Visual Storytelling 101 Workshop: a great co-hosting experience
Some weeks ago I co-hosted a Visual Storytelling 101 workshop with my visual thinker friend Yuri Malishenko at the Design Summit 2020 conference. In this article, I share the sketches I created during our workshops, and I also list out some tips & what made our workshop special.
Topics
These were the topics we covered:
- I started out with a nice warm-up exercise called Squiggle birds (we added a storytelling flavour to it by including texts and some context)
- Then Yuri talked about what visual thinking is & why it is valuable
- I explained throught my so-called train exercise how to concentrate on the most important details and slice out the parts of the whole complexity relevant to your story or to your context — that way you can establish a meaningful information hierarchy
- Then Yuri shared what good storytelling is about, and showed how to build simple characters (humans and emotions)
- After that I introduced a method called Storyboarding
- Then Yuri walked the participants through an example of Storyboarding
- We also gave an assignment to the participants: sketch out a Storyboard with 4 elements: an alien, an ATM, coronavirus, payment by card (#alienatATM)
What made our workshop special
1. No slides policy & Drawing along with us
In my Udemy course, Sketching for UX designers, I ask students to draw along with me, and instead of using slides, I draw out everything I talk about.
Similarly, we had a ‘no slides’ policy here, too, we sketched out everything as we talked, and participants could follow along. The possibility of drawing along creates an immersive experience for the participants. It’s a mindful meditative state: they can truly focus on the content & meaning.
According to the feedback I got from several participants, our workshop showed them that sketching and visual thinking is something they can do, too. Our teaching style and live sketchnoting made them realize that it is a very attainable skill, and that it is about ideas, not art (as Mike Rohde said:) ).
2. Parallel live sketchnoting
We took turns:
- I created sketchnotes while Yuri talked (and drew at the same time),
- then while I talked (and sketched out what I was talking about), Yuri sketchnoted my points.
That way participants could experience that the same thing can be sketched out very differently, and that even simple shapes and figures can have distinct styles. Also, it showed that you don’t sketch out everything, you include the things that you find important or relevant for you (the target audience of your sketchnote is you — if it is not for a client of course)
3. DIY workbook for participants
Yuri’s brilliant idea — that he successfully applied many-many times before — was that we made the participants create their very own DIY workbook throughout the workshop. We asked them to take 5 sheets of A4-size plain copypaper, put them on the top of each other, then fold the stack in half, so that they created an empty workbook waiting to be filled with lots and lots of sketchnotes during our 3-hour workshop. This solution is especially great for 2 reasons:
- it created a tangible output for the participants — they can refer back to it later
- it bridged “the remote gap” between us facilitators and the participants
4. Miro board full of resources
We used a Miro board for sharing a lot of great resources and readings with the participants, for instance these are the books we recommended:
Setup
This was my setup: instead of using a document camera, I recorded my hands and my sketching process with an iPad, and by using a software called ManyCam (thanks for the suggestion Yuri!), my face was also shown.
One pro tip here is that I used a standalone camera stand & mount (so it wasn’t attached to my desk), that way there were no annoying “micro movements” while I drew.
These are some of Yuri’s sketches and his summary on LinkedIn:
What I learned
This wasn’t my first remote workshop co-hosting experience, however, this was the very first time I sketched everything out live! And to make it even more challenging, we did it together with Yuri, and we had such a seamless, smooth flow!
Our preparation and hard work paid off. And while we tried to provide a relaxed atmosphere, we delivered a very compressed, insightful teaching material & content to the particpants.
Next to being prepared and knowing our craft, our confidence came from the deep trust in each other: I knew that Yuri was a great visual thinker & a professional workshop facilitator. I believe that we learnt a lot from each other: the way we talk and explain things, how we involve particpants, how we manage time and so on.
My recommendation is that if you usually faciliate workshops on your own, you should definitely try out co-hosting, it’s a fantastic experience!
If you like my sketches, you can buy me a coffee to support my work! Thanks, I really appreciate your encouragement! 🙏
If you are interested in sketching, check out my Sketching for UX designers course.
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If you have any comments or questions please reach out to me here or on Twitter:@krisztaszerovay
