Meet the sketchnoting expert: Mike Rohde
Nora Herting: Welcome everyone to the third installment of ImageThink’s series, “Ask the Expert!” where I sit down remotely with leaders and innovators and get to explore the practical applications of their knowledge and how it might apply to us – to our life, work, and in business. If you don’t know me, I’m Nora Herting, CEO and Founder of ImageThink, a visual facilitator, a graphic recorder, thinker, and author.
Nora Herting: And these events really are for you. They’re Q&A opportunities for all of you to join in with questions that you have so please, type out your questions in the chat, and we’ll address them. I’m also joined today by a number of people from the ImageThink team I just want to acknowledge; you’ll see on the screen the work of the talented Claude Li, who’s going to be graphic recording our conversation today. Matt Molina – the man behind the curtain, and Sam Horvath. So, thanks to all of you for making this happen.
Nora Herting: Now, I know we have a lot of graphic recorders, sketchnoters, and illustrators joining today. And today our guest really needs no introduction. However, for those of you, and the rest of us, Mike Rhode is a true modern day Renaissance man. He’s a designer, author of two bestselling books, Sketchnote Handbook and Sketchnote Workbook, both of which have been borrowed from the ImageThink library and are so good they’ve never been returned. If you have my copy, I want it back. He’s also a speaker and illustrator, a publisher, a podcaster, and I believe across all of these disciplines, a teacher and a father.
Nora Herting: Thank you so much Mike, for joining us here today from – tell us where you’re joining from, Mike.
Mike Rohde: Well, I’m coming from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thank you for having me on the show – it’s really fun.
Nora Herting: That’s one thing that we have in common. I think we have a lot in common, but I also lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as a child for a couple of years – love the Midwest. And my sister is officially a cheesehead as she was born there.
What is sketchnoting?
Nora Herting: Mike, I want to start with addressing the question that’s on the top of everyone’s list. For those of us who don’t really know what sketchnoting is, can you tell us how do you define it to an everyday person? What’s the difference between sketchnoting and regular noting or sketchnoting and doodling?
Mike Rohde: That’s a good question. I would say sketchnoting is a mix of visuals and words together – that’s really at the core of it. It’s a mix of the two. I think of them as forming a dance in a way: the words support the pictures, and the pictures support the words. It’s a way of capturing information that you’re consuming; that you’re taking in. Now, that could be a TED Talk. It could be a board meeting, it could be a really delicious dinner or a travel experience, it could be watching a TV show or a movie, anything that you can experience, and you can draw meaning and ideas from really could be a sketchnote. And it’s a mix of drawing with writing.
Mike Rohde: The crossover between drawing and the writing might be lettering. Taking the words that you’re doing and actually giving them visual interest, making them bolder or compressed or wider or scripty. So those are some ways that you can represent words as lettering. And that just draws attention to those items and gives them emphasis over other things. You’ve got a hierarchy of structure that you’re working with. It’s easy for you as the one who made it to come back and make sense out of what you captured. Or, if you share a sketchnote with someone else, it helps them to understand the structure and the flow of the thinking that you were you were going through as you captured those ideas.
Nora Herting: Yeah, that’s great. And I’m noticing, you know, in your language, you’re using terms like hierarchy and structure, and I’m reminded that your background is as a designer. I’m curious, how has that sort of informed your approach to sketchnoting?
Mike Rohde: Well, it’s kind of funny you say that. In a lot of ways, I feel like sketchnoting has been my way to teach design to people who have had no design teaching. I went to design school. It was really a technical college, but I learned the basics of design, all those things you mentioned, hierarchy, structure, white space, lettering, which you might see as typography, use of imagery to convey and communicate. Really, it’s ultimately communication. And so, I’ve always looked at sketchnoting, it’s a hand done thing you’re doing with your hand. You’re writing and you’re drawing with your hand.
Mike Rohde: You have to think about these structural things because you’re trying to make sense of the information and give some shape to it. If you just see a transcript of an interview or something, it could just be lines and lines and lines of text. Nothing is emphasized or amplified. Some things may be more important to you than others. And this is your opportunity to define that difference of what makes more sense or what applies to what you’re doing and what stuff is maybe not as important to you. There is definitely a personal aspect to sketchnoting, I believe.
How sketchnoting differs from graphic recording
Mike Rohde: Maybe that separates a little bit from, say, a professional graphic recorder, like you and your team. They have to come in and provide almost like – as neutral as a human can be – perspective on information and not insert themselves. In that sense, sketchnoting has a slightly different angle. It’s something that you do for yourself, and you can put some of your personality and your opinion into the ideas that you’re capturing on the page.
Mike Rohde: Ultimately, my thought around sketchnoting was it’s something that you capture information so you can do action. We learn so that we can apply and use, not necessarily just for more information. Just loading up on information – it’s really great for trivia, but not really useful for work and the things that you’re doing in action. I always think theory and action go hand in hand. You learn things, but then you find ways to apply them or see how they connect to other things so that you can make sense and help other people.
Nora Herting: Yeah, that’s great. I’m so happy to hear you mention what your definition of sketchnoting is and how it’s different than what we do at ImageThink. I think we first met at South by Southwest. I want to say it was 2011, where you were hosting a meetup with Moleskin, I remember. And that’s how I always thought about it too, is that sketchnoting is really a personal, if you even think of, usually the scale that folks work on. It’s very individual scale.
Mike Rohde: Right.
Nora Herting: It’s diaristic. A lot of your early work that I was exposed to was very diaristic. And I think about it as being on that scale and the matter of interpreting is really for the author or the artist, whereas when you’re in a graphic facilitator, graphic recording setting, I feel like we’re almost like a medium. Being neutral, holding the space for a number of different viewpoints, and having to synthesize those. But the techniques that you mentioned before – the structural techniques like hierarchy, structure, format, white spaces. Those are all obviously things that we broker into. I think that that’s the similarity as well.
