Amazing Feature
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, metus at rhoncus dapibus, habitasse vitae cubilia odio sed.
We're just barely into the new year, plenty of time for us dinosaurs who still write checks to date them 2019.
Are you already picking up on all the vision/visual/eye references to 2020?
Strap yourself in, Friend!
I am in it to win it this year.
For us check-writing dinosaurs, 2020 WAS the future. I started my career as a graphic facilitator in 1996, supporting change management workshops at Ernst & Young. When we gave our participants the task of envisioning the future, 2020 was their target.
It felt far away.
Until it wasn't.
I'm primed for 2020 and so excited for all visual thinking nerdery I'll be bringing you this year.
Over the past few years, my 20-year-old site had become a bit of a Frankenstein's monster. I launched in 1999, blogged from 2000 to 2007. Some hunk of malware screwed up my blog archives, but I was speeding ahead too quickly to go back and fix them. I collected a mile-long graphic facilitation portfolio. When I started publishing books in 2012, my work shifted and that section collected about 3" of digital dust.
My site's structure got to feeling a lot like this motel sign outside of Madison, Wisconsin in 2003:
(Friends and I stayed here on a road trip. Really not a clean room. *shudder*)
Instead of designing a new, enticing sign with all my own version of "cable TV" and "AIR CONDITIONE," I just kept adding to the old one. In 2016, I began building online courses using a platform called Kajabi. I was building great stuff in the "courses" subdomain of my site, as the rest of my site contined to patina... nah... it rusted.
In the last days on 2019, I finally demolished the old sign, made new handmade graphics and made my new site my WHOLE site.
It's a bit scary letting go of the old archives, but I for one am ready for more clarity.
I may not have been maintaining my site well, but I was building a big body of work about visual thinking. It's all accumulated. It's all part of a whole. I'm happy and proud that this year I'll be looking back and pulling older ideas and models into new pages, and to create new articles to help you be a stronger and more confident visual thinker.
And if you think visually professionally, specifically as a graphic facilitator, graphic recorder, or scribe, there's a lot of good stuff coming up for you.
I've been transitioning my own business from being the one person in the room drawing for a group of people, to now teaching everyone in the room how to draw out their own ideas.
As I work less as a graphic facilitator, I'll be writing articles and shooting video geared towards clients who hire graphic facilitators. To use my 23 year of experience to help you have a better experience on your project working with a visual practitioner.
I see more and more commodification in our field, but when you know more about the powers of graphic facilitation, and you find a skilled graphic facilitator, a valuable partnership is possible.
I am here to help with my past and future visual thinking and graphic facilitation resources.
I created a visual (quelle surprise!) to celebrate this year of:
Over the year, I'll be posting visual thinking prompts over the course of the year, using this image:
Because I preach process over product, I made two down-and-dirty videos documenting my drawing.
The first is inking my pencil sketch using a lightbox. In the second, I share what I did in Photoshop after scanning the drawing.
Thanks for watching!
As I say in the video, let me know in the comments below what you think of these process videos.
Written and drawn by Brandy Agerbeck.
Brandy Agerbeck writes, speaks and teaches about how to use drawing as your best thinking tool. She's the author of The Graphic Facilitator's Guide and The Idea Shapers. Brandy's work lives at Loosetooth.com.
Posted January 2, 2020
