Pretty Graphs
Posted on June 25, 2008 - Filed Under On Ideation
First of all, I apologize to you, my faithful readers, for the reduced frequency of posting. I am currently trying to achieve a balance between my professional and non-professional life and a little thing called ultimate frisbee has skewed things a bit.
I have written before about how a visual representation of a situation can make it so much clearer. It’s useful whether you’re using it to describe a problem, illustrate a competitive environment or even map out an idea. I recently stumbled upon work done by a woman named Jessica Hagy. She runs a site that posts daily situations describes as graphs on index cards.
There are two things that I love about this concept:
1. She restricts herself to one index card per idea
2. She draws everything by hand
One Card
Boundaries can be a good thing, especially in ideation. They allow you to focus your efforts and imagination into a specific set. By restricting the space available to express your idea to an index card or a Post-It, you force yourself to simplify it. You have to cut out all of the fat. You get down to the core of the idea. After the next brainstorm, instead of typing up the notes, try to distill each idea down such that it can fit onto a single Post-It. This will illustrate which ideas are worthy, and which are undefined.
The Old Fashioned Pen
I love hand drawings … and I don’t even draw well. Drawing things by hand provides a mental flexibility that is lost when using computers. And using a pen provides a certain finality to it. When you make a mistake with a pen, you either have to live with it as part of the piece or start all over again. There’s no “Undo” button. Thus, you have to be sure of your ideas before you pen them to paper.
You should be able to express a good idea on an index card with pretty pictures. Happy drawing!
- Christian
Comments
Leave a Reply
