You can find the image on Imgur and Flickr too.

Feel free to share, reuse, or modify this under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Enjoy!

Possibly counterintuitive point: It’s good to learn at least the basics of Vim. Despite the perception of a “Emacs vs. Vi” holy war (one of the classic battles in computer science), it makes sense to know both editors especially if you work with people who use Vi a lot. Know enough Vi to find your way around, and then learn how to customize Emacs to fit you to a tee. That way, you’ll avoid the pressure of not being able to work well with your team or your infrastructure, and you’ll have the space to explore Emacs. =) Emacs is totally awesome.

Need help with Emacs? Feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me. I’m often in the #emacs channel on irc.freenode.net , and I also occasionally schedule time to help people one-on-one. Also, the Emacs community (mailing lists, newsgroups, IRC channel) can be wonderful, so definitely reach out to them too. =)

Meta discussion: How can I make this even better? What else would you like me to draw a guide for? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Also, thanks to dash, nicferrier, fledermaus, ijp, hypnocat, Fuco, macrobat, taylanub, axrfnu, Sebboh, thorkill, jave_, jrm, and the rest of #emacs for suggestions and feedback!

Update 2013-05-18: Check out the conversations on Hacker News and Reddit!

Read the original or check out the comments on: How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners (Sacha Chua's blog)

I need to sort out what I’m hesitant about just because it’s unknown or something I’m shy about, and what I’m hesitant about because I want something different.

The things I love the most about this blog are:

• Sharing all these small, varied things I’m learning about, and not worrying about sticking to one topic, making sense, or writing too often
• Having these amazing conversations spanning miles and years (Raymond Zeitler, Clair Ching, Chris League, and a few other people have been commenting for more than five years – I’m so lucky!)
• Bumping into all sorts of amazing people through chance conversations and connections
• Following the thread of our shared curiosity into new questions
• Answering people’s questions with blog posts from when I was trying to figure things out too
• Knowing that no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s something I can learn from and possibly share

There’s a lot of good advice out there for people who want to “monetize their audience” or build a business around blogging, but… maybe I have the space to explore something different. What would this blog look and feel like in another ten years? More of this, I hope, and better. Better at learning, better at sharing, better at organizing, better at connecting.

Sometimes people pay more attention to what they pay for. Hmm, maybe optional payment, or saving payment for individual help? I don’t have a mental hangup about being paid for consulting, because that’s stuff that clearly creates a lot of value for my clients and doesn’t really give me things I can widely share as a way of helping others. I don’t have a hangup about earning a little bit from affiliate sales (since it’s entirely optional, and only the stuff that I like, and I point out non-affiliate links or alternative ways to get things like borrowing books from the library). I’m sort of okay with the idea of making collections of blog posts and sketches and selling them for a nominal fee as an experiment, although I’m tempted to just make them all freely available and then perhaps add a pay-what-you-can system or a donation button.

Anyway, we’re doing well, so I have some space to focus on learning and sharing. =) I want to make the most of that opportunity. Can you help me figure out what would make this better while keeping it real?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Thinking about what I want to do and where I want to go with this blog (Sacha Chua's blog)

My parents were having problems with their company’s recent web hosting migration. No e-mail was getting forwarded to the e-mail accounts that they had set up previously, and the two blogs that were separate from the main site didn’t get transferred either. My mom asked me to help restore the blogs. They needed someone to sort out the email and other system administration issues, so I suggested that she find a local system administrator who can also take care of upgrading WordPress and other sites as needed.

I don’t particularly enjoy system administration. I feel terrible when I make a mistake on my own server, and I don’t want to be on the hook for anyone else’s. I’ve done some system administration work as part of web development, since I was usually the person with the most Linux experience in my teams. Setting up is easy, but maintenance could be fiddly, and keeping up with security updates can be no fun. (I’m looking at you, Rails.) Add to that the time zone differences and the inability to just lean over and fix things, and, well…

So I was feeling conflicted and unfilial about wanting to help my mom but not wanting to commit to being the company sysadmin. The problem needed to be fixed, though, and they probably wouldn’t find a good system administrator in time.

