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Sketching & illustration

Drawing, art, illos. You know.

xBlog → Collaboratory

As you probably know, XPLANE is now Dachis Group. We are integrating everything as the year closes out — xBlog included.

On the heels of our post celebrating 4,383 days online (that’s 12 internet years!), I want to let everyone know that we’ll be importing key posts into Dachis Group’s Collaboratory blog, and we’ll continue publishing our thoughts and work on visual thinking there. In fact, my first post went up yesterday and other XPLANE alumnus have started blogging there as well.

We won’t be transferring all 8,333 xBlog posts. So many of them are outdated and linkrotted. But we will make sure key posts redirect to their new homes on the Collaboratory and all other posts don’t 404.

It has been a wonderful, amazing, enlightening ride here at xBlog, from hand-coding it starting in 1999, to embracing the first release of WordPress .7 in 2003, to today — a world where blogs are more than commonplace — they are ubiquitous. I don’t know that I could give a better rundown than I did for last year’s 11th anniversary, so if you want a trip down xBlog’s memory lane you can read it here.

Blogging has been core to me and XPLANE for a long time and we’re not going to stop. I truly hope XPLANE’s fans and xBlog’s readers will continue to follow our work as Dachis Group. We’ll still be doing that visual thinking thing, just as we have been for all these years, only now we’ll be bringing to it many more people and businesses.

So on behalf of xBlog… so long, and thanks for all the links.

See you at the Collaboratory.

Cheers,
Bill Keaggy
November 19, 2011




Bring history to life with visual thinking

This is a guest post by Jeff Manuel, Assistant Professor of History at SIUE.

As a history professor, I work with words. Pages and pages of them, in fact. Words to write, words to read, words to speak. I use pictures and images too, but they usually play second fiddle to the words. So it was challenging and humbling to visit XPLANE | Dachis Group for a recent Visual Thinking School (VTS) because it forced me to think deeply about using visual thinking to communicate history. It was also enlightening, as I came away convinced that history instructors should incorporate more visual thinking tools into our classrooms.


We started by creating empathy maps for students and teachers to help us get into their heads regarding what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking and doing while in class.

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Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 11:33 am
Also published in History, Learning, Presentations, Visual thinking, Visual Thinking School, XPLANE news | comments (2)



A visual thinking showdown: Top Jeff 2011

I should probably begin by explaining why we call it “Top Jeff” in the first place. Myself, fellow St. Louis designer Susanne and XPLANE Project Manager Lisa were discussing the strange phenomenon of Jeffs that orbit the XPLANE | Dachis Group world (we counted around eight or nine). It was determined a reality show should be created that would collect all of these Jeffs together and pit them against one another to find out who would be Top Jeff!

Cut to Spirit Week at XPLANE, a week where we do fun, silly things to raise money for local charities. We needed a name for our Top Chef-style quickfire competition and Top Jeff felt right. Instead of Jeff vs. Jeff it became XPLANEr vs. XPLANEr. Events were devised which tested an XPLANE employee’s most basic skills: Scheduling, live sketching, rendering and more! The St. Louis staff was split into two teams and we gathered in our main conference room. What followed was an hour of teeth-clenching trepidation and gut-wrenching tension! The defeated were downtrodden. The victors, proud. Here follows an account of the events that took place that fateful April day in St. Louis…

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Posted by Drew Crowley on Friday, May 20th, 2011 at 9:19 am
Also published in Creativity, Visual thinking, XPLANE news | comments (1)



Building character(s)

At XPLANE|STL’s public Visual Thinking School on April 7 we thought the time had come for a little character building. Specifically, cartoon characters and how just a few pen strokes can convey emotion and tell a story. We were inspired by Ivan Brunetti’s YouTube trailer for his new book “Cartooning,” below, and decided to do a few related drawing exercises.

WARM-UP

Everyone took dry erase marker in hand as I read through the following sequence, one line at a time. Remember — no one knew what was coming next.

  1. A little girl has just woken up, dizzy, cold and crying.
  2. She had a nightmare that she threw up…
  3. all over her cat…
  4. and the cat died…
  5. and now the cat’s ghost haunts her.

What can I say, I like dark humor.

For the main exercise we took Brunetti’s video exercise linked above and changed it slightly. We had 14 people so we paired up into seven groups to create a few Wordless Stories.

PART 1 (30 minutes)

  1. Think of a character, any character.
  2. Now think of a location, some place or setting for your character.
  3. Take four index cards and draw a four-panel strip of your character without using words.
  4. Draw the character in the location that you chose facing a challenge.