Nora Herting: I just want to stop and note we have some amazing people joining us from all over. As nearby to us here at ImageThink as New Jersey, but Albania, Germany, Stockholm. All of you, we really would love to hear from you too. As we’re chatting, put your questions right in and there’ll be an opportunity to hear directly from Mike as well.
Mike’s first sketchnoting experience
Nora Herting: I’m curious, Mike, you mentioned being a designer. Do you remember sort of the first sketchnote you took or the first thing that you recognized as being a sketchnote? And what was the topic at hand?
Mike Rohde: Well, it’s really funny. When I look back in time, even college and even I guess high school, I was actually doing sketchnoting, but I didn’t have a word for it. The funny thing is I encounter people who will come to me and say, “Oh, I’ve been doing sketchnoting for years. I just never knew what to call it.” But for me, the real turning point or the place where I actually made a decision that, “Hey, this is sketchnoting.” was early in 2007. I went to a design conference in Chicago, and I went to try and make sense of information, and to improve myself as a designer.
Mike Rohde: What I focused on was really process. In the past – before this – I had somehow gotten into this weird place where I was recording everything in a giant notebook. I used a pencil so I could erase mistakes – so a nine by twelve notebook with lined pages. And I felt this – I don’t know where this came from, but a compulsion to write everything down, or as much as possible.
Mike Rohde: I just felt like this requirement to write everything. It just got to the point where it was unsustainable. I couldn’t keep going with it. And the weird thing was, is I had all this drawing stuff in my history, and I don’t know how it got lost in the process. I think when I look back, I sort of got into computers at that time, and I think the transition back to paper, I just carried sort of a typing mindset, except without the keyboard. I got to this unsustainable point late in 2006 – I said, “I can’t do it this way anymore.”
Constraints associated with sketchnoting
Mike Rohde: As a designer, I’m almost always faced with a constraint of some kind or another. And sometimes it’s good. I think this can be a practice we can take away: putting a constraint on yourself to see what happens. Do an experiment. So, my experiment was this: What if I go 180 degrees opposite from where I was – big notebook, pencil, write everything down. What if I inverted the whole thing? Then I said, “What if I take this Moleskin notebook that I bought a month ago and is still sitting unwrapped on my desk? What if I use that?” OK, there’s my medium. I don’t want to use pencil. What if I use pen? What if I challenge myself to use a pen?
Mike Rohde: Right there, two of those elements – using a small notebook and a pen pushed me into a place where I could not write everything down because I simply didn’t have enough pages, and I had a pen. If I had mistakes, there was no way to correct them. I had to be really careful. I had to be really thoughtful about what I put on those pages from both of those parts.
Mike Rohde: That led me to the third aspect – which I think is a really big key to sketch noting – which is trying to get to the root of the big idea. That big idea, how can I take something out of it and apply it? You can see I’m really into this practical application side of things. I love theory. I love to think about things, but I also love to apply things like it’s never good enough just to learn about it or let it sit in a library of my mind. How can I apply this idea?
Mike Rohde: I went to this conference in Chicago. I had this small notebook; I had a gel pen – I think it was a Pilot G2. And I just said, “Let’s see what happens.” Faced with the situation of not having to write everything down, suddenly, I felt like I had all this free time. Like, “I don’t have to write everything. I have all this free time!” Then, I started fooling around with lettering because I love lettering and typography. I started doing that.
Mike Rohde: Then there were images on the screen that were interesting. “I have all kinds of free time. Why don’t I start sketching what I’m seeing?” And so, I started sketching images. Of course, I was still writing, but I was writing much less. I was listening for key information and trying to focus on that. Once I started into the groove of it, I really enjoyed it. By the end of the conference, I had so much fun that I shared those sketch notes on Flickr, which in 2006, was the hot social media platform.
The value of sketchnoting
Mike Rohde: And the interesting thing – the last part of it was posting it on Flickr – there were people that were at the conference that actually had presented, that were really surprised by the work that I did. They really liked it and made comments. But then, the real mind changer was when people who were not at the event who were just looking from afar, who happened to follow me in Flickr, saw the sketch notes that I did and found them really useful. They felt that there was value in them, and that they might consider going to this conference if it came near them.
Mike Rohde: There was some value, even though I had intended it for myself. There was some value bound into this work of analysis and sense making and visualization of ideas in a really compact form. Ultimately, it was great because unlike the books where I wrote everything down, which I never looked at, I never actually went back and found value in – these I could flip through in five or 10 minutes and get the gist of the whole event in a really compact way. In a lot of ways, it solved pretty much every problem that I faced with the old way I was taking notes, if that makes sense.
Nora Herting: That’s great. Yeah, I love that story. I also – it was 2006 when I sort of got into this line of work too.
Sketchnoting tips and applications
Nora Herting: And this brings me to some other questions I’m sure our audience is interested in. Specifically, we have someone joining us, Dave Stadler, who’s wondering about this for practical applications for business folks. But when people first start, you had this experience of trying to synthesize or maybe not synthesize, just capture every word that you could.
Nora Herting: I love that analogy of taking the idea of typing and just translating it back, losing that sense of drawing. And we all learned how to draw, right? And how did we get so far away from it? But as people are interested in taking steps to create their own sketchnotes, or in the case, maybe apply this in a work setting, what do you feel like are some things that beginners struggle with or tips that you might have around approach?
Mike Rohde: Well, I think the really big one is when you touched on just a second ago, the ability to draw. Lots of people, maybe in business, the last time they drew was when they were 12 years old in junior high school or something. There’s this huge gap.