As an experiment, I tried imagining an alternate universe in which I would be comfortable making those changes and being The IT Guy (or Gal, in this case). If I lived near my parents, I would help them, of course. I do that for friends and family here. If I had the routines for managing many sites, then it would be easy to maintain another site and another company. I can imagine that for Alternate Universe Sacha, this kind of work might even be easy and enjoyable.

Having imagined this Alternate Universe Sacha, I tried “stepping sideways” into that role. Sure, I was half a world away, but I could mentally move the house to my hometown. Time zone differences and distance can make it difficult to communicate because it’s hard to tell how busy someone is and when you get the information you need, but it actually worked out well because I worked on it in the evening while people were at work back home. If I stopped worrying about the possibilities of messing things up worse and instead took the same methodical approach that I would use if I had a lot of experience in this (and I guess I do, compared to many people), then it would actually be pretty straightforward. Besides, I reassured myself, everything will turn out all right. Even if I messed things up, family’s still family. For gaining experience, it’s hard to find a more forgiving client.

It turned out to be straightforward, although it did involve a lot of clicking around. E-mail works again, and the blogs are both back up. Not only that, I now have an alternate universe Sacha whom I can think of myself as if I need to do more system administration work. I’m using that idea to make it easier for me set up proper maintenance for my personal sites as well. If I was an experienced and constantly improving system administrator who enjoyed doing this, how would I do this? It’s no substitute for actual experience–I’ll still miss things people learned the hard way–but it helps me reach that point of learning what I need to learn the hard way.

I wonder what alternate universe selves I might play with in the future. Do you use any?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Stepping sideways into Alternate Universe Sacha (Sacha Chua's blog)

After reading this book, I plan to experiment with the obscure feature method and the generic parts method. They might be great ways to sharpen my observational skills and see opportunities for everyday creativity.

You can click on the image below for a larger version.

Feel free to share this visual book review! (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

Amazon affiliate link: I earn a tiny fraction if you buy something from Amazon’s site after clicking on the link, even if it has nothing to do with the book. =)

If you have a library near you, you can check it out there too. (I totally love the Toronto Public Library.)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation (Debra Kaye with Karen Kelly) (Sacha Chua's blog)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnote: Solving Wicked Problems with Dialogue Mapping (Chris Chapman, Toronto Agile Support Group) (Sacha Chua's blog)

Hope you find this visual summary useful! Click on the image to view a larger version, and feel free to share it with others. © 2013 Sacha Chua (Creative Commons Attribution Licence) – http://sachachua.com

Disclosure: I received a copy for review. If you have or know of an interesting, well-written book you’d like me to review, I accept requests.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: The Culture Blueprint (Robert Richman) (Sacha Chua's blog)

Here they are individually, too! Click on an image to view the full-sized version, and feel free to share them under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Enjoy!

[Show as slideshow]

XWidgets - Joakim Verona

Emacswiki - Nic Ferrier

Arxana - Joe Corneli

Emacs Live - Sam Aaron

El-get - Dimitri Fontaine

From Marmalade to Emacs - Michael Olson

Emacs Devel - John Wiegley

Package Management - Nic Ferrier, Steve Purcell, Dimitri Fontaine

Slime - Luke Gorrie

Project Grok - Steve Yegge

Lightning Talks

Read the original or check out the comments on: Emacs Conference 2013 Sketchnotes (also, PDF!) (Sacha Chua's blog)

What do I like about this sketchnote?

I captured enough to help me remember, and I had time for little doodles too. The light blue images and dark blue text look calmer than the red-black combination I used in some of my other sketchnotes. The brush size worked out fine in terms of the proportion.

I didn’t switch pen sizes or vary the size much because I wasn’t sure what was going to be important. Instead, I used simple borders to emphasize key points.

I’ve been experimenting with using a light shade to add more depth to my images. It usually takes me five minutes to go through an image. I didn’t do it here because the size and detail of the images felt right already.

