Hasta La Ideas

Image by Dale Purves (see info below)

One of the things I loved about seeing Scott Robertson’s presentation on rendering tricks at Autodesk’s CAVE Conference: The man still renders in Photoshop. I cut my ID teeth rendering bottles in Adobe’s flagship product, and it’s nice to see that not everyone has completely gone the 3D route.

When you’re manually (albeit digitally) laying down gradations and layers, you quickly learn how much black you have to put into something to make it look white, and how much white you have to put into something to make it look black. The optical illusion up above, which has recently gone viral and is shocking to anyone who’s never done an ID rendering, is an excellent example. The top chiclet is black and the bottom is white, right? Well, not if we look at it after masking off most of the drawing:

Yep, the top and bottom chiclets are in fact the same exact shade of grey. It’s the highlights, shading, drop shadow and that junk in the background that fools your eye into assigning different values to it. While they never taught us this in ID school, the actual name of this phenomenon is the “Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet illusion.” Taken by the illusion, Slate even dug up a video demonstration of it:

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Speaking of cities with medieval layouts, living in a pre-smartphone-Japan was a navigation nightmare. In a city like Tokyo, the lack of right angles, the language barrier, and an insane system of building numbering—they are numbered in the order in which they are built, not in a geographically linear sequence—meant that your average citizen had the cartographic skills of Magellan. People were constantly sketching little maps to offer directions, and any business relying on foot traffic offered pamphlets, business cards or flyers that always had minimaps as a prominent part of their design. I assumed every graphic designer there had a subset of their portfolio dedicated to demonstrating map-making competency.

New-York-based artist Nobutaka Aozaki, who originally hails from the Japanese city of Kagoshima, is presumably well aware of citizen cartography. And having earned his New Yorker stripes with nearly a decade of residency, he started his “From Here to There” project intending to create a hand-drawn map of Manhattan… without ever laying down a line himself. Instead, he came up with a clever way of generating the content:

[I pretended] to be a tourist by wearing a souvenir cap and carrying a shopping bag of Century 21, a major tourist shopping place, [and asked] various New York pedestrians to draw a map to direct me to another location. I connect and place these small maps based on actual geography in order to make them function as parts of a larger map.

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Reporting by Stefani Bachetti

The IIT Institute of Design held its annual Strategy Conference last week in downtown Chicago, a two-day event full of inspiring and interesting talks about using design thinking and innovation to solve complex issues. Socially conscious innovation was a common topic this year, from improving agricultural techniques in Africa to enabling University of Chicago students and professionals to collaboratively tackle major problems in healthcare, as well as revitalizing abandoned lands in Detroit with a community development and agriculture program.

Check out the sketchnotes below summarizing the ideas behind this year’s event. You’ll find synopses on speakers like Carl Bass with Autodesk, Catherine Casserly of Creative Commons, Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote, Bruce Nussbaum and Barry Schwartz from Swarthmore College, among others.

Click to view full-size images.

Carl Bass, President and CEO, Autodesk

Mark Tebbe, Operating Executive, Lake Capital / Stepan Pachikov, Founder, Evernote

Amory Lovins, Cofounder and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute / Kim Erwin, Assistant Professor, IIT Institute of Design

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Designer and illustrator Craighton Berman, who started the Core77 “Sketchnotes Channel” (as well as drawing Coretoons under the name fueledbycoffee), will be in NYC doing a couple of classes on visual thinking next week. The first is for the new Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (headed by Core77 partner and Editor-in-Chief Allan Chochinov). However, if you’re not one of the pioneering students in the inaugural MFA program, don’t fret: an encore performance has been added down the street.

Craighton will also be running a Visual Thinking 101 workshop on Wednesday August 29th at General Assembly, the start-up community/coworking/education network focused on entrepreneurship in technology and design. If you’re curious about how visual thinking might help you to better generate, communicate, and shape ideas—especially in collaborative environments—this workshop will be a great primer to philosophy and techniques. The class will cover the building blocks of visual thinking, basic rapid viz training, sketchnotes, and experience storyboarding. Drawing skills not required at all—just a willingness to use drawing to explore ideas.

Also keep an eye out this Fall for the return of regular posts in the Core77 Sketchnotes channel, with articles on digital sketchnotes, brainstorming, storyboarding, graphic facilitation, and book reviews of recent books on sketchnotes and visual thinking at large. In the meantime, keep the pens moving and the ink flowing.

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