Presto Sketching

A book to help you think and communicate better with drawing

Sketchnoting and graphic recording

Draw more creatively with FLARE

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If you want to find ways to draw topics more creatively, or you feel like you’re in a bit of a rut drawing things the same way all the time, then the FLARE prompts are for you.

How do you draw a person? Or a building? Or a tree? There are lots of ways to draw real-world objects, and we can use curiosity, observation and practice to draw these in satisfying ways.

A group of simple drawings depicting common objects like a lightbulb and cloud

Some simple images of simple real-world objects

But how do you draw more complex and abstract concepts, like ‘innovation’, ‘strategy’, or ‘diversity’? It’s much harder, isn’t it?

A couple of years ago, Axelle Vanquaillie (a masterful visual practitioner, facilitator and leadership coach, and owner of the company Visual Harvesting) and I were discussing how to help people in our training workshops with this common challenge: how do you illustrate abstract concepts in more creative ways? We realised that many of us anchor on to one idea, and find it hard to go beyond that. My design background has always taught me that it’s always better to use divergent thinking, and that the way to have one great idea is to have 100 so-so ideas first. 

With that in mind, we pooled our knowledge, sketched a lot, and swapped stories of various training sessions we had run and examples we’d come up against. And that’s how FLARE was born.

We’ve since used FLARE with a variety of different groups in training sessions, with a variety of levels of confidence in drawing, and it has always helped everyone be more creative and get more satisfying results from their drawing. And now it’s your turn to learn!

A photo of a participant in one of our training sessions reflecting on the experience of using FLARE to illustrate a tricky concept

A participant in one of our training sessions reflecting on the experience of using FLARE to illustrate a tricky concept

What is FLARE?

FLARE is a set of prompts you can use to help you move beyond the way you’re used to thinking about a topic you want to draw, and think about it in new ways. What you get is a much greater range of ideas that you can then refine and combine into one final image.

A drawing of the process of coming up with ideas without FLARE and with FLARE

The FLARE process gets you more initial ideas from which to create your final visual

FLARE stands for:

  • Feel – What does it feel like? What emotions does this trigger?
  • Look – What does it look like? What are the real-world objects at play?
  • Another word – What’s another word (or words) to describe this?
  • Result – What is the result of this? What is the end-game of this topic or scenario? Is there a benefit realised? Or a negative impact that might happen?
  • Experience – What is the experience of this? Is it something where there are several steps involved? Or several devices, places, people or roles involved?
A drawing of the word FLARE with text expanding on what each letter stands for

How to use FLARE

It’s really important to understand that when you use FLARE, you don’t try to come up with The Perfect Image first. What we’re doing here is generating lots of different ideas first, to help us explore the topic in better ways, and then we go back and refine and combine our best ideas.

1. Write your topic in the middle of a big page

Start with a topic – especially a complex or abstract topic – you have in mind to draw. It’s best if it doesn’t include any clichés or existing visual metaphors. If it does, try to restate it in a clearer way. Then, write it down in the middle of a big blank page.

Now, write the letters of FLARE around it. We’re going to make a mindmap. You can also do this as a grid if you like; the main thing is to give yourself plenty of space to write first, and then draw your ideas.

In this example, I’m going to go with “Teams struggle to understand each other”…

A drawing of a prompt in the middle, surrounded by the letters FLARE around the outside

2. Ask yourself the first FLARE prompt and draw your ideas

The first FLARE prompt is F: “What does it feel like?” Too often, concepts are – well – too conceptual, and it’s easy to forget that whatever the concept is, it probably affects people in ways that might actually be relevant to capture. Jot down some words that describe how your topic feels.

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

3. Jot down ideas for the other four prompts

Repeat step 2, and write down any ideas you come up with for the other four prompts. Allow each prompt to help you think about the topic in new ways, from new perspectives. You should have a set of descriptions around your original topic.

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

Don’t worry if you can’t think of several things for each of the five prompts. Some prompts won’t suit the topic as well as others. If you get stuck, just move on.

