Last year Alma Hoffmann, Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of South Alabama and fellow sketchnoter, asked if she could interview me about my relationship with sketching for a book she was writing. This book is now out! It’s called ‘Sketching as Design Thinking’ and aims to give an overview how designers use sketching in their practice. My favourite part of the book are the more than a dozen interviews with designers from a wide range of disciplines (like animation, interior designer, 3D design, exhibition design, facilitation, architecture, car design, engineering and fashion illustration). It’s great to get an insight into all the different aspects that the simple practice of sketching can hold in different contexts. 

You can read my full interview here, but I recommend that you also get the book to read all the other interviews as well as Alma’s conclusions and practice tips for getting started.

Did you attend art and/or design school? When?

I started studying graphic design and switched schools half-way through to a more interdisciplinary course at Köln International School of Design. The Design program there  is more open and encourages students to see design as a holistic discipline. You can choose from areas of design as diverse as typography, interface design, service design, design management or design and gender. In the projects, students from all years worked together so you could work with other students with different levels of experience. My focus was more on interactive projects, but I loved the collaboration and opening my perspective to a wider angle of design.

What was your first job in the role of creating?

I did my first internship in a web design agency in 1998. After the internship I started working there as a student for one to two days a week and during the summer. I guess that was my first ‘real’ design job.

Was this position what you always wanted? In other words, were you do the job you had envision for yourself?

I’ll go back in time a little bit to explain my initial motivation for studying design and how this connects with what I am doing today.

Growing up, I always loved drawing. When I got close to finishing high school and had to choose what to study, I had this rather naïve idea that because I liked drawing, I should maybe study graphic design. I didn’t really know much about design at the time. I grew up in a small town and I didn’t know any designers. There were no design agencies in my town and the internet wasn’t a thing yet. I had no first-hand experience of what exactly a designer does, but I had a hunch that it could be something interesting to do.

When I started university, a whole new world opened to me and I discovered all the different aspects that design actually includes. I remember my very first typography lecture. Our professor, an old-school chain-smoking typographer talked for 2 hours about the design of the Helvetica typeface, about all the details and optical adjustments in the type design and my mind was blown. Through my naïve love of drawing I had stumbled into this rich and diverse field that I was just starting to discover. Design has held my interest ever since and always offered new facets to explore and learn about.  That’s what I love about the field I am working in. From graphic design, I moved on to Interaction Design, Information Architecture and User Experience. Now I am almost back full circle at my initial love of drawing: I sketch a lot in my work and I teach others how to use sketching as a rapid technique to make thinking, communicating and collaborating more engaging and efficient.

So, in some way you could say I am having the job that I always wanted. What I learned about myself on the way though, is that I am not really ‘goal person’.

I have always struggled formulating big goals of life dreams for myself that I wanted to achieve. It’s just never been my thing. My approach to work (and life in general) is more that of an improviser. I generate meaning from experiencing situations and from doing concrete things. I do not necessarily know where it will all end up, but by paying attention, leaving space for discovery and being aware of what I enjoy about things I am doing, I make my way bit by bit.

For a long time, I felt like I was ‘wrong’ for not having these big goals for myself as the common idea about how you become successful is by setting big goals and then planning how to get there step-by-step.

Then I discovered theater improvisation –about 10 years ago– and I realized that I am just not made for this linear approach, but that improvisation is my form of making sense of the world, life and work. It was a huge revelation for me, that this perceived fault of mine actually translated into a lot of positive traits that make me a better designer.

I think that to a large extent, design is an improvisation process. Usually, in the beginning, you don’t know what you will make in the end. You start by exploring what is there, the situation, the problem, the constraints, and then you work your way through, building on what you discovered, iterating, learning and adapting until you get to the final product.  You have a bunch of tools and skills that you develop over the years that help you in different situations that you encounter, but you always mix them in a different way to adapt to the situation. This is how improvisation works. Having an improvisation mindset is a big advantage for a designer because you can handle the ambiguity and uncertainty that is inherent in the design process and respond to it in a playful way to create new and unexpected solutions.