Mike Rohde: I would say that in some ways it probably equals, or maybe is even more scary than public speaking. Because, like public speaking, you’re sharing the way you think and how you process information, except you’re doing it with 12-year-old drawing skills. There’s this fear – if I’m a CEO of a company, I’m well regarded, and then I draw like a 12-year-old, what are people going to think of me? I’m just not going to draw or profusely apologize for my bad drawing. That’s not so much of a great solution either. You’re now admitting some failing, which might be a challenge.
Mike Rohde: Pretty quickly, when it came to the point of doing the books specifically, the challenge was: how do we teach people to draw simply, in a way that they can understand and absorb and apply that will give them a little more confidence to move forward to the next thing? If you feel like you can’t draw well, or at all, sketchnoting is pretty much off the table. That was the first challenge that I faced.
Mike Rohde: In the book, after sort of contemplating what those challenges were and how to solve it, I realized a lot of the way that I drew wasn’t so much observational drawing. It was more: how do I structure images in a simple way? When you’re in a situation where you’re sketchnoting or graphic recording, you don’t have a lot of time. You have to move quickly. You have to have a simple way to draw things.
Five basic drawing elements
Mike Rohde: I broke it down to basically five elements, a square, a circle, a triangle, a line and a dot. I specifically chose those five because they were so rememberable. I think the Dunbar number is five plus or minus two – it fell within that range that it was pretty rememberable. It sort of ended up being a blessing, because it got people into a mindset when I shared it with them, that it was more like working with a set of Lego blocks than it was drawing. You have these elements that you are sort of confined to. Here come constraints again. Now you’re just putting these constrained elements together to make images.
Mike Rohde: That gives you the flexibility of circles can be ovals, and squares can be rectangles or parallelograms. There’s actually a lot more variation in these five elements if you push the boundaries. Ultimately, all these are made up of a bunch of dots sort of lined up in a certain way. If you really wanted to boil it down to one element of drawing, it’s a dot. But I didn’t think that would sell many books. I spread it out a little bit and really made it sort of simple and rememberable. I know there’s other people in the visual thinking space who have more elements of drawing, and I think that’s okay; I just felt like five was really rememberable and it was easy to teach it. People responded to it.
Mike Rohde: In the many workshops that I’ve taught this concept – this is always the foundational first hour of any workshop that I do, because I’ve just seen it work too many times. I go into a room, and I ask people, “Who thinks they can’t draw?” and 80% of the room’s hands go up.
Mike Rohde: By the end of the one hour, these people all feel like they can confidently draw a little bit better than when they came in the door. That’s a huge win, because it sort of moves them past the first tripping point into actually trying things. I just want you to feel like you’re in a safe place and you can try things out. By giving you this really simple structure, it puts you in a safe space where you can explore and experiment and try these things. Then you can sort of open yourself up to, “Wow, I actually can draw these things in a simple way if I approach it a different way than I thought I should.”
Ideas, not art
Mike Rohde: That leads to my big mantra: ideas, not art. It sounds really provocative, but in a sense, it’s not. It’s really ordering. Maybe it’s more, ideas then art. There’s so much baggage around art for people like that CEO who hasn’t drawn since they were in middle school. If there’s a burden or a worry about drawing – if you take that away because you’re focusing on the ideas, like, “I’m just drawing ideas. It’s not going in a gallery.” It sort of drops all the pressure a lot and makes it possible for someone to begin. Ultimately that’s where we have the big trouble is just starting someplace. If you don’t start, you’re never going to progress. The real spark is that starting.
Mike Rohde: I felt way down deep at the core for anybody who wants to do this sketchnoting, is to really simplify what you consider drawing and use this simple way of approaching it. Then think of it as just putting these pieces together as a starting place. The sky’s the limit as far as you want to push – making this into art if you wish – but you don’t feel like you have to do art to begin.
Nora Herting: Yeah. Dave Stadler’s question about businesspeople and how do we get them to stop the flow of working or doing so they could take small steps. I think you zoned in on what the barrier is. I’ve encountered that with people who think that they can’t draw. It does seem really intimidating.
Nora Herting: I have to tell you that I’ve used your kind of alphabet before in trainings we’ve done. And honestly, I’m like, “Oh, this seems so elementary.” But one person after we did this exercise, their mind was blown. They said, “This was the best thing ever.” I’m like, “Really? We just talked about a square, triangle…” It seems to me so self-evident, but it’s so empowering to people to be reminded of how simple it can be. So perhaps, Dave, to take that to heart is introduce that one exercise. I’ve seen it be effective even in a 15-minute window where you go through those basic building blocks, if you will.
Style and sketchnoting
Nora Herting: There’s another question here, Helma from Germany, thank you, is asking how you developed your own personal style of sketchnoting. I thought that this would be a great question, because this also gives us an opportunity of putting up some of the work that that you’ve done that, we have the privilege of looking at as well.
Mike Rohde: Yeah, that would be great. At first, we talked about the five basic shapes. If you’re just beginning, don’t worry about style yet. You’re just building the foundational pieces to get yourself comfortable with drawing.
Mike Rohde: I’m a fan and a friend of Austin Klehan, and he says, “Whatever you do is your style.” I think if I look back at my style – and I believe this about other people – is, everything you’ve done up to this point is feeding your style perspective. The billboards you see, the comics you read, the movies you like, the music you like, all those things feed into it. It produces sort of a way of looking at the world. What you take in can influence that.
Mike Rohde: If you’re interested, if you get beyond the basics, if you feel like you want to have a style, because in many cases, someone might just be happy with being able to draw. It’s enough for them. They never maybe want to exceed this basic idea drawing thing. And that’s just fine. If that works for them, that’s really what it’s all about.
