Alaska is almost indescribable. I've done my best to capture what I saw, but the best way to experience Alaska is first hand. If you ever have a chance — go.

Enjoy the sketchnotes!

In the past month I've been impressed with how well the Mnemosyne notebook has performed, so I shot a brief review video of the notebook to share with you:

Maruman Mnemosyne A4 Notebook Video Review from Mike Rohde on Vimeo.

I love the smooth, calendared paper in the book, because it holds pencil so well. Even soft pencil sketches seem to hold in place without smearing like other books that have paper with texture or tooth on them.

The size is also nice, as A4 (210 × 297 mm) provides a little more vertical height than US Letter sized 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper. This gives that little extra on the top and bottom, which works well for site design, which tends to be more vertical.

Lastly, the light gray grid is strong enough to be seen but light enough not to get in the way. The grid is also relatively easy to knock out in Photoshop, convenient for making your wireframe sketches cleaner for presentations.

Maruman Mnemosyne notebooks can be bought at JetPens.com in a set of 2 for $32. They're not the cheapest notebook, but the balance of paper quality, size and grid tonality make them worth the extra cost to me.

Tomorrow the app should be submitted to the iTunes app store — hopefully it will be on sale for $0.99 in the next few days. I'll keep you guys posted.

Tapstack Demo Video

SXSW Interactive 2009 Sketchnotes Tapstack App Demo from Mike Rohde on Vimeo.

I love how the Tapstack app displays the sketchnotes. My original sketchnote pages were created in a Moleskine sketchbook, so the card stack format works really well. Funnily enough, creating numbers for every page was the most work!

More Tapstacks?

If you're interested in seeing any or all of those, let me know!

Thanks SixVoices!

You can see the presentations captured in my SND Chicago '09 Sketchnotes Set or in the slideshow of the sketchnotes created for quick viewing as a FlickrSlidr:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Thanks Matt Mannsfield and Chris Courtney for your kind invitation. I appreciated the opportunity to meet people from the news design industry and had a great time!

What the webinar covered, in a nutshell: Austin covered drawing skills with fun drawing exercises, I shared techniques and tips I've learned from sketchnoting and Sunni explained listening skills for the visual note-taker.

Sketchnoting Austin Kleon's Drawing Lessons

Presenting Sketchnote Techniques

I felt the presentation went reasonably well — though I wish I had another week to run through my slides and materials. I've noted some things I need to improve for next time and am asking some key folks for feedback as well. If you were an attendee, please email your feedback to me with VizNotes101 in the subject line.

At the end of the presentation, I used a webcam on a tripod to capture myself live sketchnoting Dave, Austin and Sunni answering audience questions:

Missing Sunni Brown's Listening Skills

Final Thoughts

• I'm still blown away that over 100 people signed up for the webinar. Thanks for making this event a resounding success.
• I had a great time doing the webinar, but it was odd presenting to a silent room, except for Sunni, Dave or Austin's questions or comments.
• The setup made me feel like a cyborg, with wires everywhere, cameras on and windows all over my screen. In fact, after our dry run Monday night, I left everything I'd setup, in place overnight for fear of messing things up.
• I'm going to add practical exercises to the sketchnoting presentation, after seeing how much fun Austin's drawing exercises were.
• I was fortunate to find Nancy Duarte's excellent video tutorial, 6 Tips for Remote Presenting. She encouraged me to make my presentation personal and to use photos of my family as a reminder that I was talking to a live audience.
• 3 hours seemed like a long time until we got started, then the time just flew.

I can safely speak for everyone involved in our webinar — we're all very honored to have you spend your precious time learning visual note-taking with us.

Thank you!

Related Links

Here's the deck on Slideshare:

Here's the deck on Flickr:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Thetre's still time to register for this $99 webinar to hear the full details behind my slides live and learn about drawing and listening from Austin Kleon and Sunni Brown.

Register today!

So, when I was invited to present sketchnoting techniques alongside my good friends Austin Kleon, Sunni Brown and Dave Gray in a 3 hour live webinar — I immediately jumped at the opportunity!

Visual Note-Taking 101 Details

Register today for Visual Note-Taking 101!

Here's an overview of next Tuesday's 3 hour webinar:

Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others.

Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown and Austin Kleon. In this three-hour course you will learn how to use visual note-taking to improve your listening skills and take better, more memorable notes.

The focus of this class will be on how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them. Many of the techniques you will learn will also help to improve your skills in drawing your ideas at the flip chart or whiteboard.

