How to Practice Visual Thinking Skills & Apply Them to E-Learning
March 10th, 2015
In a previous post, we discussed visual thinking concepts and where they fit with elearning design.
Now, let’s look at ways to practice sketching your ideas so that you’re
able to move past understanding the concepts and actually applying them
to your course.
How to Practice Your Visual Thinking Skills
The first step is to get a handle on the basics:
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Learn to capture concepts using Roam’s visual grammar or Gray’s approach to visualizing ideas.
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Become fluent with your visual alphabet and the basic shapes used as building blocks. This helps you see the basic shapes in the objects you want to create.
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Practice using the basic shapes to create specific objects. The more you practice the better you’ll become at seeing the shapes and sketching something that looks like what it’s supposed to be.
Practice Activities for Visual Thinking Skills
Some people have innate skills and sketching isn’t too
hard to start. But many don’t have those skills and feel like they can’t
do it. But they can. A key point is to feel comfortable sketching.
Remember, this isn’t about becoming a graphics design
professional. You want to get a feel for the flow of drawing with your
pen, especially if you’re using a computer or tablet. Then develop some
fluency and clarity. And that will take a little practice.
Here are some practice activities.
Activity 1: Create basic shapes over and over again.
Work on getting lines straight and completing the
desired shape in less strokes. Can you create the shape in one movement
and still have it look like it’s supposed to? For example, I notice that
if I create a triangle really fast, then the sides start to bow in.
However, if I am more deliberate my lines remain straight. The goal is
to get straighter lines at a faster speed. A circle should like a circle
and not a blob.
Activity 2: Creating common objects.
Look around your office and identify 10 random objects.
Break them down by the basic shapes and then create them a few times.
For example, here’s a quick sketch of my desk. It’s mostly rectangles
and a few circles.
Another thing is to recognize what makes the shape
unique and identifiable. For example, an elephant stands out because of
the trunk and large ears. By focusing on the essential shapes you can
convey the idea of an elephant without having to create the entire
thing.
Activity 3: Convey concepts with your objects.
Start to practice sketching whole ideas. Identify three
TED videos and capture the core concepts as sketches. It may be easier
to just start with three main ideas from each video. Or if that is too
much, just focus on a single point. The good thing about video is that
you can pause it and rewind. Here are three to help you get started:
Activity 4: Improve your penmanship.
Sunni Brown has some good advice in her book Doodle Revolution
where she says to trace over letters. Find a font type you like and
type out the ABCs and save as an image. Then load the image into your
drawing app and practice tracing over the letters. Eventually you’ll
develop the muscle memory to create nice legible handwriting for your
sketches.
When I was a Finance Specialist in the Army we were
taught to use block letters so that our writing was more legible. To
this day, I still do a lot of printing with block letters and it helps
when I write, especially smaller text.
Examples of Visual Thinking Skills in E-Learning
Here are a three examples of people who do a great job
sketching their ideas and are part of our industry. They also offer tips
via twitter and their blogs.
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Kevin Thorn of NuggetHead Studioz. I ran into Kevin at Devlearn. He showed me his sketch note of the Neil deGrasse Tyson keynote. Obviously we don’t all have Kevin’s innate drawing skills, but if you look past the drawings it’s mostly print and a few basic shapes. Kevin offers some tips on creating your own sketched objects in between fulfilling his pro wrestling obligations.
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Blair Rorani of Ever Learning. Last year in Australia, Blair live sketched my presentation which I noted in this post on instructional design challenges. Blair also offers a lot of useful tips on his site’s academy.
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John Curran of Designed for Learning. I love John’s sketches. Again, they’re not overly complicated to create, but they convey good information and the hand drawn style creates enough contrast to engage people visually.
Note: I usually only post on Tuesdays. However, I’ve been getting a lot of request for more tutorials. So I’m thinking of doing a Thursday post. Let me know what you think in the comments.
The Rapid E-Learning Blog shares practical tips & tricks to help you become a rapid elearning pro.It is hosted by
Tom Kuhlmann who has over 20 years of hands-on experience in the training industry and currently runs the community at Articulate.
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