Notes from 57th International STC Conference
Dallas, Texas, May 2-5, 2010

Building Visual Explanations: Practical Advice for Writers

Don Moyer

A genius-level creative guru who created and heads up Thoughtform, Inc.

Session Description: Visual explanations are powerful tools because they invite audience into topics and help them understand and remember complex ideas. What steps can a writer follow to develop engaging and effective visual explanations? Participants in this session received a workbook and completed several exercises to practice what they were learning.

• Provided a workbook to expand the content of the session.
• Text is great, but some messages require visuals. Try expressing an org chart with a virtual team within it verbally. Sometimes a text-and-art combination works best.
• Exercise 1: Are you visually literate? Yes. Cultures develop visual literacy (icons, graphic conventions, etc.)
• Excellent visuals that tell stories begin in very rough form (the napkin sketch). The key thought is in the napkin sketch; the rest is graphic execution.
• Why are napkin sketches useful?
   
• They help you think about a complex topic
• They help you remember complex topics
• They help you share your topic with other people
• They’re cheap
• Astonishingly useful building blocks (14 building blocks)
   
• Put any word in a box and it’s a graphic element
• Human figure – male
• Human figure – female
• Male sitting
• Female sitting
• Computer
• Document
• Product (a box)
• Building
• Car
• Truck
• Money (dollar bill)
• Spiral... any process you don’t need to describe in detail
• Arrows
• Exercise 2: practice napkin drawing of the building blocks
• Napkin sketches often also require words in combination with the little icons to explain a complex story
• Process of developing a visual story is similar to the writing process
   
• Wallow in facts: talking to SMEs, research
• Identify the actors: they don’t have to all be people; they include places and things
• Find the important relationships: transactions
• Identify the big ideas: this is done initially with words (an outline); separate more important from less important
• Explore structures to support the story: the form that carries the flow
• Write captions and labels: Don’t say what you can show. Say what you can’t show.
• Collect feedback: Share draft with critics.
• Refine: Not always necessary (internal), depending upon audience (customer)
• Buddy vignettes (Buddy = ring that serves as a remote to your cell phone). Audience did simple napkin sketches of 6 scenarios.
• Classic structures
   
• Just show it
• Blobs
• Hierarchies
• Timelines
• Vignettes through time
• Quantities
• Location
• Flow and stocks
• Swim lanes
• Decision trees
• Connections
• Gradients
• Two gradients
• Comparisons
• Metaphors
• Combos
• Explore structures to accommodate the six big ideas of the Buddy story
• Showed samples of different approaches.
• Napkin sketches require a title.
• Summary
   
• You and your audience can read images
• You can say a lot with simple building blocks
• It’s not about art, it’s about thinking.
• The process is similar to the writing process.
• Explore more than one structure.
• For a spiffy presentation, get help, if needed