I’ve used Twitter for awhile now, loved it at some points, grown rather bored now and then, wasted far too much time or ignored it altogether. At the SXSW Festival last weekend, I wanted to attend the Ev Williams Keynote so that I could learn more about the service and where it was headed. I was also intrigued to see the guy who’d created it.
I was hoping to sit really close to the front so that I wasn’t a hundred rows back, looking at a tiny figure and watching the big screen. I queued up for an hour before the Keynote and my diligence paid off. I was rewarded with a third row seat. Had I started running, like many others, when they opened the Ballroom doors, I’m sure I could have sat in the front row. But third row was perfectly fine for me.
Also, rather accidentally, I plonked myself right down in front of a very large mainly blank piece of paper that I didn’t pay much attention to. A friend joined me and was delighted to see they were going to create a Graphic Record of the Keynote. I hadn’t heard of this before and was fascinated to see what it was. As the Keynote began, the artist, Sunni Brown, gathered all her pens and started making a wonderful record of the talk.
Here is the large sheet of paper before Sunni began.
You can see in the next photo the finished piece. Sunni started on the left hand side of the paper and gradually worked her way across, focusing on the ideas and issues discussed during the Keynote. I saw a few people actually taking notes themselves like this, with drawings and images rather than just writing sentence upon sentence, which perhaps seemed imformative at the time, but less so upon review.
This is one particular section of the Graphic Record, zoomed in for further detail.
I didn’t take any notes during the Keynote. But simply looking at Sunni’s Graphic Record, I can follow along and remember each topic as it was discussed. It’s such a clever approach to note taking.
Finally, here’s Sunni Brown with her finished work of art. And that’s what it is. If I was Ev Williams, I would love to have this hanging in my office or the reception area of Twitter. It’s informative and beautiful.
{ 5 comments }
Now that is very clever.
Beats Powerpoint (boo!) any day.
LCM x
Now that is clever.
Much better than my scribbly shorthand. I had to interview someone today and realised that my note taking skills have become appalling somewhere along the line…..
I remember doodling all around three words in an essay writing class. They were “comment, gloss, quote.” We’re now seventeen years later, and I still remember those words vividly. It does work!
I used to have to do something like that (just text tho’) in my corporate days. It was called Mind Mapping and I hated it for some reason. Hers looks great though!
Lorna,
I was so happy to read your lovely blog post. Thank you for taking the time to write it (I already tweeted about it.) FYI, I learned this skill coming from a completely non-artistic background. All of my life I took notes the standard way and I slowly taught myself how to transform them into visual language. Point: anyone can do it and it is a powerful and memorable form of learning. I teach people and hold workshops, etc., because graphic recording is also useful in business and nonprofit problem-solving. So anyway, thank you for the post and I hope to meet you next year at SXSW.
Cheers,
Sunni
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