Drawing with plenty of whitespace around each element allowed me to easily reposition things when I needed to rebalance the columns and reorganize the information. I’m sometimes tempted to go for more creative, overlapping layouts, but I do like the flexibility of being able to change my mind. I usually publish things shortly after drawing, so I didn’t spend a lot of time tweaking this image.

What would I like to improve?

I’ve been experimenting with different colour schemes. The first colour I drew the images in was too light, so I used GIMP to change the curve to something darker. Depending on what I want people to focus on, I’ve been trying out light text / dark images vs dark text / light images. It would be great to find a quick way of experimenting with the same image. Experimenting would be easier if I drew text and images on separate layers, but the presentation was information-dense, so I didn’t feel comfortable switching back and forth. I’ve tweaked my standard colour palette to include a darker blue like the one I used for the images here. That way, I can keep the light blue for shading, and I don’t have to adjust the colours after drawing. Next: Tweak my colour palette, and find a way to experiment more easily.

The presentation was only 30 minutes long. It turns out that the usual size I draw things at results in a one-page-per-hour sort of density, so I used only half the page. (Hooray for consistency!) It might be good to develop a dot grid that’s calibrated for half-hour talks so that I’m encouraged to draw at a larger size while preserving my usual landscape aspect ratio. Still, these columns worked out fine. Next: Try a different-sized dot grid for short talks, or get used to drawing larger.

It was pretty fast-paced, too. I don’t feel like I’ve fully captured the overall logic of the presentation. It would be nice to make this understandable for someone who hasn’t seen the presentation yet, which I think I can do with a little post-work (adding headings, explaining things in sentences instead of keywords). It feels a little disjointed at the moment, and I think I missed potentially interesting points like the one about the monoculture. The individual components are enough to remind me of what I want to remember about the talk, though. Next: Add more time for post-processing so that I can draw anything I missed the first time around.

—

Check out the other submissions! First set, second set: Kevin Mears (second set) has a good printout image. I like Andy Fisher’s (second set) puppeteer image, the cute robot, and the whitespace balance of the page.

Read the original or check out the comments on: The Sketchnote Challenge: Those Algorithms That Govern Our Lives (Kevin Slavin) (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image for a larger version.

Feel free to share this under the Creative Commons Attribution License! Links are appreciated. =)

Amazon affiliate link: I earn a tiny fraction if you buy something from Amazon’s site after clicking on the link, even if it has nothing to do with the book. =)

If you have a library near you, you can check it out there too. (I totally love the Toronto Public Library!)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: To Sell is Human (Daniel Pink) (Sacha Chua's blog)

There are many avenues to share or discover sketchnotes, such as The Sketchnote Handbook Flickr Pool and the wonderful graphic recordings at Ogilvy Notes. Sketchnote Army is a blog that features lots of sketchnotes, and Twitter searches turn up even more. But there isn’t really something that’ll help you bump into other sketchnotes of the same talk, or even sketchnotes of the same conference.

Are we at the point yet where multiple people might be sketchnoting something? For popular TED talks, yes, and many conferences might have sketchnoters in the crowd. I think it would be interesting to make it easier for people to find each other and compare notes.

So I registered sketchnoteindex.com and created a quick spreadsheet to get a feel for the data that would be good to capture and how we might want to organize it. (Prototype with the lowest-effort thing first!) In addition to indexing topics, I’d like to eventually build an image and visual metaphor index too, so we can see how different people have represented time. Text search would rock someday. In the meantime, I put together a quick text prototype as an excuse to learn more about the Ember.js framework, although I’m thiiiis close to chucking it all and using Emacs or a Ruby script to generate static HTML.

Some things to consider:

• We want to avoid spam and build good data for navigation. I can start off manually indexing sketchnotes, and then open it up for submission (possibly with an assistant).
• Many sketchnotes don’t indicate their licensing, so technically, they’d be all rights reserved. We can link to things, and include thumbnails if we have permission.
• I can coordinate with Sketchnote Army (Mike / Binaebi) for submissions, and I can set up notifications for other sources.
• Revenue model: Advertising? Flesh this out into a system where conferences can pay a small fee to have branding on their page? Do this as a volunteer because I want to learn more about sketchnotes along the way? Hmm…

Right now, Ember.js pulls the data off the CSV I exported from my Google Docs spreadsheet. That way, I don’t have to create an admin interface or anything else. I’m not actually using Ember.js’ features (aside from a little templating and a few models), so I may swap it for something else.

