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XPRESS is XPLANE | Dachis Group's monthly newsletter and is designed to help you stay up-to-date on what's going on at XPLANE — and keep you acutely aware of the best visual thinking techniques and collaboration methods. It features recent work, project profiles, client interviews, tip and tricks, useful links, upcoming events and more. You can subscribe using the form below. The archives can be found at the bottom of the page. You can also connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

Visual Thinking School

Visual Thinking School is a time we set aside for learning, development, camaraderie and innovation. Our St. Louis, Portland and Amsterdam offices usually hold it on the first Thursday of the month from 4-6 p.m., but it gets moved occasionally to accommodate special circumstances or events.

VTS is an important and unique part of the XPLANE | Dachis Group culture — and it’s open to the public! We usually focus on topics and exercises that will help us understand and develop key capabilities in visual thinking, design, consulting and social business — but that said, it’s more like an intelligent happy hour than school. If you’re interested in being put on the email invite list so you can attend, just subscribe below — but make sure to subscribe to the correct city.

VTS events in Portland, Oregon

Click here to subscribe to email invites for VTS|PDX.

• April 5, 2012 — TBD
• March 1, 2012 — Our digital identities: There is much more to social media than metrics, business goals, and contributing to an ever growing din of irrelevant chatter. Social is an unprecedented opportunity to actualize human emotion online. We will examine our digital identities using familiar social media platforms as tools for self discovery. We will create tactile user personas, relevant connections, aggregate likes, and shares using analog materials. At the end we will discover ways to humanize our online experiences.
• February 2, 2012 — Animatic Fanatic: Get ready to explore the unique visual storytelling power of stop-motion animation (abridged for our two-hour format, of course). You and your production team will be building sets, modeling characters out of clay, and bringing them to life on camera in a short story animatic. Each team’s animatic will be screened for all to see at the end of the evening. Milk Duds and popcorn provided!
• January 5, 2012 — New Year’s Resolutions: Every New Year’s Resolution is a new opportunity. Get 2012 moving in the right direction with a VTS designed to explore that new challenge and potentially yield better new year’s resolutions (and client results) using proven consulting techniques. Come with a positive attitude, and crazy-important stuff you want to accomplish this year and we’ll lubricate the process with bountiful refreshments and beverages.

VTS events in St. Louis, Missouri

Click here to subscribe to email invites for VTS|STL.

• April 5, 2012 — What iz a data viz? Turning information into understanding. The information age brought us big data. But what are we supposed to do with it? This week we’ll be talking about all things data viz. We’ll look at examples and create our own autobiographical data visualizations. Bring your scatterplots!
• March 1, 2012 — Social apps. Social experiences. Personal motivations. This week at VTS we’ll design the next addictive social technology! We’ll take a look at how social apps and experiences play on various motivations to grow and keep a user base. Then we’ll use those same motivations to concept and visualize some ideas of our own.
• February 2, 2012 — From storyboarding to interfaces: Sketching the story of your cross-channel experience. We are very happy to turn this month’s VTS over to UX designer Brad Nunnally. Brad is a Senior User Experience Consultant at Perficient, where he performs a variety of UX activities including research, modeling, design, and testing. He’ll discuss sketching’s role in creating cross-channel experiences. Designing for a cross-channel experience doesn’t start with a design spec or a wireframe or a prototype. It starts with a story. A story that expresses the intent and the various ways a person could interact with a solution, no matter the channel. How do you figure out what this story should be? Easy…you sketch it out.
• January 12, 2012 — Appy New Year! We’ll kick off the new year by sharing and reviewing our favorite iPhone, iPad, and other mobile apps. The focus will be on social and visual thinking software. What’s best for connecting with individuals or groups? Friends or strangers? Interest groups? What apps are great for sketching, for layout, for writing, for facilitation, for mindmapping? Make your list and bring your device on Thursday!

VTS events in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Click here to subscribe to email invites for VTS|AMS.

• April 5, 2012 — TBD
• March 1, 2012 — Charting the modern world: Maps have come a long way from parchment drawings of the known (and unknown) world. Today, we’re surrounded by all varieties of maps — directional, affinity, demographic — you name it, there’s probably a map of it. Join us as we roll up our sleeves, roll out the maps and chart a course for visual thinking “terra incognita”.
• February 2, 2012 — We’re very sorry, but VTS is cancelled this month.
• January 5, 2012 — Clearing things up visually: In a complicated world, confusion lurks everywhere. Whether it’s describing astrophysics, decoding wi-fi installation instructions or leaving a grocery list for your spouse, visual thinking can accelerate understanding and leave confusion behind. Join us for the first VTS of 2012 as we resolve to make things easier (and more fun) to understand.

Example topics from 2010

• Movie night: We watched the Milton Glaser documentary, “To Inform & Delight.”
• Rhythm & Design: We explored the synchronicity of music structure and visual design.
• 15-second stories: We crafted quick presentations, movies, skits, etc — anything that could be used to tell a story.
• Data visualization: What is it? Who dies it? How do they do it?
• Field trip: We went out for a night of Pecha Kucha.
• Layer Tennis: We got together for a few rounds of Layer Tennis (a la Coudal Partners)
• Pictorial typography: We combined type and design to create fun, effective pictorial typefaces that told a story.
• Book club: Everyone brought a book they loved — especially one designed to be instructional and/or present a good amount of varied information.
• Design the perfect ____________: We re-imagined ideas or products we thought were in desperate need of redesign.
• Invent it, XPLANE it: This VTS gave participants the opportunity to brainstorm, design and create visualizations for practical, yet-to-be invented products.
• Getting ideas onto paper: We converted text-based explanations into compelling visuals using XPLANE core visual frameworks as reference.