WHY GRAPHIC RECORDING?
Images speak more effectively than words. We are all visual learners - that’s what the science says! Make no mistake - I am in this business because it’s fun. But as it turns out, making things fun is actually the best way to learn. When your senses are engaged, more of your brain synapses are firing. And when more synapses are firing, you retain more information, and for a longer period of time.
For your meeting or conference or other type of event, graphic recording keeps people engaged, makes information easier to remember, and creates shareable takeaways that have lasting effects. Several people have told me that their companies have posted the graphic recordings up on an office wall, where they function as a kind of mission statement, keeping the key messages top of mind.
And, in this age when increasingly more functions are being automated by AI, people just like to watch somebody visualize their meetings in real time.
WHAT DOES GOOD GRAPHIC RECORDING LOOK LIKE?
Graphic recording isn’t about drawing.
When we are taking notes for you, we are listening to your ideas, perspectives, and emotions, and turning that into information.
This has nothing to do with whether we can sketch a vase full of carnations. We are rendering concepts, not objects. We speak the language of symbols. As Bob Mankoff, my former cartoon editor at the New Yorker, put it: “It’s not the ink, it’s the think.”
Take the notion of a broken heart, for instance. As übertalented graphic artist Christoph Neimann shows in this diagram, that idea is best represented by the symbol at the center. The version on the left is a poorer version of that idea, despite being technically a better representation of an actual human heart.
People often say to me: “all I can draw is stick figures.” Congratulations! You’re on your way to a career in graphic recording. The stick figures below are just as good at conveying the idea of teamwork as this absurdly realistic AI-created image.
I’d argue that it’s even a better representation, because anybody can see themselves in these generalized stick drawings. Universality is more inclusive.
The language we use is lines, shapes, arrows, colors. This is the language of symbols. These are the tools we use to communicate concepts, relationships, models, and other forms of information.
In my other occupation, as a cartoonist, I know that a reader has maybe two seconds to get the gist of the joke. If they don’t, then they move on. We have to organize the visual information in the image so that it’s understood as quickly as possible, setting up the laugh. (Or, in the case of the New Yorker, the wrinkled eyebrow and the “WTF? Am I missing something?”)
It’s no different in graphic recording, although the goal is enlightenment and not humor. The information has to be presented in a way that is easy to parse and digest. It’s not the ink, it’s the think.
It’s the same principle as a website or a newspaper. When you want to become instantly sad or anxious, you of course look at the news. Here is an actual front page from the online version of the New York Times. Let’s look at how the information is organized for immediate impact and understanding (or, in this case, sadness and anxiety).
The top stories are in the biggest, boldest letters. That’s why they’re called headlines. They are concise summaries of the content. Instantly, you know the topic you will be reading about. The slightly smaller subheaders further reveal the direction of the story. The hierarchy of text size and location is meant to help guide you to where you are interested in going. Articles that share a similar theme – in this case, the pandemic - are grouped together in a box. Opinion pieces are in a separate box.
The images, in addition to adding visual appeal, are also informative: you know if you will be reading a history of the virus, a human interest piece, or data about employment.
By now, all of this is intuitive to us. But it’s only because we know what good information design looks like.
Good graphic recording also employs these same rules. The relative size of the text should indicate what is a headline, as opposed to a sidebar. Related content should be grouped together and the flow of information should make sense.
Another tool of good information design is color. Here’s a sample graphic recording I did from a 12-minute episode of the Stuff You Should Know podcast. It’s brief, so it’s almost all headlines, as you can see. But the whiskey-related information has a red theme, the bourbon-related is yellow, and the content that is neutral or universal is blue. The flow of information should be easily ascertainable after only a second or two.
Again, this is intuitive to us, but only because we are used to seeing good information design. It can be done poorly. Here’s the same drawing, but with color used very differently.
It’s very colorful! Color is wonderful and delightful. But the use of color here does not help our understanding of the material. Our eyes dart around looking for a place to land, and it’s not clear what the relationships between the words and pictures are. It’s the equivalent of the New York Times making every word on it’s front page the same size.
So, a good graphic recorder is someone who uses words, lines, shapes, and colors to organize and display information. And the information is a real-time discussion or presentation, so we are doing it on the fly. Like cartoons, I like to think that the viewer should be delighted first, and informed second.
If you look at the samples I’ve provided, you can probably find a lot of areas where I have strayed from these “rules.” When will I ever learn !? But I hope the output is still effective and delightful, and it will never be done the same way twice.
And if you have ideas of what can make graphic recording better, my inbox is always open.