4. Draw lots of different ideas based on what you wrote

Now we get drawing! Go back over everything you wrote, and do some quick sketches to capture what you wrote. Remember, this isn’t about trying to draw the One Perfect Image now, or even to draw the entire topic or concept in one go; this is still just brainstorming.

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

As I sketched various ideas based on what I’d written for this example, I made sure not to self-edit as I went. The more rough sketches, the better.

5. Refine and combine

Now comes my favourite part! This is where you channel your inner editor, look over all your various sketches from across the prompts, and choose the ones you think are most relevant, most compelling, and/or most insightful. There might be one that just nails it on its own, but typically there are a few. 

A drawing with a prompt in the middle surrounded by the letters FLARE

As I went back over what I’d written and sketched in this example, the bridge idea really resonated with me, as well as showing several different languages. The going-around-in-circles also appealed to me.

Now, draw something that unites those several good ideas into one single cohesive picture.

Two different drawings illustrating the prompt

As you can see here, I landed on two different ideas. The first idea to illustrate the topic of “Teams struggle to understand each other” uses speech balloons and thought balloons… No surprises there, but positioning them on a roundabout double arrow added some more meaning. As I thought about my second idea with the bridges, it occurred to me that it could look interesting if either ‘side’ basically built their own different bridge, and even though both bridges are complete, they never meet in the middle. This speaks to the inward-looking nature that some teams have when they struggle to communicate with one another.

Which one do you prefer? What do you think you would draw for this topic?

Some tips to help

Here are a few other things to consider about the FLARE method

  • Trust the process! Too often we’re hard-wired to try to draw just one image that works the first time. Embrace the fact that it’s better to create and explore many options first, and then you’ll have more to choose from. And who knows, you might have some a-Ha moments about the concept itself you’re trying to draw along the way, as well as how to draw it.
  • Not all prompts have to be present in the final image. Try not to force an image that includes something that speaks to every prompt. It’s totally fine if your final image ends up just being about how your topic feels. It’s also fine if you land on an image that combines feel with look and result.
  • Feel free to skip step 3 if you like, and jump straight to drawing your answers to each prompt. I put this step in to help you if you’re more comfortable with writing as well as drawing.
  • Not all prompts will make sense all the time and that’s okay. They’re just prompts; if you’re stuck on a prompt because it doesn’t seem to work for your topic or context, just move on.

Taking FLARE further

I encourage you to give FLARE a go the next time you need to illustrate a tricky topic, or if you want to try illustrating a familiar topic in a more creative way. The FLARE prompts help you think deeper about the topic, and maybe help you to clarify your point of view, too.

With that in mind, there are other ways you can use the FLARE prompts.

  • Group drawing – FLARE is fun in pairs! Two heads are better than one, as they say, and if you try these prompts with someone else, you’ll both benefit from each other’s different experiences and points of view.
  • Facilitation questions – If you run any meetings at work, you probably know that great facilitation is often about asking great questions, to help your group have a better conversation. The FLARE prompts might give you ideas about how to enrich your next conversation, by helping everyone think about their topic in different ways.
  • Problem solving – As Charles Kettering is said to have said, “A problem well stated is half solved”. So often, a great solution lies in the way a problem is articulated in the first place. Using the FLARE prompts can help you and your team approach any problem or challenge from a different point of view, to perhaps reveal a hidden solution.

Feel free to drop me a line and let me know if this helps your drawing. 🙂

How adding a graphic recorder to your event makes it a game changer

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Ever walked out of an event thinking, “Well, that was great… but what actually happened?” You’re not alone. Words fly thick and fast, but they don’t always stick. That’s where a graphic recorder (a.k.a. live scribe or visual note-taker) comes in. Here are 6 benefits for having one around.

I’ve been graphic recording at public events, conferences, and meetings for about 15 years, and even with the advent of gen-AI, these 6 benefits still hold true. Actually, even while technology gives so much wow-factor, we still crave connection, and in many ways, these 6 benefits are more important for events than ever.