Mike’s style influences
Mike Rohde: If you want to go to the next level and develop a style, that’s where I think it can be really helpful to sort of pick some favorites or be a fan of a certain style. If I look back in my history, I was a huge fan in the 80s of a comic called Daredevil. There was an artist for Daredevil, Frank Miller, who many later know as the director of Sin City, he had other influences on other culture. At the time, his style of Daredevil was really different from every other comic that at least I had experienced. It had a really bold style – I think he was using lots of ink. If you think about comics, they traditionally have these panels, and they tended to be regular and you just sort of got into a rhythm with them. He never accepted that.
Mike Rohde: He would break panels across spreads. He would make a panel run all the way from the bottom of the page to the top of the page. Sometimes, he would take one image and spread it across a whole two page spread. He was really pushing the boundaries of what comics could do. And his style was really bold. I think that was a heavy influence on me as well as other artists.
How to develop your own sketchnoting style
Mike Rohde: For developing your own style, I would say, start looking around for the stuff you admire. And maybe the first place to start is simply to copy that stuff. I think copying is a really valuable way to learn what you like about something. By copying it, you understand, “What is it that I like and don’t like?” especially if you’re trying to be aware of it. “What is difficult?” Like, “Wow, that’s harder than I thought it would be.” That makes you really appreciate that other person’s work in a new way because you realize what they’ve gone through to achieve it. But it also helps guide you. “Do I really like that enough to incorporate it?” And then, “How can I put a little twist on it to make it mine?”
Mike Rohde: There are all these inputs. I think your own personality sort of puts it in the spin cycle. What comes out over time becomes your style. I think it’s a natural progression and that it changes a little bit over time. I think it’s a reflection of personality. It’s what I love about sketchnotes that I see – I love seeing the variety of styles. And I love that I can spot something and say, “Oh, that’s Maro Tiselli.” “Oh, that’s Rob D’Amillo.” Oh, that’s Eva Lottam.”
Mike Rohde: My favorite friends or other people, I started identifying their styles just simply by looking at it almost the way – when I was a young graphic designer, I could identify typefaces. I started to just really study them. What was unique about Gil Sands that made it unique? When I would see that character, I could say, “Oh, that’s a Gil Sands” because the “R” looks a certain way. Or whatever the characteristic was in the same way. You can do that with people’s styles.
Nora Herting: Great. Well, to that point, I think we have some of your work through different topics and times to take a look at now, Matt, if you want to put those up, some of them.
Sketchnoting sermons
Nora Herting: I know that what is interesting to me is that you covered so many different topics. As you were talking about getting started, it was the design conference, but I also know that you also – on Sundays sketchnote the church services that you attend. So – and we’ll look at these in a minute – is there certain topics that you find more enjoyable or ones that you find personally a little bit more challenging? How does the topic potentially change your approach, if at all, to some of the design elements you’ve talked about?
Mike Rohde: That’s some interesting questions. The sermon story is basically that I attend church every Sunday. It used to be in person, now we’re doing it remotely, and eventually we’ll go back. I sort of realized sitting there – I have 35 or 40 minutes of opportunity to really push some boundaries to test things, and to experiment and practice. If anything, I’m just practicing, even if it’s not the best sketchnote I’ve ever done. Keeping myself active and continuously practicing was a good pressure, I thought. So, I started bringing my notebook and doing this work.
Mike Rohde: And then, when I had the iPad Pro, I started doing the iPad Pro for a variety of reasons, some of which are just speed and editability. If I wanted to edit things, I built a workflow around that. Each Sunday, I attend service either virtually or in person and I use the iPad Pro to capture the concepts and produce them. As it turned out, again, I did it for myself as practice, but it turned out to be an interesting solution for the other parishioners. Once the leadership team at the church found that I was doing this, they invited me to share that with the leadership team. Now when they post audio of the sermons, or video and questions for the small groups that talk about them, they always include the sketchnote that I’ve done, if I do one.
Mike Rohde: I’ve heard from many parishioners that prepare for small groups that they’ll often listen to the audio and look at the sketchnote as they’re listening and follow it or use it as a quick reference as part of their preparation. I really never intended it to be that, but I’m really happy that it worked out that way. I think sometimes what you think is not important can actually be really valuable to other people. That’s something I’ve learned from doing the sketchnoting stuff that even though it is first for me, it can be valuable for other people.
Sketchnoting food
Mike Rohde: And as far as other stuff that I like to do, I like eating, I like delicious food, I love experiences. Sketchnoting my food experiences is really fun. Usually, I’m smart enough to eat first and take photos, and then I’ll sketch note from the photos because I don’t want to ruin that experience. I’ve had some really great experiences I feel fortunate to capture.
Mike Rohde: As an example, I was able to go to Chez Panisse out in Berkeley, many years ago to the cafe one night on a work trip. Two of my colleagues and I happened to be there. I happened to have my notebook and my pen, and I sketchnoted the experience. Even looking at that really rough, black and white sketchnote, which only really captures a little bit of information, it really brings back that memory – the whole memory comes back. I’ve done it in other cases. I love Thai food, so Thai restaurants.
Nora Herting: I was so happy that you pulled these food ones, which I happen to just see. I know they’re from several years back, but what I loved about them was, I recognized that you were using a Noylan – a brush pen. It was a different tool, which of course really changes the way you can capture. When you were mentioning how you move from a pencil to a pen, when we’re training people at ImageThink, oftentimes, back to thinking about the difference of what we do and you do is what we’re doing is for service for a group, so the scale is much bigger. But oftentimes when people get started, they’re used to drawing for themselves. So sometimes the font is too small. One way to rectify that is we make them use the biggest marker possible.
