Storyline Conference Sketchnotes

I'VE BEEN BACK HOME for a week since attending Donald Miller's Storyline Conference in Portland Oregon. While I was there, I captured live sketchnotes of the event for myself and to share with others. I had a fabulous time.

I was inspired by the stories Don shared, encouraged to review and better understand my history and challenged to live a better story.

If you look at the Storyline Flickr set, you'll see iPhone photos of my sketchnotes taken at the event (black & white) and the scans with cream backgrounds.

The sketchnotes have been well-received by Don himself, fellow Storyline attendees and even those who weren't able to make the event:

"Check out @rohdesign's notes from the recent Storyline Conference!"
- Don Miller

"Mike, thanks for doing this and putting them out there. A "light" went inside my head today on Donald Miller's book "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" and the "spark" is your notes you took. I will report back to you and then you know how things are going."
- Chad Jackson

"Thank you, thank you!!! I was just the slightest bit devasted that I couldn't make it to Storyline and what a blessing to get to read this!! And the design made me want to go make stuff. Thanks, endlessly, again..."
- Tonya

"Awesome!! Can't wait to look through these! What a treat for those of us who didn't make it!!!!"
- Kim Alford

I've included the entire set of scanned sketchnotes here for your viewing enjoyment.

Be sure to check out my Portland Travelogue Sketchnotes too.

Portland Travelogue

WE'VE JUST RETURNED from a wonderful 5 day trip to Portland, Oregon, for Don Miller's Storyline Conference. During our travels, I captured a sketchnote travelogue and photos shot on my iPhone of our experiences in Portland.

I've decided to post my sketchnote travelogue and selected photos here, to speak for themselves.The complete set of sketchnotes and photos are on Flickr.

Storyline Conference Sketchnotes I captured live are also on Flickr and I'll post my thoughts and sketchnotes from Storyline next week.

We can't wait to visit Portland again soon.

Resources

Post: Living a Better Life Story: Storyline Conference

ImageThink Blog: Travel Sketchnotes

Today I'm honored to have a guest post on creating sketchnotes of travel experiences published on the ImageThink blog.

ImageThink is a graphic recording and graphic facilitation firm in New York City, run by Nora Herting and Heather Willems. They specialize in large-scale captures and interactive facilitation of meetings using drawing.

Thanks Nora and Heather for the opportunity!

Pipeline RailsConf Illustration

LATE FRIDAY I received a message from David Heinemeier Hansson, requesting a slide illustration for his RailsConf 2011 keynote.

David is a partner at 37signals, co-author of REWORK (the book I illustrated) and creator of the Ruby on Rails development framework.

David provided his talk title The Asset Pipeline and our Post-Modern, Hybrid, Javascript Future, along with notes about pipelines and a Jetson-like spaceship he envisioned. Beyond that, I was free to have some fun with the illustration.

iPad Concepting

I grabbed my iPad for concepting, using Penultimate with my finger and Stylus Sock Pro to sketch several concepts. This is the final, approved sketch:

The iPad and Penultimate worked well for these rough concepts. I was able to get several ideas down quickly and email them directly to David from the iPad for review.

Inking and Production

With the concept and general direction set, I brought out my large Moleskine sketchbook, penciled in the rough imagery and began inking the pipeline, landscape, space ships and several bits of hand-drawn typography.

Here you can see the pages where I inked the illustration. Note how pieces are spread out on the page and not in any specific order — that's because I scan the pieces and assemble them in Photoshop. This approach provides control and lets me make changes quickly.

Once the pieces were scanned and assembled, the final slide looked like this:

I was very happy with the end result. Having just finished watching Mad Men Season 4 last week, I was definitely channeling 1965 into the final illustration.

David was very pleased with the results as well:

I'll be keynoting tomorrow morning on this topic at RailsConf: http://yfrog.com/hs1p4pp (illustration by the wonderful @rohdesign)less than a minute ago via Tweetie for Mac Favorite Retweet ReplyDHH
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Thanks David!

UPDATE - David mentioned this article on the 37signals blog, Signal vs. Noise.

Chick-fil-A Leadercast Sketchnotes

ON MAY 6TH, I had an amazing opportunity to sketchnote the Chick-fil-A Leadercast in Atlanta, Georgia. In April I wrote about being commissioned to sketchnote the event. Now that my work is done, I'd say the Leadercast exceeded my expectations.

Giant Impact, organizers of Chick-fil-A Leadercast were superb. On Thursday, I was flown to Atlanta, provided a room at the Omni and invited to the speaker dinner. On Friday I captured live sketchnotes at the Georgia Word Congress Center from a VIP lounge chair.

The extreme lighting which made the stage look great, made my sketchnoting task challenging. However, I found a pop light on a table near my white Don Draper lounge chair, which perfectly illuminated my Moleskine sketchbook for most of the day.

Here's the full collection of sketchnotes captured live at Chick-fil-A Leadercast:

It was fascinating to hear all eleven speakers in a single, one-day track. Every speaker had a unique way of presenting and a unique, thought-provoking perspective on leadership.

Sketchnoting Field Tips & Notes

There were several new approaches I tried with these sketchnotes which worked quite well that I'd like to record for myself and share with you:

Pre-created Speaker Title Pages - Thursday evening before the event, I took time to create title pages for each of the speakers, with 8 blank pages between each title page.

I this way, I made sure names were spelled correctly in the calm environment of my hotel. Pre-creating title pages provided an orderly structure when I started working on Friday, freeing me to focus on capturing ideas rather than sweating those details during the event.

A Portable Light Source - Finding a pop light for a portable light source was a happy accident. I should have brought my little book light, but forgot it at home. Fortunately, the pop light's diffused glow worked well, even though I had to hold it with my left hand.

An iPad & iPhone - I decided to travel without a laptop, carrying only my iPad 2 and iPhone 3GS. Besides being lighter than a MacBook, he iPad came in handy as a portable table for my Moleskine while sitting in the lounge chair and as a laptop replacement.

Unfortunately, Flickr isn't well optimized for touch, so editing my sketchnote photos with the iPad was less than ideal. I'm investigating iOS tools like Flickr Studio and hope to find an app that allows me to manage my Flickr images on the road.

The iPhone worked great for capturing photos of the sketchnotes in progress. During breaks I found decent lighting backstage to take shots of each page with Camera+. On each shot, I applied the flash filter for contrast, converted the color images to black and white, posted them to a new set on Flickr and announced some on Twitter.

Nomadic CB-1 Wise Walker Backpack - The Wise Walker backpack is gem — the perfect travel companion. It worked great for traveling around Washington DC, and perfectly in Atlanta too. It'ss the perfect size for my iPad, several sketchbooks, pens, water, snacks and a rain jacket with plenty of compartments for all sorts of items. Not too big, not too small.

Thank You

Thanks go to Jeff Shinabager for making the initial connection; to Dan Cathy at Chick-fil-A for his graciousness; to Jeremie Kubicek, David Hoyt, Rachel Christopher, Stephanie Holcombe, Kevin Lee and Craig Johnson on the Giant Impact Leadercast team for their organization and care for me in Atlanta. I had a great time.