PART 2 (20 minutes)

  1. Go back to the beginning of the sequence and draw 2 more panels to make the motivation behind the character’s action more clear.
  2. Then go to the end of the sequence and draw 2 more panels to show some consequence of the action depicted.


One of the characters.


A full panel. Click to view larger.

Rapid creation (and beer — VTS runs 4-6 p.m.) always leads to very lively and unexpected results. Visit our VTS Flickr Set to see more examples.

FINALE

After going round the room and reviewing each other’s work, we sat back and enjoyed Matthias Hoegg’s beautiful animated short, “Thursday.” We marveled at how much story and emotion he was able to create without using a single word.

Posted by W. Scott Matthews on Thursday, April 14th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Also published in Comics, Creativity, Visual Thinking School | comments (0)



Draw that tune!


VTS (aka Visual Thinking School) at XPLANE’s St. Louis office.

At XPLANE’s public Visual Thinking School on March 3, we were looking for a new “live sketching” challenge. In the past, we’ve had people describe children’s book scenes, or tell personal stories while others would stand by dry erase boards taking visual notes. It’s always interesting to see just how unique each drawing turns out.

Anyway, having just caught El Monstero’s Led Zeppelin tribute at the Pageant in St Louis, I thought it would be fun to do some live sketching of “Stairway to Heaven.” The lyrics are so rich with imagery it seemed a natural. So we played the song, pausing every few lines to allow people time for interpretation. We learned that it’s one thing to listen to the song but it’s another to see it in sketch form!

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Posted by W. Scott Matthews on Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 10:02 am
Also published in Music & sound, Visual thinking, Visual Thinking School | comments (0)



SXSWi 2011 sketchnotes

Wow. Visual thinking practically took center stage this year at SXSWi. Ogilvy hired visual note-takers, graphic facilitators and artists to capture many of the talks, panels and workshops during five days of interactive sessions. I too made lots of notes, sketches, scribbles and scratches and am cleaning them up and boiling them down into my own sloppy style of sketchnotes. Here are the first two:

Panel: Design Across Disciplines
SXSW 2011 - Design Across Disciplines

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Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
comments (3)



My 2011 New Year’s Resolution

The holidays are now behind us and the new year has ushered in a renewed sense of optimism and hope. So many possibilities for what 2011 could bring. Maybe this is the year you finally write your first novel. Maybe there’s a business you’ve been wanting to start, a diet you’ve wanted to try, or a favorite hobby that you’ll finally make time for. Heck, maybe your 2011 resolution might be to draw more. Why not?

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Posted by W. Scott Matthews on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 8:39 am
Also published in Life, Visual meditations | comments (0)



26 wonderful triangles

Last month at VTS our St. Louis studio did an exercise we called “What’s in a triangle?” Basically, everyone drew a triangle on a whiteboard and had five minutes to turn it into something. So from a very simple starting point we ended up with a lot of clever and creative sketches. The idea was to make something out of nothing — to exercise our visualization muscles.

Brian Williamson came to that VTS. We had been talking with him about the designer position we had open. Afterwards, Brian went home and took that single triangular starting point all the way to the finish line: He made his niece a beautiful book called ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ: An alphabet book of drawings inspired by the simple triangle — and he sent us a copy.

Brian started working with us in our St. Louis office last week.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 at 10:07 am
Also published in Books, Visual Thinking School, XPLANE news | comments (0)



The official Gamestorming video

As you may remember, a few months ago Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers hit shelves. Today, I’m excited to share with you a new XPLANE video that offers a sneak peek into the inner-makings of the book and why it is so unique, and useful, in today’s business world. The three-minute video, created by our ever-brilliant creative team, can be seen on both Vimeo and YouTube:

For the most part, the video was created with markers, whiteboards, sticky notes, paper and other “low-tech” tools commonly used in Gamestorming.

Written by XPLANE founder and business design mastermind, Dave Gray, XPLANE consultant James Macanufo and Sunni Brown of Bright Spot Information Design, Gamestorming is a collection of 80 games to help teams break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies.

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Best Christmas gifts ever

What a great time of year. Soon people all around the world will be exchanging gifts and celebrating Christmas with their families.

If you celebrate the holiday, you must remember the utter excitement that you had as a kid on Christmas Eve — how you wanted so badly to catch Santa in the act but were told he wouldn’t come unless you went to sleep. Kids throughout time would doze off dreaming of gifts ranging from record players and Barbie dolls to iPads and Zhu Zhu pets.

What if you could put together a greatest hits collection (K-Tel anyone?) of the best gifts ever and spread them around one tree?

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Posted by W. Scott Matthews on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 9:07 am
Also published in Visual meditations | comments (0)



Kronos video

Sample visual
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.

Azure poster

Sample visual
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.

Tweets & Flickrs