Style evolution
Nora Herting: It was interesting to see, you shift the tool, obviously that changes your technique, which comes to a question from Chris Coleman. Chris, it’s so great to see you. Thanks for joining us. Chris is a longtime fan of the work that you do and visual thinking and actually a fantastic illustrator himself. But he’s asking, how do you feel your style has evolved over time? You spoke a little bit to your influences, but potentially also, is it sometimes you just experiment with different tools and see how that shapes or influences your style?
Mike Rohde: Yeah. If you look at my work, you’ll see and if you follow me, you’ll see that I’m really into experimentation. I don’t know where I discovered it, but I discovered the pocket Pentel brush pen, which is easy to carry in a pocket. It’s got a cap, but it’s a full brush with cartridges. My friends at Baron Fig made a really great little notebook – super small pocket size notebook of the Baron Fig confidant.
Mike Rohde: When I was traveling to New York City and to other places, I could stick that little, tiny notebook in my back pocket and have my Pentel brush pen, and typically a flare pen. I would go into restaurants, and it was such a small package. It was easy for me to capture these experiences. Often, I would show it to the people who ran the restaurant. They would really enjoy it, take pictures. It became sort of a social opportunity.
Mike Rohde: As far as, my style over time, I think some things I’ve discovered is, if I look really far back, back in high school, I could not write upper and lowercase letters. I really got into this architect hand kind of look. And I wrote everything this way. I felt it was really limiting, and I had to force myself – over probably like two years – to write everything upper and lowercase. I think that played a benefit in my handwriting getting improved, although I certainly can have my messy moments. It led to having that as a component.
Lettering
Mike Rohde: Something recently in the last three years I’ve really been interested in script. Whether it’s brush script with that brush pen or writing faux script with any kind of pen and either just single line faux script, which looks like script, but it doesn’t have the thicks and thins. You can fake those by thickening parts. That’s been an interesting thing because it’s a little bit softer.
Mike Rohde: And then, also sort of bringing back in all caps for emphasis. If there’s something I really want to emphasize, I might do a mix of like regular lettering and then I’ll switch into script, and then I might go into all caps and mix them up. If I really want to punch it, maybe I do something bold and compressed. All that study of typography has helped me in a lot of ways because I have this catalog of my imagination of typefaces that I can draw from and turn into lettering in my sketchnotes. If you look at my work, you’ll see that lettering is a really strong part of it.
Mike Rohde: I would say the part that I’m weakest at is actually portraits. I think portraits are really tough because I always feel like I want to capture the best side of someone. I see the best sides of people, and I feel unless I can capture them in a way that flatters them or makes them feel the best that they are, I’m always afraid that I’m going to do something to make them like, “I hate that drawing of myself.” It ruins the whole thing for that person. I haven’t actually experienced that. Most people are really appreciative. I pressure myself to try and capture those portraits as accurately as possible with pictures and such. But I would say faces and probably hands, of course, everyone would say hands are tough to draw as well.
Nora Herting: Yeah, I agree. Although there’s some people in the ImageThink team that really, really love hands.
Mike Rohde: Maybe I need to talk to them.
Nora Herting: We can have a tutorial on hands, but I agree. It can be very expressive, definitely. One question, and we have so many to cover. There’s some great questions coming in around applications. Again, I like how you’re a practicalist, about applying what this looks like for people. I know you’ll have great answers and thoughts around that. Then also, we’re on this virtual space. We really want to hear about that transition for you, too. Before we move on from that, another question that came up is sort of around synthesis.
Common misconceptions about sketchnoting
Nora Herting: Two comments, there’s a comment from – I think it was Bob – who said, he feels that professional work that’s too beautiful or too expertly drawn to him can actually distract people from the true meaning of what’s captured. And I’m curious what your thoughts are around that. Clearly, you’re an accomplished illustrator, you have that skill. Do you feel that that sometimes can kind of work against the experience?
Mike Rohde: Well, it sounds like for Bob, that’s the case. I can’t deny his experience. I would say that the thing I see a challenge around really good illustrators is often they get hung up in the details of the drawing and lose the analysis of the moment – I know I’ve caught myself doing it. I’m not throwing stones at anybody but myself.
Mike Rohde: I always say I would rather see a really, really sketchy, loose, imperfect sketchnote that actually captures the concept, than a beautiful illustration. I think it’s uncommon to see a beautiful drawing that doesn’t capture the point. I think it’s being captured. But I think sometimes you can find yourself so lost in the drawing part of it that you’re missing the connections in subtle ways that only the person who’s catching it might notice. I think it certainly could be a distraction for someone.
Information overload
Mike Rohde: I find some other distractions are really busy sketchnotes, where you’re just filling the page with so much information, because you’re afraid to make a decision about “I’m not going to capture that.” That comes into another design principle, white space. White space refocuses your attention on the things that are in the space – it’s part of the image as much as the drawing is. The space that you leave is as much part of that as anything.
Mike Rohde: When you really put too much information on a page, it’s really hard to consume. And I could see almost like a cognitive overload for someone where if they don’t know where to begin, and it’s just too much information, they may not never begin. There’s another challenge, that having something too overloaded could be a problem as well. There’s a variety of challenges that we face doing any kind of visual work to find balance and structure and white space and style that walks these lines and balances all these parts.
Nora Herting: Yeah, that’s, that’s true. Definitely, you can run into some problems with white space. Claude might be running into it because we have so much more content, but it’s been awesome. I see that they’ve captured some hands for us there too.
