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Visual Thinking School

XPLANE’s VTS, where we take time to get better at what we do.

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 So many of them are outdated and linkrotted.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

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 11:16 am
Also published in Business of design, Communications, Infodesign & graphics, Internet, Sketching & illustration, Visual thinking, Weblogs, XPLANE news | comments (1)


Visual Thinking School: Do-overs

Back in June the federal government unveiled a newly designed visual to replace the Food Pyramid many of us are familiar with. Rather than simply showing us what each food group is, the new graphic also is meant to give us an idea of proper portion control of each food group. Shaped like a plate (and cup for the milk) the graphic is very simple, especially when held in contrast with the food pyramid.

This change prompted us at XPLANE | Dachis Group to take a look at a few other long-standing charts, graphics and diagrams and ask whether they could use a bit of sprucing up.

Read more »

Posted by Drew Crowley on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 9:07 am
Also published in Communications, Data visualization, Food & drink, Graphic design, Infodesign & graphics, Visual thinking | comments (0)


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, Sketching & illustration, Visual thinking, XPLANE news | comments (2)


Designing for the greater good

We often have successful Visual Thinking School nights that yield great conversations and ideas. Sometimes those ideas blossom into a new process, product or service. Of the ideas that become real, very few of them are as important as one that was created in Portland earlier this month.

Just a little over a month ago, I happen to be on Maui when I heard the warning sirens go off at around 11 p.m. on a Thursday night. It was the day the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis hit Japan. Although Hawaii was left with incidental damage, the experience left a lasting impact on me. At the suggestion of my coworker Roel, now I had a VTS topic I was passionate about: Designing for the greater good.


Teams at work.

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Posted by Marvin Gaviola on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 7:50 am
comments (0)


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, Sketching & illustration | 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, Sketching & illustration, Visual thinking | 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, Sketching & illustration, XPLANE news | comments (0)


Design challenge night!

XPLANE has a regular thing we do called Visual Thinking School — VTS for short.

It started as a way to take a break from client work and get together to safely learn new skills and innovate. The format is wide open — the only real requirement these days is that the exercises be interactive. By that, we mean that everyone should be involved and active. No death by PPT. No one-way lectures. Get people up, get them working together in small groups or discussing things, report back.

So at VTS we make things, ask questions, sketch, scribble, draw, design, share. It’s a time for XPLANERS (and the public, on the first Thursday of each month) to focus on becoming great at what we do and have some fun at the same time. (Contact me at bkeaggy at this domain if you’re in St. Louis or Portland and would like to get on the invite list.)

Anyway, today I’m going to tell you about one of the more fun VTS sessions we’ve done. Actually we’ve done some of these a few times. It’s called Design Challenge Night!
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Posted by Bill Keaggy on Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Also published in Graphic design, XPLANE news | 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