So this was about eight hours including data entry (300+ sketchnotes; I did it myself instead of delegating because I wanted to sketch the idea out quickly), going through the Ember.js tutorials, and fighting with Javascript.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Imagining an index of sketchnotes (Sacha Chua's blog)

Here’s a sketchnote that summarizes the key points from the book. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Cool Time is a good book for people who work in an office and use calendar systems a lot (or would like to make better use of their calendars). Even if you work on your own, you might find it useful to adopt the “I-beam review” involving 15 minutes of planning before you start your day and 15 minutes after for processing. If your life is even more interrupt-driven, David Allen’s bestselling Getting Things Done (2012) book is an excellent read focusing more on managing your to-dos.

Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book notes for more business- and technology-related visual summaries!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: Cool Time: A Hands-on Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time–Steve Prentice (Sacha Chua's blog)

Feel free to share this! © 2013 Sacha Chua, http://sachachua.com (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

Learn more about mindmapping on Chuck Frey’s blog, The Mindmapping Software Blog. You can also follow him on Twitter (@chuckfrey).

For more sketchnotes, see http://experivis.com/ and http://sachachua.com/blog/category/sketchnotes . Enjoy!

This post originally appeared on Experivis, the company I’m building around the idea of turning experiences into visuals.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnote about mindmapping: Rock the Monkey: Visual Facilitation Skills and Brain-based Learning–Chuck Frey (Sacha Chua's blog)

I sketchnoted this live at the free MaRS Entrepreneurship 101 series (webcast and in-person session every Wednesday). Click on the image for a larger version of sketchnotes.

Feel free to share this! You can credit it as (c) 2012 Sacha Chua under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada licence.

Here’s the video:

Lived it Lecture with Kunal Gupta of Polar Mobile ― Entrepreneurship 101 2012/13 from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.

Find more details on MaRS Discovery District’s blog. Check out my other ENT101 sketchnotes, or other sketchnotes and visual book notes!

Text:

MaRS ENTREPRENEURSHIP 101
Jan 9, 2013 #ENT101
Lived It Lecture
KUNAL GUPTA, POLAR MOBILE

Focusing less on entrepreneurship and more on the ENTREPRENEUR

Our story:
While we were studying at Waterloo: iPhone App store, still

one year away
Inspired by mobile experience in Hong Kong: Watching TV!

The great thing about Co-op was that I learned I don’t want to

work for anybody. So we started a company!

Nobody knew what apps were. (Huh?)

Prototype of magazine on Blackberry

meeting:
Why would anyone use this?
Where are the ads?
How do we get content in?

Q: Finding talent?
A: Referrals, events
Q: Pricing?
A: Listen. “How would you like to pay for this? -> Model neg.

Go out there and talk to customers
even big companies!

Nobody knew what I was talking about! (What’s an app?)

We’ll think about it. (3-6 months..)

We could’ve given up. We didn’t.

10 weeks, 9 phone calls… BUSINESS!

Professional persistence!

We launched 6 months before the App store
Went after US market in between exams

Q: Negotiation
A: Put off pricing -> validate problem first
Early days – no one expects you to have a rate card. As a

supplier, you want to use your own agreements eventually.
Q: Explaining ideas to people who pass it on
A: 1. Keep it simple. 2. Ask if they understand 3. Don’t need

to sell in first meeting.
Q: Small startup e-mailing/selling big companies.
A: Short, links at bottom. Put yourself in their shoes. Would

I reply to this?

We graduated and went full-time.

There’s so much noise about the difficulty of getting FUNDING.

THE REAL CHALLENGE
/ Is there a proven market?
/ Do you have a product or service of value? Can it SCALE?
/ Do you have the TEAM you need?

