Anyone can draw apparently - effective visualisation

Not being the greatest at drawing, but having an acute awareness at how useful visualisation is for communicating ideas, I am always interested in learning useful techniques that can be applied easily (see also my review of "The Back of the Napkin"). Over the last year I have had the opportunity to work with some very bright and creative people to create conceptual imagery to and have been impressed on how effective it can be.

As such, I was pleased when I stumbled across this nice set of video guides to drawing on VizThink (a favourite website of mine). Ultimately this is the same material that comes up in every 101-type book and course that I have seen, but it is succinct and easy to remember (my favourite kind of method!).

Having said this, I was a little disappointed that the post did not go beyond how to visualise particular elements to how to really use them effectively in presentations, meetings and workshops and simply to guide one's own thinking. On this front, I have been much more taken by the simple approach:

1. Start with identifying the elements that are relevant to the problem or issue to be visualised
2. Then decide upon the relationships between the elements (which are important and what flavour are the relationships)
3. Once you have the block diagram in place, start playing with "visual metaphors" that can transport the key message best.

Coming from a traditional business analysis background I was struck by how similar this approach is to the simple domain modelling approaches (OK, UML doesn't really allow for much in the way of visual metaphor, but the process is much the same!), but the results are so much more effective in transporting the ideas than such dry (if intellectually satisfying) diagrams.

Of course it is the third step that is the most challenging (and the one that I certainly struggle with the most), but the good news is that there are literally hundreds of interesting sources for ideas on this front.. but that is something for later post!