Shifts in the field of sketchnoting
Nora Herting: I’m going to ask this kind of in two parts, because Lisa Rostein has a great question that dovetails kind of opposite of the first part of the question, which is, since you started in 2006, kind of developing sketch notes, and I started or 2007 rather, I started 2006, working as a graphic facilitator. In my opinion, I think I’ve seen a shift in the business world, certainly, around the power of visuals. And I’m wondering if – I think you’ve played a large part in that in terms of building a community building the sketch note army, and you founded Official Sketchnote Day, which is incredible. We talked already about how those are a little bit different – the two disciplines – but I’m curious, have you felt that things have shifted in those 13 plus years you’ve been doing this work?
Mike Rohde: I think in a lot of ways, of course, there’s more people doing it. There’s lots of Germans that have jumped on the sketch noting and also the graphic recording and graphic facilitation space. There is definitely an international movement. I mean, back when I started this in 2007, I had no clue that 10 years later, something there would be. I think there’s international sketch note camp happened three times in Hamburg, actually four times, Hamburg, Portugal, Paris, and then we almost had Belgium, but things didn’t work out. So, I mean, there is definitely a community that’s grown up around it sort of self-selecting and seeing the work and wanting to be part of it.
Mike Rohde: I think there’s also a change in that there’s lots of schoolteachers, both at elementary and secondary and even at college levels, who are realizing the benefits of visualization for their students as just another communication and a way of expressing and capturing ideas for both retention and organization and making sense of things. Teachers are another component.
Mike Rohde: When I wrote the books that we had not really considered at the time, we didn’t even know if the book would sell, we just we thought it was really good. And our target market were people like me user experience and other designers who were the ones doing it at the time. But now here, several years later, we’ve actually got schoolteachers that are implementing it and finding it really valuable for their students and a way to keep yourself busy in a class. Why couldn’t we leverage that for students that really have to be kinetic? To have something to do that’s intentional, that actually benefits them. There’s another thing.
Mike Rohde: I think the last thing I’ll say is I think there there’s definitely been a push towards more visualization. Maybe it has to do with the capacity of the internet to support this. In 2007, you know, us doing this event would be really painful, expensive, and not many people would show up. Because the technology wasn’t there, not to the degree that it is now. Technology had a part to play in it, emphasizing our visual natures, because we are built to be visual.
Mike Rohde: Things like Instagram, or any of these software tools where they rely on seeing things. TikTok, and even Facebook and other things. There’s all this visual information for you to process that I think now it’s become possible that you can actually deliver that stuff in an effective way. And it’s democratized where regular people can have huge followings and have an impact and use visuals effectively. I think that those three things probably have had an impact and probably are tied together. And there may be even more that I’m not considering that had an impact as well.
Nora Herting: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I always tell people that ImageThink didn’t invent the idea of visuals as a leadership tool, it really started in 30,000 BC with cave paintings. But certainly, I think that in the time that we’ve been in the space, there’s been a prevalence of, or a shift of – first it was early adapters, and now we work with companies of all sizes kind and across industries. But at the same time, there’s still occasionally resistance to it, which I think comes to Lisa’s question.
What is the ROI of sketchnoting?
Nora Herting: She is asking how to demonstrate the ROI of sketchnoting or use cases for people in terms of visual thinking and business. I think that that’s an interesting question. There’s a lot of neuroscience, if you’ve joined us, we had neuroscientist on. And I think that’s what you’re saying, Mike. I think people are recognizing there’s so such a surfeit of information, and we do enjoy consuming information visually. But when asked where are the hard facts for this as a tool, do you point to anything? Or, for you – as you’re saying for sketchnoting – it’s usually for the individual, for the student or for the journaler. Is that something that you encounter at all?
Mike Rohde Well, kind of going back to my epiphany when I first did sketch noting is – I did it for myself first, but then I discovered that other people found value. Even people that weren’t at the event could still get value from it. I think the ROI – and I don’t know if there’s numbers associated with it would be – there’s always going to be value in business for someone who can take lots of conflicting and confusing and overload of information, analyze it, make sense of it, and map it out and tell a story with it using visuals in a really compact way.
Mike Rohde: If you think about the situation we’re in now with COVID-19, so many people are – I’m working at home, I’ve been home since March. There’s lots of people – we’re sort of getting in some ways overloaded with as great as these meetings are, there’s a sort of peak Zoom meeting that you can reach. I don’t want to watch a replay of 10 Zoom meetings from earlier today. If there’s someone who is assigned to do that work and capture the gist of it and show you the high-level analysis that could be really valuable for an executive especially.
Mike Rohde: If an executive is given a choice of having to read you know a 20–45-page word document, notes with every last note of the thing and then have to watch the videos to go with it, I think they would probably turn around and run screaming. If there’s a way where you can consolidate this information in a really high-level way, I think about it almost as levels of detail. A sketchnote or graphic recording is a level of detail that’s in some ways maybe like an executive summary. It captures the concepts. If someone’s making an analysis and giving you their take on what they heard – if you don’t believe it, okay. You can go rewatch the whole hour meeting and verify that information if you wish.
Mike Rohde: If someone had written detailed notes that they included you can do search ability and stuff. There’s different degrees of detail that you could provide, and maybe that’s all part of it. It’s a sketchnote at one level, and detailed notes below it, and then a link to the recording at the bottom. Why couldn’t that be a really valuable ROI deliverable? You go as deep as you’ve got time for, and then you’ve got a reference if you ever have to go back to it.
Nora Herting: Right. It’s sort of the way you were saying earlier that we’re reading short form writing now. Sometimes they even tell you, “Three-minute read” – The New York Times does this thing now where basically they bullet point the high level in the article before you go down to the article. There’s evidence that we’re trying to process information and different densities all over the place.