Singapore is an AMAZING country. They always shoot for gold.

Learn from lots of places around the world.

Q: Future of mobile?
A: Amount of consumption -> 30% of traffic now mobile, will

cross 50%.. mobile-first. Changing the way people interact.

Manufacturers – what are people buying? Investments? Growth?
Q: Deciding between do and delegate?
A: What’s the most important thing for your business at this

time? That guides your time.
Q: Managing cofounders
A: Transparency -> trust. Expectations, concerns. Alignment.

How did we get Time Warner?
E-mailed the president!

What’s a little Canadian company doing in New York?
Blackberry -> made in Canada

9 months to get to a deal
rollercoaster

I was so stubborn I insisted on having Sports Illustrated as

part of the deal

What we thought this would take

What it took

TEAM:
Hire for aptitude and attitude, train for skills
What should we do?
You know more about this than I do
Oh!

Alignment is important but hard

New vision

Ex: BANANAS
People become more similar…

When you’re starting out, you need to keep REALIGNING

Chief Everything Officer } It’s not the right thing to do! You

can’t scale

Guarantee: You’ll make more mistakes than your team. Get over

yourself.

Your body
barometer for business: stressed? focused?
Hey, is everything all right? You seem a little off.

Should I finish school?
Yes. Learn how to do things you don’t want to do.

You have to learn how to make tough decisions.

Toronto: Great place to start!

customers
talent
listen and develop product

Vancouver: Happier?
REMEMBER: HAVE FUN!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnote: ENT101 Lived It Lecture–Kunal Gupta, Polar Mobile (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image for a larger version of the sketchnote.

The Art of Pricing has some tips for entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out the right price for their first product or service (see the value decoder on p99). It has more tips for business owners who have established a few profitable offerings and are trying to figure out how to tweak the levers for more profit or expanded markets.

Feel free to share this! You can credit it as (c) 2012 Sacha Chua under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada licence.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: The Art of Pricing: How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business–Rafi Mohammed (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image for a larger version of the sketchnote.

Feel free to share this! You can credit it as (c) 2012 Sacha Chua under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canadalicence.

Blue Ocean Strategy is a good book for established companies that are finding it challenging to differentiate themselves, but it’s also a good read for companies that are starting out and who are looking for their unique selling propositions (USPs).

I’m going to go over different business ideas, sketch red ocean / blue ocean strategies for each, and see about talking to lots of people in order to help validate the sketches. Looking forward to it!

Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book notes. Want me to sketchnote your event? Know of any interesting tech / business talks coming up? I’d love to hear from you!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: Blue Ocean Strategy–W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne (Sacha Chua's blog)

Here’s a sketchnote that summarizes the key points from the book. Click on the image to see a larger version.

The business model canvas in Running Lean is released under the Creative Commons Sharealike Licence, so this image is as well. Enjoy!

Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, Second Edition (O’Reilly). (affiliate link) Copyright 2012 Ash Maurya, 978-1-449-30517-8. Recommended for startup founders and early employees.

If you like this, you might want to check out:

• Visual book notes: The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
• Sketchnotes from the Lean Startup Day
• Other sketchnotes
• Other visual book notes
• Cross-posted from my new Experivis blog. =) Turning experiences and resources into visuals!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: Running Lean–Ash Maurya (Sacha Chua's blog)

For comparison, here’s the sketch and summary from 2011.

Read the original or check out the comments on: 2012 as a sketch (Sacha Chua's blog)

THE PAIN

Imagine you’re a conference or event organizer. You want to make sure your attendees get a lot of value out of your conference, and that a lot of potential attendees hear about it so that they’ll sign up for the next one. That’s why you’re using social media, you share slides, you’re working on getting videos uploaded, and so on. BUT you’re still only engaging a small fraction of your potential audience because most people don’t have the time to review all the materials, people aren’t interested in wading through lots of slides or text, or the materials are published long after people have gotten distracted by something else they need to focus on.