Here's a detailed outline of what the three of us will present next Tuesday:

Section 1 – Austin Kleon will present “But I can’t draw!”

• Addressing your fears of the pen, and rediscovering the ancient, universal childhood pleasure of putting pictures and words on paper
• Exploring drawing not as fine art, but as a communication tool
• Establishing a drawing alphabet and learning some basic cartooning techniques
• Doing fun activities: “How to draw a stick figure” and “How to draw a face”
• Building our very own icon library for note-taking

Section 2 – Sunni Brown will present “Learning Active Listening”

• What is “active listening” and how is it different than “regular” listening?
• A graphic recorder’s approach to active listening – how to listen effectively to multiple sources, fast talkers and ramblers
• What to listen for and what to filter out
• How to “cache” what you’re hearing so you can capture it on paper

Section 3 – Mike Rohde will present “Sketchnoting Techniques”

• The importance of focus & engagement in capturing presentations
• Learning to become a filter of ideas rather than a word-by-word stenographer of every last detail
• Techniques for getting into the flow, to help you capture better sketchnotes
• Getting personal with sketchnotes — letting your personality shine through
• How to use recorded podcasts and videos for sketchnoting practice (with a demo of sketchnoting a podcast live)

Register for Visual Note-Taking 101

Related Links

Impromptu interview with Mike Rohde at SXSWi '09 from Ove Klykken on Vimeo.

I'd completely forgot about this interview until last night when Ove contacted me with a preview. In the interview I talk about why I sketchnote, challenges in sketchnoting and if I think someone needs to be an artist to do sketchnoting.

Enjoy!

Being interested in documentaries, especially Gary Hustwit's recent Helvetica and upcoming Objectified films, we kicked around the idea of capturing the SXSW Interactive experience as a documentary, so we did. Here's a teaser:

A SXSW interactive 2009 experience (teaser) from Brian Artka on Vimeo.

I have to come clean — Brian did the real work. I was his personal "assistant-to-the-regional-manager" holding the camera while he went to the bathroom, rounding up potential interviewees for filming and I think I fetched him some coffee once.

The teaser above features Jeffrey Zeldman, Ove Klykken, Garrett Dimon, Veerle Pieters, Jason Santa Maria, Tracy Apps, and Kevin Ciesielski with some great story nuggets. I can't wait to see the full documentary.

The Canon 5D Mark II

I was amazed at the quality of the video, particularly since Brian was able to use digital photo lenses to capture video — wide angle and low-light capable lenses. You can already see it in this rough teaser.

Brian is hard at work, organizing his 6 hours of video into a unified, coherent documentary that he'll be releasing on Vimeo very soon. I'm recommending he sell the video on DVD as well, because I know I'd buy a copy in a heartbeat.

If you have comments on the documentary, please leave them on Brian's Vimeo page for the teaser and if you would buy a DVD of this documentary, please let him know that as well (for planning purposes).

I was curious to see the response I'd get from Twitter, so I publicly sought my followers' recommendations on Twitter.

Here is the complete collection of @replies and Direct Messages received with recommendations and links:

bernardgomez Been using a pair of Vibe Duos for over a year now. Build quality is good but tough to work out in. Decent iPhone integration. 7.5/10

knight777 waffling between Shure 530s, Westone UM2, Westone 3 - yeah, expensive indeed :( Looking forward to your writeup!

knight777 btw, I went with the Westone 3s.

heygabe JVC Gummies. For $10, You can't go wrong.

jparato Have you tried Skullcandy headphones? I don't own a pair personally, but I've heard they're decent.

danhhoang I go with the apple premium headphones. I use tons of headphones and I think those sound the best. Just pricey. Next is sony MDR-EX71SL

jburdine @rohdesign just picked up iCover earbuds with an online mic to use w/my Touch and Skype for the iPhone

jburdine @rohdesign I'm really happy with my $25 Sony earbuds.

topmuffin @rohdesign NuForce NE-7M Stereo Earphones got these 3 mnths ago & they beat every headset I've ownd. Not sure about sleeping w/ them. #iphone #headsets

toddclausen @rohdesign don't really like sound quality of earbuds, but fav is Shure SE115s with foam earpieces like a hearing protector

bjhess @rohdesign Shure e2c's sound great, but ear buds tire my ears out so I've given up on them.

jabbott @rohdesign I've been really happy with UE Super.fi 5 EBs for the past couple years. I use them almost daily,

bnyquist @rohdesign - I have had the Bose earbud headphones for nearly 2 years now and love them. Great sound, great fit.. but a little expensive.

