I focus on visual thinking for business people.
Visual thinking. Uh huh. What's that?
Here's my official elevator speech:
Visual thinking means using our innate ability to see -- with our eyes and our mind's eye -- to discover new ideas, develop them and communicate them with other people. The four steps of visual thinking are: look, see, imagine and show. Everybody already knows how to do them all, so visual thinking should be pretty easy.
The good news is that visual thinking is easy. The great news is that with a little practice we can all get even better at it. Especially those people who can most benefit from great ideas, faster development and clearer communications. Like businesspeople.
And here's what I say to people who are stuck with me for more than 30 seconds:
Sometimes -- and usually at random times and places -- my career itself has felt vaguely random: serving as a magazine art director, then setting up Russia's first "western" advertising agency, then running an international marketing communications company, then design directing at an early web boutique, then leading user experience and technology projects for the biggest of the big web shops, now writing a book on visual thinking.
But in hindsight, I see the connection: in all cases, what I was really doing was helping people use pictures to more effectively tell their story, solve their problem, or sell their idea. When I couldn't speak the local language, pictures were worth a thousand words. When I could speak the local language, they could be worth a million. Now I like to use visual thinking as a language itself, a language that conveys more ideas more effectively in more cases than (especially in business) most of the written or spoken word.
Mainly, I'm interested in three aspects of visual thinking:
1. Creating images for people to help them better convey their ideas
2. Teaching people to get better at creating their own images
3. Working with people to create images that help them discover their best ideas
I've grown so fond of all this that I began a business so that I could focus on this all the time... all the time, that is, that I'm not working on my two books about visual thinking.
This blog is by, for and about people who like to think visually -- for business or otherwise. If you're someone who likes to solve problems with pictures, I'd like to think this blog is for us.