Sketchnotes can help you help your participants remember and share key points from the conference, increasing their ROI (and yours!). By sharing these images, people become ambassadors for your conference.

THE BENEFITS

This is about helping organizers engage participants through digital sketchnotes that are published throughout the event, taking advantage of the Twitter buzz. Sketchnotes can offer more information and more context than live-tweeted quotes, and they can reinforce the conference brand and sponsor relationships through templates. included in every sketchnote.

After the event, these notes also help participants remember and share key points from the conference. People can feel overwhelmed by all the great ideas they’ve picked up from a conference. When they get back to their offices, they probably need to justify their participation in the conference by writing a report on what they’ve learned. Few people have the time to review slides or re-watch videos. Conference sketchnotes are a quick way to trigger memory, and they can also be shared with people who have not been to the talks. This additional value gives conference organizers a good reason to follow up with participants after the event, which could influence feedback survey completion rates and scores.

Sketchnotes can also help organizers pre-market the next event. As a quick proof of the content covered in the conference, sketchnotes can spark interest in a way that slides may not. Often tweeted, reblogged, and searched for after an event, they’re an excellent way to share great ideas.

ALTERNATIVES AND DIFFERENTIATION

One of the great things about this is that I don’t have to build a market from scratch. Bloggers and live-tweeters are now part of many conferences’ social media and marketing planning, so there’s an established need for real-time sharing. Video/slidesharing is part of many conferences as well. Many companies and conferences have worked with graphic recorders and facilitators to capture and share discussions.

Organizers use several alternatives for engaging people during and after events, some of which are complementary services. Here are a few:

• Doing nothing: No cost. However, this misses out on the opportunity for engagement.
• Live-tweeting: Often on a volunteer basis, although sometimes there’ll be a small team dedicated to monitoring, responding to, and posting on social media networks. Live tweets are good for engagement, but are difficult to curate or read afterwards.
• Live-blogging: Often on a volunteer basis, or in exchange for admission. Variable quality and shareability. Sometimes results in lots of text that people don’t enjoy reviewing afterwards.
• Posting the slides: Many conferences post slides on Slideshare, Lanyrd, or similar sites. This tends to be a split between presentations that have too much text in them and take much time to review, or presentations that have practically no text in them and are impossible to share with people who have never been to the conference.
• Posting the videos: This can take months, if it gets completed at all. It takes time to review these and find the key points.
• Transcripts: Very few conferences post transcripts of talks. It’s expensive and time-consuming, although transcripts can increase the searchability of a talk.
• Graphic recording / facilitation: Excellent for discussions. Visually impressive, as artists work on huge sheets of paper at the front of the room. Can be distracting if people are tempted to watch the graphic recording instead of watching the speaker. Takes time to post-process the images for posting, so not well-suited to publishing during the event itself. Less flexible when it comes to content because it’s hard to erase or move segments of a drawing. Matching colours, adding logos and sponsor information, and using other template elements may not be cost-effective.

I think there is a space right there, in the gap between

• social media blog posts / tweets / slides / video on one hand (a “good” conference these days), and
• full graphic recording / facilitation

where digital sketchnoting makes sense, especially considering the advantages to working with an all-digital workflow. (Quick publishing, templates, non-distracting setup…)

Also encouraging: I’m not the only one looking into this! Here are some companies offering digital sketchnoting/digital scribing services: The Grove Consultants International, Imagethink, See in Colors, The World Cafe, WrightMarks, LearningTimes, Virtual Visuals

Potential differentiators:

• I have a technical background, which means I’m fine with acronyms, diagrams, and lots of abstract/obscure concepts (especially related to web design/development, social media, social business, mobile development, and other topics I’m personally interested in)
• Many visual communication companies focus on large-scale graphic recording; by specializing in digital sketchnoting, I can get really, really good at it
• Many sketchnoters / visual communicators are coming from paper-and-pen backgrounds or Mac backgrounds; I use a different toolset, and I continually experiment with making it better
• I’m comfortable with social media, and have set up many tools to help me make even better use of it
• I can offer complementary services, such as getting a talk transcribed and turned into an e-book
• I speak, too! People enjoy my practical, down-to-earth illustrated talks, and hundreds of thousands of people have viewed my presentations online.