And, of course, there is also a huge parallel between improvisation and sketchnoting. As sketchnoting is a real-time process where you have to make a lot of decisions on the spot and develop visual metaphors and structures on the fly, you could call it a form of visual improvisation. Now I fully embrace being an improviser and see it as a positive quality, both in my personal life and for my work.

While in school, either at the undergraduate or graduate level, were you instructed on how to sketch, in your particular design discipline? Was there a class for it?

In the two foundational years of graphic design at my first university, we had drawing classes once a week. It was about drawing more from an artistic or illustrative angle, I’d say. We would draw from nature – different objects, figures, scenes, architecture or animals at the zoo. It was all about training the eye and the hand. Sharpening observation and finding your own interpretation and quality of line. My professor was very open and let us experiment. I loved these classes and I learned a lot about making mark, line quality and creating tension and balance in a composition by experimenting and critiquing work on a weekly basis.

I was never formally taught in ‘design sketching’ or sketching for organizing thoughts or developing ideas though. Using sketching in my design process as a UX designer and using it for visual thinking or ideation, was something that I developed much later and I basically figured it out by myself as I went along.

Today, I teach workshops about sketching as a practical thinking tool. It is so powerful and yet, many people don’t dare trying it, because they think, that they can’t draw and that they need an ‘artistic talent’ to learn it. Many people are held back by the idea that sketching and drawing is something artistic, with the ultimate goal to make something. Of course, this is a misconception – or let’s say a very limited view of what drawing can be.  In my world, sketching is a very functional and practical tool, that helps you to organize and express your thoughts. In my workshops, the first step is to give people the permission to draw something that is not beautiful.

Have you always sketched? In college for design classes, sketches might have been required, but when did you start sketching as a personal commitment, as a way to keep practicing your creativity, or as a way of thinking? Do any of these sketches or doodles make their way to a professional job?

I have been drawing all my life, you can say. I loved drawing since childhood and as I mentioned, it was my main driver to start studying graphic design.

There was stretch of 5 or 6 years though, when I stopped drawing almost completely. After having sketched all the time in university, carrying a sketchbook with me all the time, I started working as an information architect and interface designer. All of my work was made for and on a computer and I just stopped drawing during the first few years of working. I didn’t use sketching much in my design process and didn’t have much time or energy outside of work to keep drawing up as a hobby.

I rediscovered drawing when I started attending design conferences. I had always taken notes in a more visual way, sketching small pictures or diagrams in addition to the written notes, to get a better overview of a topic or to make a quick simplified copy of design I had seen and wanted to remember. I also used this technique when trying to note down the interesting points from the conference talks.

Around the time of the first design conference I attended, in 2006 or 2007, I saw some notes from Mike Rohde on Flickr that looked very similar to what I was doing. He labelled them ‘sketchnotes’. I thought: “Hmmmm, there seems to be a name for what I am doing. Why not use it as well”. That’s how I ‘officially’ started sketchnoting. Over time I got more and more interested in capturing and organizing information visually in real-time and through sketchnoting at talks, sketching slowly re-entered other areas of my work.

Talk about the structure of your sketches

The main problem when sketchnoting a talk live is that you don’t know what is coming. Even if the presenter implies a structure, by naming her talk ‘The five golden rules of xyz’ or by telling the audience that they are going to talk about 3 problems or 10 tricks, it’s not guaranteed that there will be exactly this expected number of neat and interesting pieces of information to capture: Speaker go on tangents, there might be lots of interesting side points you want to capture and some of the speakers points might not be relevant enough for you to note. You just never know.

And this is where the improvising mindset is very helpful. You stay present, you listen, and you build your sketchnote as you go along. Sometimes a structure emerges, sometimes it does not.

I don’t think it is a good idea to ‘pick’ a structure to stick to before the talk, because you don’t know if it will fit and it might lead you to limit what you capture just to make it fit into the structure. It is not about creating a perfect layout but about capturing the key points that are interesting to you.

