Give them the pen

According to maestro visual communicator and author Dan Roam (and I’ve seen this in action myself), there are 3 types of people in the room when it comes to whiteboards:

  • The Black Pen People – they can’t WAIT to jump up and start drawing on that whiteboard (me!)
  • The Yellow Pen People – they’re happy to hang back a bit, and add to someone else’s work
  • The Red Pen People – they wait until the end, question it all, and might just jump up and re-draw it all

It’s really useful to know what sort of Pen People you have in your meeting, because you can use that to your advantage. For brevity, I’m going to focus on the Yellow Pen People, since they’re the ones who will give a lot of value to a meeting through visual communication, if nudged in the right way.

Here’s how. On your whiteboard, draw things that let the Yellow Pen people easily see where they can add their bit to, give them the pen, and then ask them questions. Here are a few examples:

  • Sliding scales – Draw: a sliding scale, with an alternative at either end // Ask: “Is this a low-risk move or a high-risk move? Where do you think a circle should be on this risk scale?”
  • Fill in the gaps – Draw: a set of circles representing the set of whatever you’re talking about (e.g. projects) // Ask: “Are there any projects missing? Could you draw any more in?”
  • Make connections – Draw: a set of circles representing the set of whatever you’re talking about // Ask: “How are these connected? Could you draw lines in where you think the connections are?”

5: Capture those whiteboard drawings clean and fast

It stands to reason, the sooner you can get a good clean picture of the whiteboard into your team members’ (or stakeholders’) inboxes, the better. The more you use images that they’ve seen before to reinforce what was talked about or decided, the greater your influence will be.

Thankfully, there are some great (and free) smartphone apps out there that will take a great photo, clean it up and send it to your inbox in a jiffy. My current favourites:

You can read a whole lot more about capturing your whiteboard drawings in this Presto Sketching blog post: Capture photos of your sketches like a pro.

Well, there you have it! 5 more tips that I hope will really improve your whiteboarding skills, as well as the meetings and workshops that you and your team have. Let me know in if and how you put these tips into practice, and if they’ve improved your meetings.

5 tips for better whiteboarding awesomeness

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No-one likes boring aimless meetings, or long wordy slide decks, and a big way to make meetings much more engaging is to use a whiteboard. Writing and drawing on a whiteboard is a great way to visually reflect what’s being said in the meeting. In a way, the whiteboard becomes your second voice in the room.

No matter what you think your ability at the whiteboard is, here are 5 ways you can take your own whiteboarding skills from good to great.

1: SLOW DOWN

Drawing on a whiteboard is a lot like public speaking: if we rush it, we won’t sound very confident in our ideas, what we draw will look like an unruly mess, and others won’t be as confident in our ideas either. How often have you seen this sort of thing on the whiteboard, scratched your head and wondered what it was:

Just slow down. Slow. Down. Breathe. Spend just a few extra seconds as you draw, and be more deliberate with each line. It will inject so much more confidence in what you draw and what you say. And when you project more confidence, others will have more confidence in your ideas. And they’ll remember them longer, too. Try to aim for something that’s just a bit neater, like this:

2: Get decent whiteboard markers

There are a lot of really ordinary whiteboard markers out there, and they do you and your ideas no justice at all. Let the ink speak to the quality of your ideas, and get a set of decent markers that don’t run out by the end of the meeting. Chances are, there’s a newsagent or office supplies store near you that has a range of markers to choose from, for less than the price of a cup of coffee. My favourite tends to be a chisel-tip marker (rather than a bullet tip), so I get a chunkier line:

3: Practice your writing

This is related to tip #1: be a little more deliberate and neat with your writing. What you write is like your voice recorded on that whiteboard long after you’re not in the room, so it’s worth putting a bit of effort into your lettering.\

We’re not aiming for precise calligraphy with graceful ligatures and flourishes, of course! But just a bit of neatness goes a long way to projecting more of your character, and more of that confidence. Try practicing on the whiteboard before the meeting, in both lowercase and capitals:

4: Master outline text

Outline text is eye-catching and, used sparingly as a title or two on your whiteboard, will command attention and inject a little more life and energy into the meeting, for very little effort. It’s best to practice beforehand, if you’re not confident. The best way I know to get good at outline text is to draw each letter in capitals first (with plenty of breathing room between the letters), draw an outline around it, and then rub out the first line:

5: Master a small set of icons

Try to practice a small set of simple icon-like pictures that you’re likely to use over and over, from meeting to meeting. You might like to start with some like the ones below, that represent things like goal, problem, process, conversation, security, company, options, and so on.

These tips will really take what you draw on the whiteboard to the next level, and inject more confidence and life into what you have to say, so why not try them in your very next meeting?

Let me know if and how you’ve put these tips into practice, or maybe a share a killer tip of your own. Here’s to better whiteboarding, and better meetings!