How working virtually has impacted sketchnoting
Nora Herting: Now here we are – to your point – working virtually and having our interactions inside these windows. I’m curious, and we have a question also from the audience on LinkedIn around – how has working virtually changed your practice? What tools are you using? I know that you’ve been developing some really interesting things around you know building community and teaching using a virtual platform. What would you like to share with us about how this has shaped your work over the last few months?
Mike Rohde: I have been – since the iPad Pro came out – I’ve been an early adopter. The key thing for me with the iPad Pro wasn’t so much the iPad Pro itself, but the pencil and the integration with the screen. Because of the high-quality drawing ability that I could produce, and then the software that was available to do things like you’re seeing Claude doing right now – being able to work with layers and colors and make modifications. I was a pretty relatively early adopter. I think my first one was a 9.7 iPad Pro and a pencil. It was a huge game changer for me in my in the work setting as a user experience designer. I used it for capturing notes and meetings. That was an early tool.
Mike Rohde: I found that really useful to be able to do sketch notes on an iPad. Then they’re very easily shareable. Again, as we talked about that ROI question, having a sketch note that I could – half an hour after I go through and check for typos and tweak things up to share that with my team on my take of what we talked about for the last hour. They could be refreshed or whatever, so that’s one thing. I think having the power to do video – so another nice thing about the iPad is I can plug it into my Mac with a cable and share it. I can actually do live drawing with other people a lot like what you see Claude doing – same kind of idea. There’s level two.
Virtual visualization tools
Mike Rohde: And then for analog, I’ve done some teachings. You sort of alluded to this teaching work that I’m doing. I found ways to use my iPhone with a cable, and some software to actually project my notebook. Stuff I want to work in an analog way and show that. I can share that through the through the computer in a visual way. The last thing I would say for tools that I find useful would be a tool called Miro or Mural – the two tools that are really popular right now.
Mike Rohde: The limitation is they’re not great for drawing, simply because drawing tools are just not that common. It’s more common to see a mouse or trackpad, and they’re not great for drawing. But for many other things like sticky notes, and being able to build things collaboratively – I think that’s where the value of those come in. Certainly, you could draw something on an iPad or in an analog way, take a photo, and then drop that into a Miro or Mural board and work with those tools to make use of visuals and writing and stuff like that. Those are some of the ways that I’m finding it useful to communicate and collaborate.
Nora Herting: Great, great. The iPad Procreate – no surprise there. You’re even working with your teams and some of these collaborative visual platforms, even though drawing isn’t necessarily part of it. But they are inherently visual – those programs – even if we’re not able to draw in them.
Nora Herting: Great. So now, something else that I really appreciate about you. Obviously, your sketch notes are beautiful, you’ve broken it down. You’ve been able to really speak about it in a design language, how people can apply it. It’s really though, the amount of community building and teaching that you’ve done over your career. I mentioned the sketchbook army. You’ve been involved in a number of things virtually lately, these days. I’m curious, you talked about Sketch Camp which I didn’t I didn’t even know about. How amazing is that? That would have been a camp I would have died to go to when I was 13.
The Sketchnote Army
Nora Herting: What do you think the sketchnote army and the sketch note community brings to people? Why has it been such a success? What is it tapping into? We talked a little bit about how it’s easy for people to ingest but for people to do. What do you think that – if you had to sort of summarize that community and characterize it – how would you?
Mike Rohde: I would say it’s a very welcoming community. I think if you go back, the sketchnote army has been around since 2009, so it was only two years after I began the experimentation. What I realized was there was lots of work going around, but there was no central place to really find it. I felt like, well what if? Why don’t I just make the place? So, I reserved the space and started posting the things I was finding as a way to share it and say, “Hey, this is really interesting. Check this out.”
The Sketchnote Handbook
Mike Rohde: And it was a focus on the variety. And then later, when I had my book, the Sketchnote Handbook -that really was that really influenced me. The idea that there’s a community out here and people with different styles, that led me, in the book, the Sketchnote Handbook, to emphasize the variety. I invited lots of other people to submit samples. I managed all those submissions, invited other sketch noters to have full spreads in the book, so they could explain sketchnoting and techniques with a full two page spread in the book to really show that there’s many ways to do it.
Mike Rohde: I think sort of the emphasis was there’s no one way to do it. It’s not the “Mike Rhode” way of doing sketchnoting. Sketchnoting is just something I stumbled on to and has worked for me. I knew that would work for others and it has. Opening it up for other interpretations just makes it a lot more inviting and approachable. I think that the core of all those things continued. The way that early on, people were invited and welcomed and encouraged them to then do the same for other new people that came or to tell friends, or to become in many ways evangelists of the idea and then bring other people in. It’s sort of a self-perpetuating engine in some ways.
The International Sketchnote Camp
Mike Rohde: Once you sort of set the criteria – this is how we work, and this is people like us do things like this. I think that’s a Seth Godin quote. That was sort of what was set really early on. There was just a real sort of established mindset of sharing and encouragement and help. If someone needed help, they could ask in this environment and people would be there to help them. I think that then led to everything else.
Mike Rohde: The International Sketchnote Camp came from four German women that were really into sketchnoting and they wanted to do something physical. They just did it. Bound into it too, was a little bit of a mindset of doing it yourself. You don’t have to necessarily ask anyone for permission. We invite you to come and do your thing and we’ll support you. So, that I think is also less visible but in there. Each year someone else, some other group would take that Sketchnote camp. The second one was in Portugal, and then third one in Paris, and this September we would have done one in Belgium had we not had a virus, and it probably would have continued.