In my workshop I put the focus on using visual hierarchy to build structure instead of using pre-defined spatial arrangements. The most important thing is to get good at extracting the important pieces of information, to re-phrase them into sharp succinct statements, note them down in nice compact chunks of text and to consistently use different size, boldness, colour and styles of writing to pull out the keywords and main points. I encourage people to not worry too much about where on the page they put the information, but to pay attention to how they shape it visually. When adding a new chunk, I suggest they think about how it relates to what is already on the page (and not what might still come), choose a good place, put it down and move on. They can always add structural elements like frames, connectors and dividers at the end of the talk when they have a better overview over the material.

When you are working live, you have to relax and take things as they come. You need to embrace ‘mistakes’ and things that don’t seem to fit. But that’s also the beauty of sketchnoting. Over time you will build more strategies and intuition for working with the uncertainty, for creating structure in the unknown and learn how to to relax and play with the material.

Do you keep a sketch journal or sketchbook?

I have several notebooks in different stages of usage. But I sketch a lot on just  loose sheets of A4 paper or any kind of paper that is close. I admire people who have very neat sketchbooks.  I wish I had the discipline of always sketching in a sketchbook so that everything is together in one place, but it never quite works out for me. I think one reason is that I feel less pressure to sketch something great when I just use loose of sheets.

Another big advantage of sketching on loose sheets Is that you can lay them all out next to each other to compare different versions or see the bigger picture. You can easily hang them up on the wall and discuss with other people, rearrange, exchange and add to them. And scanning is also a breeze when you have a scanner with automatic paper feed.

How do you use sketches in your professional life?

I use sketching a lot in my professional life. Sketching is an integral part of my thought and communication process. I’d compare it to writing as a skill in terms of its usefulness and versatility. I sketch to understand and think through a problem in beginning of a project. I sketch on my and with other team members to brainstorm and develop ideas in a tangible way in the early stages of a project. I use sketching in meetings and chats with stakeholders to explain the ideas and solutions we developed. I sketch when I need to develop an outline for a talk I am giving or workshop I am teaching. The occasions when I sketch are manifold.

I have one sure rule though to determine when it’s time to go from sketching to developing a design on the computer: When you start to sketch the same things over and over again, just with slight variations and you get really bored by it, then it’s a sure sign that you should get to the level of fidelity that is way better handled on a computer than on a piece of paper.

Do you see a parallel between drawing, sketching, doodling, calligraphy, lettering, and writing?

Yes, the main parallel is that they are all about making marks.

I like to make a difference between the words drawing and sketching. For me, drawing is more related to making art, like drawing landscapes or still lifes. It is a slower, almost contemplative process, that is about observing your subject closely, noticing and capturing nuanced details, and creating an accurate portrait of the real world.

Sketching is faster and looser. It is less of a representation tool and more of a thinking tool. Sketching is about trying to extract the essence of a thing and distilling it into a few lines on paper. It is about figuring something out, about solving a problem with the help of putting marks on a piece of paper as cornerstones and reminders of the thinking process. The main goal of sketching is not to produce a beautiful drawing, but to gain new insights through the activity itself.   

Sometimes people refer to sketchnoting as doodling. I don’t agree with this view. For me doodling is drawing for the sake and joy of drawing, without thinking, just letting the pen wander over the paper while the mind might wander in a different direction. I doodle a lot as well. It is a beautiful and relaxing thing to do. It’s almost a form of mark making meditation – a great way to practice being present and to follow wherever the line is leading you.

But when I am sketchnoting, I am not doodling. My mind is not wandering, but it is laser-focussed on listening, and synthesizing information, while my hand turns the processed chunks into visual representations on the page.

Do you see yourself sketching more or less as you have gained experience as a designer?

I am sketching more these days than I did in the earlier years of my career. Sketching is a great tool for thinking about problems on a high-level, to figure out big pictures, overall structures and the underlying systems.

As I progressed as a designer, the types of problems I am helping to solve have gotten more high-level and structural, more strategic than tactical. Sketching also helps me to stay on the right level of fidelity to see a problem as a whole and not to get lost in the details too quickly.

Over the years I have also grown more comfortable with sketching as a tool. It’s now as natural for me as writing something down.