explore, express, experiment

Author: ProfessorJRE

  • Some of my favorite resources for visual thinking

    Using the visual part of our brains (and expressing ourselves by drawing) is an important (and FUN!) skill for creating and learning. Here is my collection of resources — verbal AND visual — that support explorations and practice in visual thinking. Being able to express your ideas visually is an important design skill.

    Remember, the point of these drawings is not to be REALISTIC, but to be RECOGNIZABLE.
    You want it to MEMORABLE, not a MASTERPIECE.
    (Learned that from Emily Mills, a sketchnoter in Nashville) Her free short course in illustration is a good resource.)

    How to Draw Anything. Dan Roam is one of the first people to make simple drawings a PERFECTLY VALID WAY TO COMMUNICATE. His books are all good, and he has shared many of his tips online, either in YouTube or vimeo.  This video is a good starting point for this kind of drawing … and you’ll get it all in less than 7 mins! Feel free to explore more of his free materials – there’s some good stuff there.
    Having trouble thinking about the form for your ideas?  His idea of Vivid Grammar (don’t let that scare you!) is a powerful one. Summarized in this video, in less than 6 mins.

    Another good concept Dan illustrates well is ‘Being double-minded’, addressing two ways our brains process information.  Can you find his video about that?

    You can’t draw? I don’t believe you. Doug Neill, of Verbal to Visual, is a person I’ve learned a lot from.  You might learn that you actually CAN draw from this video.

    Once you’ve started building some confidence and skill with expressing your own ideas, you might want to expand your own visual vocabulary. Doug has some neat ideas on how to do that in this video/blog post.

    Mike Rohde’s mini-course in sketchnoting This 33 min video is a really good intro to sketchnoting, with a good design exercise (10 more mins) at the end.
    Mike Rohde coined the term “sketchnoting”. His books are great resources, full of ideas and techniques.  His podcast “sketchnote army” is full of good conversations, too.

    The image here is the page of notes I made one day while my design students were watching this video … I like it okay for my own use, but I’d probably refine the layout once more if I were to make this my “official” recording of this workshop.  How many passes should

    Ralph Ammer’s stunningly illustrated TED talk about drawing and thinking is one of the most beautiful and skillfully descriptions of the power of drawing for clarifying and conveying ideas. So many big thoughts in this 17mins!

  • Useful Portland info

    the bus schedule to and from Logan airport

     

  • Getting back to blogging …

     … or trying to

    So here I am, at the beginning of a summer term, thinking that this is the time I will finally make my blog into a useful thing, and this is my first hour of working on it, and … I get stumped.

    I don’t actually want to start writing, or posting, or anything. Dang it!

    So I try to figure out what’s holding me up, and I ask myself why I want to blog at all? And I find there are three reasons.

    1. Mostly, and primarily, I want a searchable, accessible, indexable, taggable, categorizable place for stuff I write (or draw) while I am figuring things out, so that I can refer to that stuff later, as I figure out more. Basically, this reason is all about me, and it’s all about things that are in draft form, stuff that is incubating, developing — stuff that is still raw, not really ready for public viewing. But it’s more polished than what I initially write in my notebooks. So I need to figure out how to make it okay for that just-beyond-raw material to be on the blog. Maybe I use drafts, or change the privacy on these posts, or create a private/WiP/journal/draft/incubating type of post/area.
      [I don’t even know what to call what I’m trying to do here.]
      Or maybe I just need to realize that I’m the only person reading / using this blog, and live with that.  I’m documenting this material for futureMe. That’s a perfectly fine reason for blogging.  It’s a personal repository. 

      This post is an example of this reason for blogging. 


    2. Somewhat and secondarily, I want a place to put finished polished material that I would like to share easily with others, at any time. This is especially the case for collected information, or great truths, or lessons I like to provide whenever the need arises.

      All the material developed for #JREclipse is an example of this reason for blogging. Even after the event, that collection is worth saving and revisiting as a good guide to enjoying the area. It could morph into a local guidebook quite easily.


    3. Finally, blogging is practice using WordPress, which means a shared experience with SC, another aspect of general geekitude I can claim, and an area of personal learning.

    unresolved issues:

    • at the top, I really wanted something like a subheading, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. The type of block at the top doesn’t seem to actually be editable/controllable, although the code inspector shows that it’s an <h2> (I wonder how that will render — it rendered correctly.)  Changing out of Gutenberg allowed me to add an <h4> as the first part of the post, but I probably could have done that with Gutenberg after I found the different block types.  Still doesn’t look the way I intended it to.


    • I (think I) put extra space between the list elements, since they each have multiple paragraphs, but those extra spaces seem to get stripped by the theme, because they do appear in the editor. I think that’s something about the box model, or maybe it’s the after attribute? Need to review that part of CSS. Still don’t know how to customize little things like that.


    • Illustrations improve posts. Maybe I need something like a workflow diagram? I know I’ve drawn that multiple times.

    resolved issues

    • in the preview, using the theme twenty-fifteen, the lists above were not indented properly, though it seemed correct here in the editing space. (Is that Gutenberg? I believe it is, and I’m turning that into an option.) hmmmm. Maybe the theme was screwing it up. I think I’ll just preview a different theme to see if that fixes it. YUP! So I changed to the theme twenty-nineteen. The big learning here is remembering how to use the code inspector in the browser to see what’s actually happening. In this theme’s css, there is no entry for the padding-left attribute. In the other one padding-left was set to 0px. The big question that remains is how to actually find the styles.css file that’s being used, and how to edit it in the child theme. But that’s another learning session.


    • I really did want a horizontal rule above the unresolved issues label, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that here. Adding a few dashes doesn’t really do the job. But learning about the separator block-type in Gutenberg does!