🧲 1. It makes people look up from their phones

When someone’s sketching the conversation live in big, bold strokes, it pulls attention in a way bullet-point slides just can’t. A visual note-taker brings the vibe of “something really interesting’s happening here”… and suddenly, people are leaning in instead of tuning out.

There’s nothing like seeing a big drawing come to life before your eyes (pictured: Axelle Vanquaillie)

Oh, and sometimes my clients are worried that graphic recording distracts from the speaker. What actually happens is quite the opposite! It’s like watching a documentary; seeing the action unfold while hearing the narration over the top is the perfect combo.

🧠 2. It helps brains actually remember things

Our brains are wired for stories and visuals, not just talking heads and dense jargon. A graphic recorder connects the dots with succinct phrases in attractive lettering, colour, layout, and metaphor, turning a wall of words into something you can see, remember, and talk about later.

And here’s something nobody talks about: a graphic recorder can make a so-so talk MUCH more appealing, since it helps to amplify the content.

🖼️ 3. It’s like getting a Polaroid photo for every event talk

By the end of your event, you’ve got a collection of boards that are like a set of giant hand-drawn Polaroid photos, or a ‘highlight reel’ of key insights. Each board is part artwork, part documentation, and 100% useful. You can take a photo and boom: your post-event wrap-up just got sorted.

The boards (or charts) also act as postcards of each talk, for your attendees to take with them and share (see #5). Of course each ‘postcard’ doesn’t capture all the detail of what’s in the talk. But just like a postcard, each particular piece in the postcard conjures up memories of that detail, to keep those fond memories around for longer.

Graphic recording boards making great souvenirs from a conference

🌐 4. It makes your event more inclusive

Not everyone processes information the same way. Visual note-taking supports people who think better in pictures, who don’t speak the main language fluently, or who need more than just facts and figures to feel knowledged-up on the topic of the talk, or quick actions to try out.

A lot of what a graphic recorder does is to summarise a speakers’ content (or a conversation) by listening, synthesising and translating that summary into a visual summary. So in a way, the graphic recorder is doing the heavy cognitive lifting for the audience, so that they don’t have to.

It’s a win for accessibility and inclusivity.

📣 5. Hello, shareability

Graphic recordings are super snackable content. One photo of a rich, colourful visual summary can do more on social than five paragraphs of text ever will. It’s a dream for your comms team. And of course your audience will love sharing it, too.

Graphic recording works super well at sponsor conference booths too!

🤝 6. It sparks conversations (and a few a-ha! moments)

When people see their own words or ideas pop up on the board, it builds validation, trust and momentum. It invites discussion, reflection, insight, even laughter. A live scribe doesn’t just record the moment; they shape it.

🧭 7. it’s great for strategy and decision-making

Wait! There are actually more than just 6 benefits. This benefit is actually my favourite. Workshops, planning sessions, roundtables, offsites… graphic recorders shine in these, and I see this play out in my own work all the time. They map out ideas in real time, reveal patterns hiding in the noise, and help groups focus better, and get aligned faster.

Think of them as visual GPS for complex conversations.

Even if it’s rough, graphic captures on a whiteboard help groups to focus and have a more productive conversation

🎉 8. It adds that “Wow, they thought of everything” feel

OK, yes, there’s yet another benefit. This one’s definitely for the event organisers. Having the process and product of a graphic recorder around is a little unexpected, a little delightful, a little premium, and always interesting. When people see a live scribe in action, it tells them your event is top-drawer, thoughtful, professional, and designed for deeper engagement, not just an information dump.

Bottom line? A graphic recorder doesn’t just make your event aesthetically nicer and more engaging. They make it stick.

If you want help with getting a visual note-taker at your event, I got you (links to my business website, Bright Pilots). If you want to learn more about how to draw for graphic recording, look no further than my Presto Sketching book.

5 principles of great layout for your visuals

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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!

…

  • Follow Presto Sketching on Instagram for more
  • Sign up to the Presto Sketching newsletter by using the box at the top right of this page, and get more tips and techniques like this
  • Buy the Presto Sketching book, and get an absolute boat-load of this sort of stuff in one go, and really amp up your visual thinking and visual communication game.

