Pencil Me In

Panel One: Show your key customer, their goal and motivation. What do they want? Why? Here we see a mom: “I want to lose weight to be healthy, so I can dance at my daughter’s wedding someday.” Panel Two: The inciting incident. What makes the customer decide to journey toward her goal. “Oh my! I weigh what?!?” Panel Three: How she currently tries to

Idea Sketching (Also Called Doodling) All about getting the stuff in your head out on the paper where you can see, evaluate, and share it.

We can further understand customers by making storyboards. First, let me tell you about stories. All compelling stories share the same elements. Start with a character who wants something for a reason the audience can recognize. Harry Potter wants to defeat Voldemort to protect his new found home, Hogwarts.

When I was at Kansas City Art Institute, drawing was taught as a kind of Zen practice. You were taught that your idea of a face or a house got in the way of truly seeing it. You needed to stop thinking about what it was and relax into seeing what really was there.

Doodling helps. People who doodle remember 29%1 more information than those who don’t.

My favorite brands now are Micron and Tombow. If the pen’s product description says, “archival ink,” you won’t get in trouble with fading (or accidently washing).

When problems are really tough, we need to get drawing. We draw to see what we think, in order to evaluate those ideas. When ideas are made physical, they are tangible enough to understand and communicate. Scientists call

Begin by drawing lines in sets of five. Go in both directions, up and down.

Life Drawing The art of looking at the world and shutting up your verbal brain so you can draw what you see. The best book for this is Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.