Mike Rohde: It’s sort of a community sort of building itself in a lot of ways, but a lot of it was establishing sort of the principles and the way we work early on. It’s just been continuing. And then that group kind of polices itself. I think it draws people that are interested in those ideals. It’s been a real fun experience. Probably the proudest thing in my work is seeing that a community is formed around this.
How to start sketchnoting
Nora Hertig: Yeah, it’s tremendous. I mean, it sounds like anyone can become a new recruit for the sketchnote army. Sort of self-recruit self-identify. For those people who are going to do that, what words of encouragement or tips would you give someone who’s about to embark on this sketchnote journey?
Mike Rohde: Yeah, I would say coming back to the basics: the five basic shapes. Really focus on keeping it simple, and working and think of everything is an experiment. I think that’s a really helpful mindset. When you start with really basic elements, you can strain yourself.
Mike Rohde: Then maybe you begin with recorded talks like TED Talks or something where you have control over the pause. If something’s going too fast, you can certainly pause it and have control over the flow of information until you get to where you feel confident that you could do it live. There’s no reason that you have to throw yourself off into the deep end. So, starting with those simple shapes, think of everything as an experiment. If something goes wrong, don’t beat yourself up over what you did wrong, but learn from that. Like, “What did I do wrong here? Maybe I was just trying to do too much.” “What if on the next try, I stopped myself?” – I can only write something down every two minutes or something. Some way of metering yourself.
Strive for progress
Mike Rohde: And then finally, I think the last thing is to give yourself lots of grace because it’s lots of cognitive work that you’re doing – this analysis. It’s really exciting and it’s really valuable. I think you remember a lot more and it’s enjoyable. You can definitely get in a flow state if that’s something you want to get into. But you have to have lots of grace for yourself because it’s going to take time to get up to speed and you have to just be okay with that.
Mike Rohde: Think of that a whole thing is an experiment and to see how it builds over time so that you’re not putting all this pressure. I have to be as amazing as Claude the first time I try it. Claude’s got lots and lots and lots of experience to produce the level of quality that you see. You cannot compare yourself to Claude’s work, because Claude is a different person and is at a different experience. Everything that has come before has influenced the work. You have to be who you are and have grace for yourself and look for progress. I think that’s really key too is, focus on progress and not on some artificial – I have to do X number of this. Often that can backfire on you. Progress is way better.
Adaptability
Nora Herting: So to summarize some of those great – that was a lot of gems. Like us, we also have people start off with TED Talks. Or something that’s coherent also, like an excellent speaker, so you can pause to take the pressure off yourself. Don’t try to be Claude right away.
Mike Rohde: Yeah.
Nora Herting: You know, grace. I love the way you said that, grace. And leaning into mistakes. For us, when we’re working analog, there is no erasing, and you’re in front of people. So how do you just adapt and be very adaptive to things that happen? That’s also a great takeaway as well. And then, learn from the things that maybe you don’t love about your work or your capture. Hopefully that answers some of those questions around getting started.
Where Mike Rohde is sketchnoting now
Nora Herting: And before we wrap up, Mike, it’s been so great to get a chance to connect with you, even though it’s virtual. It’s been too long. I want to give you a chance: what’s next for you? Where can we find you next? Where will you be hosting or part of a community event for folks that are interested and want to be enlisted in the sketchnote army? Tell us where we can find you. Also, what’s coming up for you that you’d like to share? We can share with our audience here on LinkedIn.
Mike Rohde: Sure thing. I’m really active these days on Instagram, although I’m also on Twitter. Both those handles typically are always Rohdesign, R-O-H-D-E-S-I-G-N. You can find my site at Rohdesign.com. I would encourage you go to sketchnotearmy.com and just sort of look through the archives.
Upcoming sketchnoting activities
Mike Rohde: Something new that’s coming – I can mention in September is the Sketchnote Army Podcast, which is kind of funny to have a podcast about visual things, but actually really works. It is interviewing really interesting visual thinkers from all over the place in those podcasts. So that’s coming soon.
Mike Rohde: And then, there’s going to be a variety of activities coming up, I’m sure, where I’ll be appearing online and doing some teaching. I’m sort of in the skunk works. I can say that I’m working on some live workshops where we’re going to be doing really fun exploration of sketchnoting and building skills for those who are sort of in an intermediate level. That’s definitely happening soon. And then, of course, probably the last thing I can mention is my work done on a Kickstarter campaign for something called the Sketch Note Idea Book, which you can find at sketchnoteideabook.com. It’s a notebook that’s really designed for sketchnoters, with really thick white paper and a polymer cover that will take a beating and references if you’re a new sketchnoter for the basic shapes and the different layouts you can consider inside the front and back covers.
Nora Herting: That sounds awesome. I’ve seen that on Kickstarter and it looks great. I think there’s some perforated paper in there too?
Mike Rohde: Right. Yeah. I have a library page.
Nora Herting: Lined notebooks are banned anywhere near me in the ImageThink office.
Mike Rohde: You’d love these.
Nora Herting: Yeah – too constraining. Never liked that. Never liked coloring books as a kid. I didn’t want anybody else putting their ideas on me. I love the free form that you have. Thank you. Thanks, Mike.
Closing
Nora Herting: So, you heard it. Follow Mike. Visit Sketchnote Army and stay tuned for some online courses. It sounds incredible. An incredible opportunity to be able to work with you on those, Mike, and the Sketch Note Idea Book coming out. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining us, everybody, on LinkedIn. Round of applause for Claude.
Nora Herting: Not an easy task to capture visually from one of the pioneers in the field. Hats off to you, Claude. And thank you again, Mike. Thanks for joining.
Mike Rohde: Not a problem. Claude, I tried to give you as many word pictures as I could. So hopefully that helped a little bit. Great job!