A guide to sketchnote layouts

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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.

Further reading and watching

If you’d like more inspiration and further thoughts on this area of sketchnoting, try the following places as suggestions:

…

  • Follow Presto Sketching on Instagram for more
  • Sign up to the Presto Sketching newsletter by using the box at the top right of this page, and get more tips and techniques like this
  • Buy the Presto Sketching book, and get an absolute boat-load of this sort of stuff in one go, and really amp up your visual thinking and visual communication game.

Discover how your customers tick with the Decision Factors sketch

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It can be really hard getting a handle on what factors affect your customers’ decisions, or how to get buy-in from your stakeholders. The Decision Factors sketch can make it easier.

Why do we buy the products and services we buy? Why do we choose one brand over another? Why do some factors influence us more than others? Or why is it so hard to get teams to use a new system, as part of change management?

If you’re a researcher, designer, marketing professional, product manager, or change manager, you probably spend a lot of your time thinking about these sorts of questions. There’s an incredibly complicated soup of factors and biases going on in the way we make decisions, large and small, as well as various forces that play on those factors and biases. There’s also a huge body of ongoing research into the cognitive psychology and behavioural economics involved in decision-making.

I want to show you a simple framework that has helped me apply the essence of this research: the Decision Factors sketch. It helps you visualise the various factors going on as we make decisions for behaviour change, whether that change is to make a purchase, to join a meeting, to approve a design… anything at all.

What’s in the Decision Factors sketch?

As you can see in the sketch below, there are four main elements going on:

  • SUBJECT – Your customer, persona, stakeholder, staff-member… the person who you want to make a decision for change
  • OFFERING – The thing (idea, solution, product, proposal) that you want the subject to buy, or buy into
  • ATTRACTORS – The factors that attract this person to your offering
  • INHIBITORS – The factors that inhibit, distract, or otherwise prevent this person from making the decision to buy/buy into your offering

By mapping out the factors in this way, you can really put yourself into the mind and shoes of that person, spot gaps in your understanding, and enrich your own thinking about the relationship between your offering and your customers/stakeholders. Let’s take a closer look…

Attractors

By using this sketch to list out the factors that encourage someone to make a decision in favour of your offering, you pull the focus of the offering from its features (usually what we think about the most) to what those features are for. These tend to do with things like:

  • GOAL – What would this person achieve with your offering? This is the main factor that everyone thinks about, and is at the foundation of user-centred design and jobs-to-be-done theory. A decision cannot take place without the recognition of a need of some sort, to help solve their specific problem.
  • OBJECTIVE BENEFITS – What is better about your offering than the competition, or what the person is doing already? You should be able to list some differences your offering affords them, e.g. to do some task easier/ faster/ cheaper, to do better, gain more, save more.
  • SUBJECTIVE BENEFITS – What emotional need lies on the other side of the goal (above)? This is the factor we like to think drives everyone else except us… but we know that’s not really true. This is the factor at play in marketing messages and advertising. These are the ’emotional jobs’ in JTBD theory. Things like: make me look good in front of others, make me more popular, make me feel smarter/ sexier/ cooler/ more powerful. Make me more…complete.
  • TRUST – How much would the person rely on your offering? Past experience of something is our best predictor of the future performance of something similar. The trust earned from a previous positive experience is a strong attractor in itself.

Inhibitors

Inhibitors are the forces that turn us off, hold us back, or get in the way of deciding to buy or change, things like:

  • HABIT – People’s habits — their regular entrenched way of thinking and/or doing things — can be a powerful thing to have to overcome.
  • OBJECTIVE DRAWBACKS – There may well be specific disadvantages that are worth highlighting in the array of factors affecting the person, such as increased cost of time and resources. But sometimes behind these objective drawbacks, lie factors that actually affect that person more…
  • SUBJECTIVE DRAWBACKS – These factors don’t apply to all buying or behaviour change decisions of course, but they can still be powerful deterrents. What might the person be afraid of, if they decide to do/buy/use your offering? Is there a fear of change? Fear of loss of control? Or any limiting beliefs in the way, e.g. “I don’t know if I actually deserve this”, “I’m not worthy of it”, “It’s out of my reach”…?

