As of this moment, there are only five spots left for the VizThink Austin gathering happening April 30!

And you can still sign up for the Dave Gray/Karl Gude workshops happening in Chicago and New York the first week of May.

“We are so excited to be able to announce our next VizThink Conference! This time we’ll be in Berlin, Germany. Berlin is an exciting, vibrant town with an amazing, growing art community. We’ll have lots of opportunities for hands on experiences, learning from industry gurus, and networking with your visual thinking peers. We’ll be bringing a few of your favorite facilitators from San Francisco with all new content, plus a whole lot of new facilitators from Europe.”

“It’s been a bit of an open secret for the past few weeks but as of today the official announcement is out. I’m excited to announce that as of May 1st I’ll be joining VizThink as their Chief Community Evangelist.

As the title suggests my new role will have me focusing on growing and developing the community surrounding VizThink and the ideas of Visual Thinking. One could argue I’ve already been doing this job for almost a year now, back to when I started running the VizThink evenings here in Toronto - it some sense I have, but it’s always been something I’ve done when I could steal a few minutes to think about it/do something.”

“Are you a visual thinker? Do you want to hone your visual thinking skills? Do you want to learn from some of the best in our industry? Then the Visual Thinking Workshop is for you! VizThink is offering a series of one-day workshops all around the United States. These workshops will help you improve your visual thinking skills. The first workshop series will be run by Dave Gray and Karl Gude.

Apparently separated at birth, together they will show you how to visualize your ideas so you can think and communicate with greater clarity and effectiveness. Working individually and in small teams, you will learn and practice visualization techniques that have been successfully used to improve innovation and accelerate change at some of the world’s leading companies. After completing this workshop you will have a toolkit for thinking and presentation effectiveness — your presentations of complex information and strategies will never be the same.”

A list of winners from “the Oscars of information graphics” contest recently help in Pamplona. XPLANE took a bronze. Congrats, Ted, Taylor and Matt!

“If creativity is your livelihood, is it a good idea to pursue multiple interests and develop a range of skills, or should you focus on one or two key talents and become the best around in your specialism?

I’m asking the question because two of my favourite blogs take completely opposite positions on this issue.”

XPLANE continues to grow and we’re looking for project managers for the Portland and Atlanta offices. You can find job descriptions at http://www.xplane.com/#/careers/.

Check out this new video from XPLANE, demonstrating the impact of mobile marketing. If you’d like to share via mobile devices, use this link: http://www.canalwap.com/xplane/.

“Tony Karrer wrote a post VizThink and Visual Thinking and Learning: Still not sure last week. It’s in reference to a conversation he was having with Tom Crawford, the CEO of VizThink about whether it would be valuable for e-learning professionals to attend the conference he is organizing in January.

Several of us who are facilitating at the conference responded, and a very interesting conversation developed… Dave Gray has been a leader in this field for many years, and his company Xplane has opened an office here in Portland. Dave joined in the conversation with Tony, and since he is a featured facilitator at the VizThink conference, Tom Crawford arranged for Dave and Tony to have an expanded discussion in a free webinar.”

• Topic: How is Visual Thinking Related to eLearning?
• Guests: Tony Karrer & Dave Gray
• Date: Thursday, December 20th, 2008
• Time: 8am Pacific, 10am Central, 4pm GMT
• Cost: FREE

“Bringing together leaders in visual thinking for the first time in one location, the VizThink ‘08 Conference (http://www.vizthink.com) is an opportunity for executives to understand ways of incorporating visualization processes into business, learning and communications strategies to gain faster and more effective results. Hosted by Portland, Ore. based VizThink LLC, the conference will include breakout sessions and forums facilitated by some of the most recognized names in the visual thinking space, including the distinguished Bob Horn from Stanford University, renowned author and artist Scott McCloud, award winning designer Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, most notably known for her work in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and Nigel Holmes formerly with Time magazine. The conference will be held at the Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel from January 27-29. Registration (http://www.vizthink.com/reg.html) is open now.”

Perfunctory public notice: On this day in 1999 xBlog started broadcasting to the world. This is the 6,000th item added to this visual thinking linkblog.

By winter 1999 the idea had been stirring for at least year, inspired by Camworld, Kottke, Rebecca’s Pocket, peterme and a handful of others. I built some prototypes but never put them online. But once I started working full-time at XPLANE I knew had I found the perfect home for these design/web/communication/etc links.

With the help of Jeff Lash, xBlog became a great linkblog. For eight years it’s been filled with almost daily links to what used to be scarce online visual resources. Those online resources aren’t so scarce now — in fact they’re everywhere. So xBlog’s function as a filter is still useful, but we’re going to take it up a few notches in 2008. Lots of notches.

xBlog’s linkblog component will still be here but I’m looking to start sharing much, much more. Good. XPLANE. Stuff. And trust me — we’ve got lots of good stuff to share.

“As Dave outlined previously, running a Visual Thinking School (VTS) style event isn’t all that difficult, some supplies (pen & paper), a space and idea will go a long ways. That said, I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘Sounds great, but a party of one isn’t going to be very fun.’ …The reality is these events have grown through word of mouth using a few free tools online. In this post I’ll outline some of the tools I’ve made use of to help promote the events and hopefully help you connect with the visual thinkers amongst us.”

UPDATE: Early registration has been extended to 24 Oct to allow our corporate customers enough time to get budget approval!

VizThink is a visual thinking conference and XPLANE is proud to be part of it. It happens Jan 27-29 in San Francisco and these are just some of the folks lined up to speak and facilitate:

Scott McCloud
Nigel Holmes
Christine Martells
Neil Cohn
Nancy Duarte
David Sibbet
Eileen Clegg
Robert Horn
Stephen Few
Dave Gray
Karl Gude
Dan Rose

Who are visual thinkers? Visual thinkers are people who use graphic design, images, pictures, video, animations, sketches, and other forms of visual art for communications and learning. VizThink will bring together several hundred participants from the best of the best in our industry with participation by trainers, marketers, presenters, executives, planners, strategists, and managers, just to name a few. While each approach may be different, the attendees all share the same philosophy in the power of visualization for learning and communication. We believe that by bringing these diverse groups together, we’ll create a community that can take the industry to a new level and invite you to take part.

Take advantage of the early registration discount by heading over to VizThink.com now!

This week, the newly formed XPLANE Press achieved its first milestone: The reprinting of Bob Horn’s classic book Visual Language. Horn’s book makes the case that visual language is truly an emerging international language, and – like all languages – it has an inherent order, syntax, and grammar that can be learned and applied. While the world of information design has come a long way in the 10 years since Visual Language was first published, the book’s core message remains relevant today.

Visual Language has been out of print for the last few years, but is now back on the market via the XPLANE store. We will soon be offering it on Amazon as well, where used copies have been selling for upwards of $100. Here’s more from XPLANE founder Dave Gray.

“We look at a lot of Ajax applications, and we have seen a lot of trends over the last couple of years. In general we are maturing, but as complexity has gone up in Ajax applications we are seeing one scary trend. The first set of apps simply added some <script> that did some happy XMLHttpRequest dancing. Then we abstracted to libraries such as Dojo and Prototype. Then people tried to do the right thing and use unobtrusive JavaScript where we keep the HTMl structure separate from the code. We would all like to see more of this. Unfortunately, we are starting to see Ajax applications that look more like Flash web pages…” (Thanks SuccessForce!)

btw, you can see some work XPLANE has been doing for Salesforce over at the Successforce blog.