Hi, I’m Matt Balara.I solve design problems with my head.

As I mentioned last week, Eric Scheid was generous enough to sponsor me to attend Oz IA to be the event’s sketchnoter. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and will once again indulge my scribbler’s laziness and let some pictures say a thousand words…

Okay, so I’m not that lazy.

I’d never attended Oz IA before, and after my experience at the IA Summit this year, I was a little afraid Oz IA would be a navel-gazing IA rockstar festival, but I was happily surprised. Everyone (okay, almost everyone) was down to earth and had practical, useful stuff to say.

Too Fluffy

One of my personal favourites was Anthony Colfelt’s talk, “We’re Still Too Fluffy”, although I got the feeling it wasn’t so popular with the rest of the crowd. It was a wake-up call to information architects that see commerce as dirty, and expect clients (and the general populace) to see their skills as valuable and shower them in riches, just because they exist. Anthony urged us all to more clearly define what it is we do, learn to convince others of the value of design, and to learn to sell. Amen, brutha!

Here’s what I captured during Anthony’s talk…

Is it Art?

Another big hit with me, and apparently many attendees, was “I don’t know much about the web, but I know what I like”, by the manager of information at the Gallery of New South Wales, Jonathan Cooper.

Compared to almost every other presenter, Jonathan’s talk was poor on hard data, research findings and user personas, none of which kept it from being the most engaging, entertaining and interactive talk at the conference. Like all good presentations, showing you his slide deck wouldn’t even impart 10% of the experience of watching him throw rubbish on the floor and transform it into art. If anyone out there has a video I could post, let me know!

Not surprisingly, Jonathan’s show produced my favourite sketchnotes…

On the Job

The experience of sketchnoting Oz IA was a bit different than at UX Australia:

After all the positive feedback from UX Australia, I was more confident, which translates directly into better visual ideas and a stronger line.

Since Eric was sponsoring me, I was under a different kind of pressure: I wanted to give him value during the conference, so I was running out in between sessions to photograph and upload my pages. This had a very exciting immediacy about it — one guy told me on the second day that he’d spent the night before trying to copy my first day’s sketchnotes — but it also meant less chatting and hanging out, and a fair bit of rushing around.

The sketchbook & pen combination from UX Australia didn’t work — the Sharpie bled through the soft pages. Using a pocket-sized Moleskine with heavy sketchbook paper and a Uniball Signo cartridge hacked into a Pilot G2 Mini body proved to be perfect. Thanks yet again to Mike Rohde, sketchnote king.

Looking at my sketchnotes now, I find them very light on information. I still haven’t found the right balance between taking the time to draw and making sure I don’t miss something important.

Even though some of my drawings completely sucked (see for example my portrait of Joji Mori) people were very encouraging anyway. Thanks folks!

Closing the Book

Oz IA was another great conference that I look forward to attending next year. And my second round of conference sketchnoting proved challenging, highly enjoyable, and a great way to concentrate and absorb and save more. If you liked the sketchnotes above, you can see all 13 spreads from Oz IA in my Flickr set.

I can’t wait to capture more sketchnotes at Web Directions this week. See you there!

What do you think? Leave a comment…

If you’d asked me how I felt last Wednesday morning, I might have answered “shoot me.” That’s how nervous I was about leading my workshop, “Scribble Your Way to Success!” at UX Australia last Wednesday afternoon. It was the first workshop I’ve ever given for complete strangers, and the first time I’d ever tried to teach anyone to draw.

In an attempt to control the utter panic that overtook me at having committed to doing a workshop, and inspired by my friend Donna Spencer’s blog post, How I Draft an Information Architecture, I went back to a method I’ve often used in the past to organise my thoughts for a pitch presentation. I thought you might find it useful, so here it is.

What You’ll Need

It starts (as so many good things do) with a stack of index cards and two Sharpies, black and red. You’ll also need a large, flat surface where you can spread a large number of cards out and move them around. It might sound odd, but I recommend that you pick a surface that isn’t white, or if your surface is white, use cards that aren’t. This allows you to really see the structure you’ll be creating. I used to use a pinboard and pins for this, but it’s far quicker and easier to place and move the cards around on a horizontal surface.

Brain Dump

The first step is to get everything out of your head and onto cards. Take the stack of cards and your black Sharpie, write an idea on a card, and throw it onto the pile. Then another, then another, and so on. Only write one idea (rule of thumb: maximum 5 words) on each card, and don’t worry about penmanship or eloquence - you’re the only one that needs to understand these. Don’t worry about order, don’t worry about “getting it right”, don’t sort as you go - there will be time for all of that later. Just like popcorn, when your ideas stop popping, you’re done. Don’t fight to squeeze every idea out - as you move along, more will come. Pick the low-hanging fruit and move on.