Visualise the factors at play with different-sized arrows

I hope you can see that the Decision Factors sketch is more than just listing pros and cons for the subject. This is a visual, so we can map how big/small each of the factors are, with different-sized arrows. This helps you (and others you show it to) understand how these various factors might work together, or counteract each other, more quickly, accurately, and comprehensively.

What do I use the Decision Factors sketch for?

You can use this to:

  • Help explore how to make your product/service more desirable to your customers
  • Help analyse research results about customers’ needs and buying habits
  • Help dig into why people are/aren’t adopting a new product/service/way of doing things in your organisation
  • Help yourself prepare for a pitch to stakeholders, to attune your communications to what they care about the most
  • Have a more productive discussion in any 1:1s with staff or stakeholders

How do I do the Decision Factors sketch?

1. Draw up the framework

Start by drawing the basic framework of the Decision Factors sketch on a whiteboard, flipchart, or even just a piece of office paper. You can even put these elements together in an online collaboration space like Miro or Mural.

2. Use the areas as prompts for discussion

Now, use each area to help structure your thinking and prompt group discussions, all with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of how to maximise the likelihood of a particular subject adopting your offering. You can ask yourself or your group questions like:

  • What’s in it for this person to buy/use our offering / solution?
  • What is holding them back from buying it/using it?
  • What might distract them from making this decision?

Note! You don’t have to solve anything right now. Resist the temptation to justify your offering, or falsely ‘jack up’ the power of some attractors over others, or to rationalise any of the inhibitors away.

3. Capture and visualise the factors

Capture what you’re thinking, or what others are saying, on the sketch as you go. Messy is totally OK; this is definitely a case where the process of using this sketch is often better than the final product. remember to play with the size of the arrows, to indicate what factors are greater than others, or what factors you know you need to focus on. This can also expose some blind spots that you or your group might not have thought about.

4. Discuss next actions

Once you or your group have laid out and assessed the array of various attractors and inhibitors, now you can switch to ‘solution mode’, and think about what you need to do, to increase the chances of this person adopting your offering.

  • Is there something about your offering that needs to be introduced? Or dialled up? Or taken out?
  • Is there a benefit of your offering that just isn’t clear enough?
  • How might you change any marketing or communications to help people decide?
  • Are there any specific messages you need to put out there, to help people deal with the inhibitors?
  • Is there something you can do to help with a specific inhibitor, that would tip the balance in your offering’s direction?

Try it yourself

As I hope you can see, the Decision Factors sketch can be a powerful analysis and re-framing device. It can be fast and light – like using it right before you go into a pitching presentation – or it can be thorough and in-depth, like in a product strategy workshop.

However you use it, I hope it brings you might insight and success!

3 ways to add extra impact to figure sketches

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Do you ever wonder why some figure drawings have a way of jumping out at you and grabbing your attention? By trying out these ideas in your sketching, yours can do that too.

Figures help your audience put themselves in the picture

Whether you draw for fun or for a living (or both!), and you want to liven up your work by making it more visually interesting (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. Why? To seek meaning and affinity. My own pet theory is that we are constantly looking to see something of ourselves, or to learn more about ourselves, whenever we look at art in general, and visuals in particular.

Or as George Bernard Shaw said:

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Figures can do the ‘heavy lifting’ for business audiences

You can also use this to great effect for visuals in business communication. Take a leaf out of the advertising playbook:

  • Do you want to attract staff to be part of some change at work? Show figures thinking about and/or reaching the same goals that they have.
  • 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.

In this way, visuals of figures are doing some of the cognitive ‘heavy lifting’; in other words, making it easier for the audience to relate to what’s being communicated, and understand what their response is.

Good news: you can draw figures and faces yourself, that can add a lot more life and impact to your communications at work, 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 communication to each other we pick up on 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!

The pose of the figure you draw instantly tells a story about what they’re doing, and maybe how they feel about 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.