schutzsmith @rohdesign i really like the skull candy earbuds. they're cheap too, like $15 and they are hella loud!

cdharrison @rohdesign Skullcandy Smokin Buds are what I currently use. I love em.

andykant @rohdesign I've been using Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3's for a while and have been very happy with them.

bartka @rohdesign these earbud headphones are excellent: BOSE in-ear Headphones

davidhughes @rohdesign Ultimate Ears Super.Fi 5 Pros - I'd no idea earphones could sound so good!

adny @rohdesign I've not owned or used too many cans $100+, but really like the beyerdynamic DT-770's and sennheiser hd600's, fwiw.

adny @rohdesign best earbuds under $50, v-moda bassfreq - best $50 - $150 etymotic i6, imo. best cans under $100, sennheiser hd 280 pro.

drstout @rohdesign These headphones (Pioneer HDJ-2000) are expensive, bulky and you'll never fall asleep wearing them. But they're damn cool.

Arlen @rohdesign I sleep in Koss Plugs, under $20, fairly comfortable, goos sound. Koos also makes some KEB24r's that look good, never tried them.

NathanBowers @rohdesign I have and like Shure EC3 earbuds and over ear Sennheiser cans. Not sure what it's like to sleep with them. #cordDeath

steventrotter @rohdesign Skullcandy FMJ

I ended up buying Sony MDR-EX32s. They had a good frequency response and are quite comfortable. For my main listening though, I have used Koss PortaPros for years and love 'em!

Thanks Twitterfolk for your suggestions! I hope this is helpful to others seeking earphones.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Sketchnotes are Posted!

This year I doubled the amount of pages I was able to capture to 70, up from 34 pages of sketchnotes in 2008. Having done more sketchnotes since last year helped as did my position of official SXSWi sketchnoter.

Here's the FlickrSlidr set:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Photo: Derek Dysart

Thanks to Hugh Forrest and Shawn O'Keefe for giving me the opportunity to live sketchnote this year's festival and design the tote bag.

Another Great SXSW Interactive

I also had the opportunity to perform live sketchnoting at the 9th annual 20x2. The organizers of 20x2 invited 20 people to interpret the question "What's it gonna take?" so I chose to sketchnote my answer live on stage. Here's the video of my performance (watch it in HD on Vimeo):

20x2 Live Sketchnoting from Mike Rohde on Vimeo.

Photo: Derek Dysart

I'm already looking forward to SXSW Interactive 2010! :-)

Related Links
SXSW Interactive 2009 Sketchnotes
SXSW Interactive 2009 Tote Bag Design
Austin Kleon's SXSW 2009 Drawings
SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes

I know from my last year at SXSW Interactive that 8,000+ tote bags are given out to SXSW Interactive registrants — so I was driven to come up with an amazing design.

In this post I'll explain the tote bag design process, including some of the challenges we faced through that process and how we came up with a winning solution.

Initial Specs and Feedback

The SXSW team also mentioned that the past two bag designs had been hand-drawn in a cartoon style, with mostly darker colors. For the 2009 design they wanted something brighter and less cartoon oriented.

For creative direction, the SXSW team wanted to represent the most common tags generated by the Interactive Panel Picker in a creative way. Shawn shared a Wordle word cloud type treatment as a reference, using some of the tags they were seeing:

Sketches

Concept Sketch v1
In the first round, I created a network tree, with SXSW 09 text at the center of the tree with panel picker tags branching out from the center to fill the space:

The SXSW team felt the very structured network idea was a bit too rigid. They wanted the design to have a more random, organic feel than a network structure could offer.

Concept Sketch v2
In my second sketch, you'll see I've returned to the general idea of a tag cloud, but making better use of the square shape I had to work with.

The upper sketch uses actual tags to form an arrow pointing to the SXSW tag in the lower right corner. The lower sketch features four arrows created with tags, point to the 4 corners that spell out S X S W:

We liked the second round of sketches, especially the idea with the single arrow pointing to SXSW in the lower right-hand corner of the design.

Black & White Concepts

This direction was good — the sizing of the letters, positioning and overall shape felt right. In fact, when I showed this to my friend Brian Artka, it reminded him of the state of Texas. I hadn't intended this, but I really liked the serendipity of it.

