Visual Thinking

Marks Baskinger, associate professor at the School of Design of the Carnegie Mellon University, tells you why you should take your clients to cheap Italian restaurants and gives insights on how to have better meetings using visual thinking. Plus loads of practical tips for sketching for interface designers.

The best cartooning is efficient visual storytelling - it is as much a matter of writing as it is of drawing. In this book, noted cartoonist and illustrator Ivan Brunetti presents fifteen distinct lessons on the art of cartooning, guiding his readers through wittily written passages on cartooning terminology, techniques, tools, and theory. Supplemented by Brunetti’s own drawings, prepared specially for this book, these lessons move the reader from spontaneous drawings to single-panel strips and complicated multipage stories. Through simple, creative exercises and assignments, Brunetti offers an unintimidating approach to a complex art form. He looks at the rhythms of storytelling, the challenges of character design, and the formal elements of comics while composing pages in his own iconic style and experimenting with a variety of tools, media, and approaches. By following the author’s sophisticated and engaging perspective on the art of cartooning, aspiring cartoonists of all ages will hone their craft, create their personal style, and discover their own visual language.

I went to Munich earlier this week to film a video for http://www.text100.com/. They wrote the script, I drew the pictures and Ralf Luethy took care of the filming itself and all the technical setup in his backyard studio in Schwabing.

That was my first proper video shoot with a big camera, lighting and editing. Loads of fun and a good working atmosphere made up for that odyssey I went through to get to Munich…

Here are a couple of pics I took during the day, I’ll let you know as soon as the video is online, Ralf is editing it these days.

Amazing how you can have a good idea, make a great video and ruin it with a silly voice over. Gee. What were they thinking.

A while ago I blogged a song called “Paris” by Berlin-based singer-songwriter Hans Unstern. Roland Brückner was the guy illustrating the video with a really wonderful one-line drawing that fit so well with the music.

Roland is also part of a creative studio that’s focussed on narration and picture called bitteschön.tv. Gotta love that flash header ;)

A week ago Bitteschön posted a video on Vimeo called “One Minute Puberty” and you better watch it because it’s loads of fun and if you were a normal teenage boy this will most likely be like a trip down memory lane for you.

Bittschön also made a narrated video about a man that’s actually a man in a man and a man, and all these men talk to each other. Sounds confusing? It’ll make sense once you see the video with all its layers interwoven. The sound is a bit awkward at times, but I really like the way the story and the visuals come together.

“We took the ideas of our followers on facebook and twitter and drew their suggestions as they were requested.”

Conversation Portrait by Flash Rosenberg ~ Artist-in-Residence, LIVE from the New York Public Library ~ ideas drawn as they are discussed in real time ~