Digital Roam

A portrait of the artist as a book buyer

This modern world our ours works in mysterious ways.

The Guardian newspaper (the London one, not the San Francisco Bay Guardian one where I started my career twenty years ago, nor the Moscow Guardian one where I served as Art Director fifteen years ago) asked me last week to write an article about my book and visual thinking. The article ran in Saturday's paper across the UK, and I received several complimentary notes from readers, which was great.

Then today I got a Google Alert about a blog mentioning me and that article, so I clicked through to Andrew Smith's blog "In Front of Your Nose".

There I saw Andrew's napkin sketch about how he had come to decide to buy my book. It's a great picture, and the accompanying article serves all authors (or hopeful authors) on how complex the process can be by which a potential reader becomes an actual book buyer.

Thank you Andrew for the blog, the sketch, the insight, and above all for the purchase. You'll be happy to know I sent your link through to everyone I know in publishing as a reminder of all the eggs we need to keep up in the air: books, websites, links, blogs, tools, downloads. It all matters and it all adds up.

Thanks again!

The best drawing appliation ever -- and you already own it!

Based on feedback I've received at hundreds of presentations, the most important single piece of visual thinking advice I can give is this: if you want to draw on-screen, just open PowerPoint.

Yes, the best drawing program on the planet is already on your computer -- and it's not even from Apple. :-) It's the built-in "PRESENTATION MODE" drawing application in PowerPoint (aka PPT).

The drawing is smooth, touch-sensitive (for those of you on a tablet PC) and intuitive to use. Here's how to access this wonder:

1. Open your PPT document.
2. Go to presentation mode.
3. You will see 4 faint icons in the lower left corner (if you can't see them, open up a blank white page in PPT; sometimes colored backgrounds make the icons difficult to see.)
4. Still in presentation mode, mouse over the PEN; a set of options will pop up (see attached)
5. From there, select pen type, color, etc.
6. Draw directly on your slide.
7. When you exit presentation mode, PPT will ask if you want to "keep notations" If yes, your drawings will become embedded 'vector' objects in your original PPT; if no, you'll go back to your original.*

* For Office 2003 and earlier, you'll need to right-click on your presentation and choose "pointer options".

I use this lovely little application 100% of the time when I am presenting. It works for large audiences (you draw on screen while connected to a projector) and small audiences (people can see you work right on-screen). I even use this as my standard drawing tool when creating new illustrations while on the plane or anyplace where I don't have access to a scanner. It even works for live drawing during webinars online.

Although I use a tablet PC, the drawing application works exactly the same with a regular mouse and screen.

Funniest thing of all, I was giving a "back of the napkin" presentation to 100 people last week at Microsoft up in Redmond. It was a great session and at the end someone asked me what application I was using to do the live sketching on-screen. When I showed them it was plain-old out-of-the-box PPT, the crowd went wild! I've never had so many cheers.

Made my day. And theirs. 

I always suspected that Google was designed on a napkin...

Turns out I was right.

Click here for the WSJ video.

Thanks Arnie for pointing me towards this WSJ clip with Tim Armstrong of Google drawing out the company's vision on a napkin. According to Tim, Google has been refining this single napkin sketch (as an alternative to a canned presentation) for seven years, and plans to continue refining it for at least another five.

Now that's a napkin story I like to hear.

Napkin tools: now downloadable!

Ever since The Back of the Napkin appeared, people have been asking me for download-friendly versions of the key visual thinking tools I introduce. So due to popular request, here they are; high-resolution PDF files for:

The Visual Thinking Toolkit. (A visual summary of all the lessons in the book.)

The Visual Thinking Codex. (The master checklist for creating any problem-solving picture; a combination of the SQVID and the <6><6> Rule.)

The SQVID. (The five questions that get your mind's eye kicked into gear.)

The <6><6> Rule. (The six ways we see mapped to the only six pictures we need to be able to draw.)

For anyone who asked for these -- THANKS. I hope they're useful for you.

If you don't know what these charts mean, let me tell you about this book I wrote... :-)

UPDATE: These tools can now be downloaded at my website: www.thebackofthenapkin.com

Visual thinking is 32,000 years young

As I was finishing up the manuscript for The Back of the Napkin last year, I had a bunch of fun conversations with Will Weisser and his publicity team at Portfolio, brainstorming on the promotional copy for the book. We were all excited about how the book had come together and knew we were on to something powerful. There haven't been many business books about how to solve problems with pictures, so it was hard not to say, "Wow! This is a completely new way of thinking!"

We all knew that wasn't true, of course: people have been drawing since the dawn of time. (Maybe not businesspeople, but you never know.) Which got me wondering. How old is "visual thinking" anyway? Who were the first people to use pictures as a way of understanding the world? How far did the use of pictures predate written language?

I recalled from art history classes a couple vague facts about the famous cave paintings of Lascaux in France, but couldn't put those sketchy bison into any broader context. (And frankly, with a business book about to come out, the last thing I needed to lose focus by digging through pre-ancient history.)

So it was with snowballing fascination that I read last week's New Yorker article by Judith Thurman about the earliest cave painters. From the opening paragraph, something clicked in me: this wasn't just a story about some random proto-humans a zillion years ago scratching out animals on cave walls; this is OUR story.

As Thurman makes clear, nobody has any real idea who these cave painters were or why they were compelled to draw, but we do know that they -- forgive me, WE -- drew long before we wrote. And as Picasso said after viewing the paintings at Lascaux, "They've invented everything." That got me hooked.

As much as I loved the descriptions of the paintings, the debates about how they were drawn, and the academic battles about why, what really got me about the story was the description of time; more specifically, how close we really are to the earliest humans who drew.

When I read this paragraph, my mind was officially blown:

"Since recorded history began, around 3200 BC, with the invention of writing in the Middle East, there have been some two hundred human generations."

What?? Only 200 of generations of humans since the beginning of written history? How could that be? I thought history was a lot longer than that: the ancients, the Greeks, the Romans, the dark ages... you're telling me all that happened (*everything* happened?) in a number of generations I could count in less than a minute. That I had to see.

So I mapped it out. And here's what the length of recorded history looks like, generation by generation. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Then if we add in all the generations since the earliest cave paintings ever discovered (those of the Chauvet Caves, dated to 32,000 years ago), we see that there really haven't been all that many of us. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Solving problems with pictures isn't new. It's what we've always done. "Always" just turns out to be a lot shorter than I thought.