SALES AND MARKETING

Most conference and event organizers won’t be looking for sketchnoting in particular, so I’ll want to start by identifying potential clients, reaching out to people, and figuring out the possibilities together.

Another way to find potential clients would be to work with event producers who help organize lots of events. Sketchnoting becomes another capability they can offer to clients in order to add value.

People might not know how to make the most of sketchnotes as a resource. By handling the social media publishing and coordinating with the event’s social media team, I can simplify the process. I’ll also put together a guide for organizers who have existing blogs, Twitter accounts, Pinterest accounts, and other publishing platforms, so that they can take advantage of the sketchnotes that they’ll have.

My long-term evil plan

One of the reasons I’m interested in building a business around sketchnoting is because I want to learn more about sales and marketing. I could learn these business skills using web development or consulting instead, but those engagements involve longer iterations and less tangible services. Sketchnotes are easy to appreciate and share.

In addition, sketchnoting business and technology events also helps me build my visual communication skills, my understanding of topics, and my archive of content. This will come in handy when I write more books and work on more experiments. I think there’s room in the world for more visual books like the Sketchnote Handbook, especially as we shift towards reading less and wanting to understand things faster.

I think that sketchnoting might turn into an interesting 12-16 hour/week business that takes advantage of and fits in well with complementary strengths. Looking forward to trying this out!

More notes: Business idea: Digital sketchnoting agency

Read the original or check out the comments on: Imagining sketchnotes as a business (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image for a larger version of the sketchnote.

Feel free to share this! You can credit it as (c) 2012 Sacha Chua under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada licence.

Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book notes. Want me to sketchnote your event? Know of any interesting tech / business talks coming up? I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks to Tamara Paton for the nudge to share this. =)

Sketchnote and got tips to share? Curious and have questions to ask? Comment below!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Tips for growing as a sketchnoter (Sacha Chua's blog)

My first exercise was to draw shoes with lots of soft lines. The teacher said to focus on drawing each line in relation to each other instead of thinking about the whole shape. That makes it easier to defamiliarize yourself and draw what you see, instead of this preconceived notion of a shoe. I ended up making this shoe a little shorter than it actually was, but it was recognizably a shoe, hooray!

My homework was to draw more shoes.

Since I’m curious about translating abstract concepts to concrete images and vice versa, my teacher also suggested that I draw different kinds of shoes and the ideas associated with them.

The second class focused on negative space and chairs. On the left, you can see the chair I drew in class. On the right, here’s a chair that Leia (one of our cats) often likes sleeping in.

The third class was about lines, angles, and proportions. I started by drawing the scissors, then drawing the detergent bottle, and then finally by drawing the overlapping shapes of the coffee mugs.

At home, I practised by drawing the salt-and-pepper shakers, and by drawing the mouse.

My last session was one about faces and proportions (see above). Both of these were drawn from (rather odd-looking) mannequins. I like the profile likeness, although it was a little difficult getting the hang of the chin.

I’ve read many art education books such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Drawing by Seeing, so that sped up the teaching and gave us a shorthand for discussions. For me, the art classes were more of a meditative space where I could deliberately practise techniques, with feedback from a teacher who could warn me when I was getting too close to the paper (and thus shifting my viewpoint) or who could figure out where I was a little bit off in terms of proportions.

It’s a very different style of drawing compared to sketchnotes. I’m usually just focused on getting the gist of an idea across in a very simple, iconic form. In terms of getting better at sketchnoting, I’ll focus on broading my visual vocabulary by sketching different terms of concepts instead of focusing on drawing more realistic images. Still, it was fun discovering that even though I hadn’t been practising much “proper” drawing, I was getting better at seeing things!

Decision review: Good decision to experiment with art class, although I’ll keep looking around for other classes and I’ll keep practising on my own.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Decision review: Art class (includes sketches) (Sacha Chua's blog)