Shawn and the SXSW team wanted to see the arrow tags and SXSW pointing to the lower left, so I created a second version, emphasizing the Texas shape a bit more:

Notice the circle-star and AUSTIN text in the middle of the type treatment? I added it once the shape was tweaked to look more like Texas.

Color Concepts

The brightness of the design was great, but it needed something to separate the tag cloud from the canvas color. I used the type to create a halftone-edged shape in Photoshop, which formed the white shape under the typography in v2:

Facing & Solving Challenges

The SXSW team wanted a design that was more organic, and even though initially they didn't want another hand-drawn bag design, we started talking about using the Sketchnote style they really loved, mixed in with regular typography.

I replaced some of the tags in the cloud with hand-drawn sketchnote lettering:

It still wasn't noticeable enough, since the crisp typography dominated the design. The hand-drawn words were getting lost in the mix, and looked more like bad reproduction than intentionally hand-drawn typography.

Next I traced the bottom half of the tags in a sketchnote style, scanned and auto-traced the letters using Vector Magic (a wonderful service BTW).

I wanted show a transformation from sketchnote letters to real type — but it still felt wrong. It was too loose for actual type and too mechanical for hand-drawn type:

I was stumped, trying too hard to sneak organic hand-drawn letters into the type.

The Solution: Raw Sketchnote Typography

Yes! This was what we were aiming for! Shawn and the SXSW team liked the new sketchnote direction and I did as well. I had my personality baked in and felt unified and organic — something we didn't feel with the clean typographic approach.

With the design approved, I finalized my Photoshop artwork for printing, and sent it to the SXSW team for production. That was November 17th, because printing 8,000+ canvas tote bags with 7 colors needed lots of lead time. :-)

Final Tote Bags

After having a few months away from the design, the human touch in the sketchnote lettering really feels right for this bag design. I'm very happy with how it's turned out.

I'm hoping attendees to SXSW Interactive for 2009 will enjoy the bags and the design. I'm honored knowing that these bags will be used for years to come, reminding SXSW attendees of their great experience in Austin.

Thank You

I'm excited to see thousands of tote bags I've designed wandering around Austin! :-)

Taco Dip

• Blend 3 (8 oz.) cream cheese and 1 large container of sour cream
• 5 teaspoons of chili powder
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of garlic salt
• 5 teaspoons (or more to taste) of taco sauce

The cream cheese/sour cream layer tastes best when prepared and chilled in the refrigerator the day before.

Before serving, add any or all of the following: chopped onions, chopped lettuce, diced tomatoes, green peppers or grated cheddar cheese. Dribble taco sauce over the cream spread and veggies and serve with plain tortilla chips.

Is it good? The design crew at Northwoods sat and consumed a plate of this stuff in the lunchroom within 30 minutes, so that would be a yes. :-)

I'm pleasantly surprised at how sustainable my blog has been.

It's good to see this space remain a place I can share my thinking, processes, insights and design work with others.

A Busy Year
This year has been especially tough. I've dealt with a job change, incredible busyness professionally and personally and the impact of using Twitter to share small tidbits I might have posted here a few years back.

There was a rise visibility of my sketchnotes from SXSW Interactive 2008, SEED 3 and An Event Apart this past year, and a few posts about my design process to boot.

Goals for Year 7
One of my goals for my 7th year is a focus on sharing more of my design process posts, from initial challenge to final solution for logo, icon and other design and UI work I'm up to. In fact, I have 2 posts brewing already.

Thanks!
I want to say thanks to you, my readers and visitors, for leaving comments and visiting the blog all of these years. Thanks go to my family and friends, who have always been supportive of my work here.

I appreciate you all, and I'm looking forward to a great 7th year of blogging.

Maintaining the Winterblast Identity

For the 2007 design I created a snow monster with two broom ball sticks on a navy shirt to start this series. In 2008, I chose a polar bear with a winter hat and sunglasses on a forest green shirt.

For 2009 I selected a penguin on a snowboard as the cold-weather animal to stylize for the shirt design.

Sketching the Snowboarding Penguin

Tom the youth pastor wanted simplify the FOLLOW type so the double LLs wouldn't tuck together, and we both agreed that having the FOLLOW type tilting downhill (rather than uphill) with the penguin grabbing air over the type worked best.

Color Mockup

Tom liked this look and shirt color, so I sent shirt sizes and final artwork to MJM Screen Print & Embroidery Studio in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin for final printing.

Finished Design

Once again, the shirts turned out well, thanks to the great work by MJM on printing. I'm looking forward to handing these out to our students at Winterblast this weekend.