Rough in Some Structure

Now that you’ve got a stack of ideas, start sorting them. First, flip through the stack quickly and make a few smaller stacks of ideas that go together. Now look at each of those stacks and sort them into some sort of order, as in “this idea leads to this ideas leads to…” Now take your sorted cards and lay them out on your table. We read top-to-bottom & left-to-right, so I tend to put “chapters” one after the other from the top, and within the chapters ideas build up from the left, as you can see in the photo above.

Get the Details In

Odds are that you got new ideas and noticed things missing (hrm, how do I get from that idea to there?) while laying your cards out. No problem, think a moment and add what you need at this point. If you can’t think of what you need right away, don’t get hung up on it - make a note in red, and move on. At this point you can also add chapter titles (in red in the photo above), timing (the stopwatch icons on the right of the photo), notes to yourself about possible imagery or diagrams, whatever.

Now step back and take it all in. Read through the cards from start to finish and note where the ideas flow, and where the holes are. Move chapters around and see if things flow better. If you want you can take the time to fill the holes now, although the point of this exercise is to get ideas & structure down quick.

Once you’re more or less satisfied, do what you need to move this structure into Powerpoint or Keynote. Take a photo to refer to, write down a hierarchical list, or bring your laptop over to the cards and whack in a slide with each card’s text, which is how I do it. Now the real fun begins - Powerpoint acrobatics! But that will have to wait for the next post…

What a Blast!

Although I was terrified, the workshop seems by all accounts to have been a success, and I enjoyed it immensely! The nine remarkably nice participants made my day by kindly and obediently jumping through whatever hoops I put before them, and they remained creative, friendly and funny throughout. Thanks guys! More than one of them best possible feedback afterwards, “I never thought I could draw, but now I know I can.” And that was the whole point.

I enjoyed it all so much, I can’t wait to do it again! If you think you and your colleagues would benefit from breaking down the “I can’t draw” barrier to collaborate & communicate better, generate ideas faster & easier, and simply enjoy your work more, let’s talk.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

I’ve been watching Mike Rohde, the unchallenged King of Sketchnotes, for a while now, with a “why didn’t I think of that?” attitude and a healthy side order of “get your ass into gear and start doing that too!”

This year’s UX Australia conference served as a perfect place to get started. Considering how smart & inspiring most of the speakers were, I had the right amount of “yeaaaah!” to almost get myself going. Considering that I taught a workshop called “Scribble Your Way to Success!” – during which I taught people who thought that they couldn’t draw that this belief was complete bullshit – I had the right amount of guilt to actually get myself going.

So, instead of spending hours agonising over the best way to describe the best UX conference I’ve ever attended, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

What I learned from these sketchnotes (other than the smart things the speakers said):

• Sketchnoting makes for stronger, more memorable notes than just text notes. I assuming this has lots to do with the left/right brain activity I talked about in my workshop.
• The paper in the Windsor & Newtown visual diary I’ve ben using is too thin, and there’s quite a lot of bleed-through. I also miss the warm tone of Moleskine paper, so I’ll be going back to the good old Moleskine sketchbook with the thick drawing paper.
• I’m not confident enough with sketching people, so I dodged the portraits through the whole conference, although I did draw half of Alex Wright, a little Paul Otlet, and Guillermo Torres and Ayne Valencia’s hair. Next time I’ll suck it up and see if I can’t get closer to Mike Rohde’s great little portraits. Being afraid to suck at something shouldn’t keep me from trying.
• Other than the fact that he’s a far better illustrator than I, Mike Rodhe’s sketchnotes hang together so well due to the simple, consistent elements and the large text, among other things. I’ll emulate those aspects of his notes a little closer next time.

What these sketchnotes don’t convey about UX Australia was how surprised and impressed I was with the sense of community in the Australian UX scene. By way of comparison, last year’s IA Summit in Memphis was full of navel-gazing, rockstar posturing, and no small amount of friction, which left me with little desire to attend in 2010. Now that UX Australia exists, I know I won’t have to. It was full of practical ideas that I can use in my work, fun jibes at how seriously we sometimes take ourselves, and intense conversation between intelligent, grounded individuals. By the time Friday night arrived, I wanted to start a company with all attendees so we could do this sort of thing every day.

It’s been said many times already, but here’s mine: congratulations to Donna Spencer, Steve Baty and all their helpers for not only hammering a stake into the ground of the international UX scene, but also hosting one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. I can’t wait for UX Australia in Melbourne next year!

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While working on my presentation for UX Australia, I decided it’s about time I had a new and snazzy font for my slides.

Happily, I stumbled across Klim, a so far unknown to me foundry in New Zealand, and their lovely font Newzald, which may be just what I’m looking for. But lovelier still (to my eyes) are the pages of their sketchbooks that they’ve posted. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of creative process and painstaking craft goes into forging a beautiful typeface, you must take a look. It’s all there on the page, for anyone to see.

What do you think? Leave a comment…