GO-GN

GO-GN

I love a wide brief. Getting people together, and using dialogue to see what we can be unearthed. GO-GN is a postgraduate research programme, connecting and furthering those involved in researching Open Education. They asked if I could help with a brand refresh, and create a set of visual assets along the way.

In order to capture all the voices, we took the approach of facilitating two conversations: one for participants and a second for the GO-GN team.

We had two really rich conversations. I live draw while the conversation is taking place, by using a document camera, but also record the conversations so I can go back through them later and harvest and clues I can tune into.

Ideas

A rich conversation also leads to many ideas. My aim is always to capture as many of them as quick sketches.

Creating a Visual Language

The trouble is, creating a fresh brand for an organisation is tricky. In some ways it’s like buying a bold new coat. Liking it isn’t enough. You’ve actually got to wear it. What are you as an organisation trying to say? To whom are you trying to say it? If you find an aesthetic that fits well enough, it can be used as a visual language, to communicate a feel which is sub-consciously absorbed.

One of the prompts in our discussion used a poster-making technique to unearth ideas from the participants on the call. An idea emerged relating to “the golden age of travel”, which led to us nailing down a bold visual language. It’s quirky yet intentional. It has momentum built in.

A quick shout out to the Fabulous Remixer Machine – for providing the necessary inverted earth projections too!

Listening with your eyes open

Video conversations underpin the Visual Thinkery 10 ideas process. By seeing someone as they talk, it’s possible to hear a richer voice. One of the participants in the call, Caroline Kuhn, used this gesture while speaking of the care and respect that exists in the GO-GN network. And it had to be drawn…

What is it we do again?

Brand, Identity

INC-4: Global Cartoons for a Global problem

Activism, Message

OER24

Visual Language

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UNEA4

UNEA4 – #BreakFreeFromPlastic

There’s something about working with activists. They speak from the heart. I find them very easy to listen to – to tune in to. They’re often great storytellers too – and stories describe pictures…

The brief was to create visual assets for United Nations Environment Agency summit in Nairobi, Kenya.

Dialogue

Our virtual session spanned the globe. Jane was already in Nairobi at the pre-summit, and Jed was organising from the Philippines, and sketched and scribbled in London.

The number of ideas betrays the richness of the conversation – and we had no trouble creating collaborative ideas to that we felt people could align to.

Distill

Humour disarms, even if it’s sometimes pretty dark. I often listen out for those bits of insight that sit behind the humour as they’re often pictorial. Here’s some of the final artwork we created:

Documentary Cartooning

Conversations, Message

25 Years of EdTech

Aesthetic, Conversations, Message

GO-GN

Aesthetic, Conversations, Identity, Visual Language

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API Evangelist

The thing I love about this sort of work, is that there is so much to be learned from other people. Kin Lane (aka API Evangelist) knows what he’s talking about when it comes to APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Not just how they work, or how to build them, but how they’ve evolved and the impact they can have.

Kin asked if I would help evolve the visual identity for API Evangelist.

Dialogue

We arranged a remote video session (Kin was in Los Angeles, whilst I’m based in London) and to make sure that I caught as much of what Kin was saying as possible, I recorded our video conversation for good measure. That way, I can go back through the conversation and let it dribble over my creative brain during the sketching phase of the process. I didn’t want our ideas to be restricted by my lack of API knowledge, and being a former software engineer, I’m very interested in this domain too…

Here are a few sketches the session:

A credential is more than just a credential

Artwork

Finding a visual identity is not easy. Like a new pair of shoes, how you see them changes as they become part of you. There’s much “stepping into it” required. Also, we’re trying to create something bigger than the person behind it, as its purpose will be to provide a stage not just to speak from, but to build other scenes on top of.

…and finally

Humour is often a great indicator of something worth creating. So when a thought tickles me, I try to capture it before it escapes. The artwork below came out of the conversation with Kin, and as a mash-up also allowed be to explore and understand some of Roy Lichtenstein’s work. This artwork ended up as a sticker and can be found on the back of my laptop. 🙂

Making an impact on the world. I enjoy seeing my ideas fluttering around, adding color, adding motion, and presence around the API community. At the moment where I couldn’t imagine any image to represent API Evangelist, Bryan was able to extract a single image that I think couldn’t better represent what it is I do. #VisualThinkery

Kin Lane

API Evangelist, Excerpt taken from this blogpost.

Documentary Cartooning

Conversations, Message

25 Years of EdTech

Aesthetic, Conversations, Message

GO-GN

Aesthetic, Conversations, Identity, Visual Language

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CMALT Principles

CMALT Principles – a visual language

I always love working with ALT members. Openness is baked into whatever they do, so if I’m trying to capture ideas from dialogue, there is no shortage of members to get involved.

ALT asked if I would help them create a visual language for their CMALT programme, starting with the CMALT core principles.

Dialogue

ALT helpfully organised two remote dialogue sessions (using Google Hangouts), in order to involve a range of people in the collaborative process. Taking each of principles in turn, we discussed members’ understanding of each principle’s meaning and captured it using a live drawing method.

Here are the outputs of both sessions:

As you might spot, different voices produce a different conversation. Principles tend to have a degree of constructive ambiguity, resulting in multiple aligned but varied personal meanings. Of course, the more angles you can view an abstract principle from, the more chance of finding a visual metaphor that might fit.

Distill

The next step is to take those rough ideas and create a number of distilled ideas. This process culminated in the following three routes:

Artwork

The rough sketches allow us to see which of the ideas resonate, and how we can take them further. In the end, we settled on a mash-up of two of the routes. Here’s the final artwork:

Using a visual language to articulate the core principles of our professional accreditation scheme has had real impact: candidates are now much clearer about what the principles are, more advocates have been able to use the artwork to promote the scheme and there is a stronger visual and strategic connections between this and the overall vision of the Association.

Maren Deepwell

CEO, ALT

Documentary Cartooning

Conversations, Message

25 Years of EdTech

Aesthetic, Conversations, Message

GO-GN

Aesthetic, Conversations, Identity, Visual Language

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Library of Things

I originally met the founders of the Library of Things at a Platform Co-ops conference a few months ago, and was really inspired by the enterprise they had set up. For me it’s in the sweet spot of my interests: community oriented, a mashup of physical/digital, technology for good, and of course a social enterprise solving real problems.

Their social start-up had generated (and still does) a significant amount of interest from organisations and individuals wishing to do the same or similar. In response, the team decided to organise a boot camp, inviting those serious with the concept to work though their ideas amongst friends and experts. As the bootcamp was conversationally oriented, the team asked if I would help capture some of the thinking that emerged.

The bootcamp looked at different lending models, and the ideation of a back-end platform, as well as looking at the similarities and differences of each interested party’s circumstance, environment and available resources.

As always, I came away having learned a thing or two. Here’s a selection of the final artwork:

If you’re interested in finding out more, then check out the Library of Things website, or subscribe to their podcast for a more personal perspective.

Next Entries »

GO-GN

GO-GN

Ideas

Creating a Visual Language

Listening with your eyes open

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…and finally

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That would look great on a T-shirt

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