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

Just like how people rarely stand bolt upright not doing anything, people tend to exist in some kind of environment, rather than just in a void. Think about where your figure is, not only what they’re doing. Add a hint of background, something simple to indicate where they are, and perhaps even what time of the day it is. Add a hint of an accessory or something to add a bit more interest, too. When you use your imagination in your sketching in this way, you’ll ignite your viewers’ imaginations too, which will make your message more memorable.

3. Dial up the drama

Use a trick that cartoonists do, 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 more drama and urgency.

Try it yourself

So, there you go. I hope these examples inspire you to try adding figures to whatever your draw, and to add more character, nuance, movement and visual story to your figures.

For more creative sketching, try SNAILS

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Looking to change up how you draw the same thing all the time? Or to boost the variety and style of what you draw? I got you: try this easy and effective SNAILS method.

If I got a dollar for every light bulb that I drew in my work, I’d be… well, I wouldn’t be rich, but let’s just say that the beers would be on me next time!

The point is: if you do any kind of sketching regularly, you might find yourself drawing the same old things in the same old ways, and you might be after some fresh ways to increase the visual variety of what you’re sketching. Whether it’s sketching for yourself (e.g. sketchnoting, urban sketching) or sketching for others (e.g. scribing, storyboarding, graphic recording, graphic facilitation), it can be easy to feel in a bit of a rut when it comes to what you draw and how you draw.

I got to this point fairly often a while back, so I started working on various ways I could spice up what I was drawing, to keep it more interesting and more meaningful. I’ve refined these various ways into an easy-to-remember method: SNAILS! I had the joy and honour of sharing this SNAILS technique as part of a workshop on using visual metaphor to explore and solve problems at the EuViz conference in Denmark, 2018.

SNAILS – An easy-to-remember set of sketching prompts

No, I’m not saying you draw snails on everything (although, hey, that might be your style). SNAILS stands for 6 creative prompts, or aspects you can think about changing whenever you draw something, to add more creativity and meaning.

SNAILS stands for:

  • Shape
  • Number
  • Angle
  • Identity
  • Line
  • Size

The SNAILS approach is a great way to take something you’ve already drawn and try a little bit of ‘visual first aid’ to help it visually ‘work’ a bit better. It’s also a good way to think more creatively about the topic, object, or concept you’re sketching. Let’s take a look at each of the 6 ways…

Shape

Changing the shape of an object can change its meaning, especially if it’s a visual metaphor for something. In the light bulb examples below, the shape of the glass changes to mimic other objects (e.g. a deflated balloon), to show what type of idea it represents.

Number

Sometimes adding more of the same object can add some nuance to what you’re showing, like one fish amongst a whole school of fish that looks different, or one bright idea amongst lots of ‘dim’ ones. A dozen fresh free-range ideas, anyone? 😉

Angle

Changing the angle – or your point of view – can enrich the meaning of the thing you’re drawing. It can give it more character (e.g. showing it viewed from slightly below looking up), or indicate that something is not quite right (showing an object upside down or backward), or movement (slanted to look like it’s moving fast).

Identity

If you’ve been following Presto Sketching for a while, you’ll probably know by now that I like putting faces on anything and everything. By putting a face on an inanimate object, you give that object an identity and an opinion. What type of face you give it obviously shows what personality or point of view it has, no matter how subtle or obvious the face is.

Line

This prompt is straight from art school. The nature of the line we draw says so much about what it is we’re drawing. Thin trembly lines indicate fragility or brittleness. Thick flowy lines indicate confidence. But you can take this further in so many different creative ways. Here are a few examples:

Size

Lastly, by playing with the size of what we draw, we can show how important it is in relation to what’s around it. For this to work, you usually need something else in the picture to give the particular object scale, for comparison.

Share your sketches!

I hope this SNAILS method has given you some ideas about adding some more variety to what you draw. Try it today, whether it’s on a whiteboard in a meeting, or in your sketchbook, or as part of live scribing. And as always, I’m keen to see how you use these methods in your own sketching, so feel free to share it on the socials and tag it with #prestosketching, or tag @prestosketching on or Instagram.

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! 👋

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!