I’m at Oakland Intl Airport catching a flight back after a three day workshop on The Principles of Graphic Facilitation hosted by The Grove.

PGF Program

1. Principles of Graphic Facilitation – This two day workshop builds on core skills in meeting facilitation and graphic recording and connects the two skills. Either on its own can be a powerful tool, but when combined, the impact is astounding.
2. Workplace Applications Intensive – This add on workshop applies everything you learned in the first two days and starts to build the tools you need to apply it to your work.

The course comes with The Grove published books on Graphic Facilitation, Best Practices, Sketching Practice books, Visual Meetings by David Sibbett, and more. Just these materials alone would cost you hundreds of dollars. When you factor in all these materials, the course is a steal.

The Experience

Just like any other program, the interaction and meeting of the minds by people all over the world adds so much value that you can’t get from reading the books. Since we’re all busy professionals and creatives from all walks of life, taking three days off can be difficult for everyone. However, this is my first workshop where people were truly interested, came early every day just to make sure they get every little bit. The shared experience of learning and practicing together built such a strong bond that other types of programs can’t achieve in such a short timeframe.

Resources

At the last day, we got a preview of new digital tools for graphic facilitation. Below are a few things we talked about:

• Wacom Bamboo Tablet ($69) – Pen tablet input device. Very low cost for getting started and practicing.
• Wacom Cintiq ($999 for 12″ version and $1999 for 21″ version)
• Sketchbook Pro ($79) – Pro version with more options
• Sketchbook Copic Edition (Free) – This is a free version of Sketchbook Pro and uses the same marker colors as Copic Markers. Works perfectly fine for most people.
• Join.Me – I’m adding this is an alternative to WebEx and other corporate screencasting and conferencing tools. I like it because there’s a free version and it’s really easy to connect everyone.

We talked about using the iPad as a facilitation device. Although the iPad 2 has HDMI mirroring and airplay, it’s still not a very good tool for broadcasting visual displays. First, the resolution is still too low. I personally would wait for iPad 3 with a potentially higher resolution screen. Higher resolution gives you the ability to portray and view more detail.

On the iPad, I also use Sketchbook Pro and Brushes.

Looking ahead

In the coming weeks, I hope to share some of my work and present new ideas to advance the field of graphic facilitation.

Edit 9/15/2011:

Here’s an output of a practice file I made using Sketchbook Pro on the iPad while my flight home from San Francisco.

I’ve been paying particular attention to bus riders in Seattle. I’ve notice a growing trend of smart phone addicts. We’re still children, holding onto our Starbucks coffee (our adult sippy cup) and grasping our smart phones inches from our face (our toy). The weather in Seattle is amazing in September. This is when summer starts and the views onto the lake and sound is breath taking. Yet nearly 1/3 of the riders on the bus live in a world dictated by a 3.5″ screen.

Social media has made us less “social” and smart phones have made us less “smart.”

While at my optometrist appointment for my annual eye exam, she asked how much time do I spend in front of a computer a day. That number for me lately has gone down from 16 hours a day to about 6. In fact, most of my work day is on paper (sorry Captain Planet) and whiteboards. I’ve matured to the point where most of the design and planning is done offline and the execution is done later.

As I spend less time in front of my 3.5″ smart phone and 15″ laptop, I find myself getting more done and less focused on busy work.

Here are a few other changes I’ve made:

1. Forget about organizing emails into folders and tagging – use search to find things later.
2. Inbox zero is a waste of time – check email periodically and do something about it, or flag it for attention later.
3. Carry a paper notebook around, take notes, and review it daily.
4. Doodle more.

Standard templates are not optimized for readability. A Word document has standard margins of 1″ on each side. With an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, that’s 6.5″ of text. PowerPoint is even worse. In landscape view, that is 9″ of text.

Newspapers and magazines have been working on layout for years. They use narrow columns so that the eye can quickly read down the column without losing focus. If the line is too long, the reader has to move his/her eye or head back and forth. After a few seconds, the mind loses focus. If the line is too short, then the reader has to go back and forth too much and loses the rhythm.

After little research on Google, I haven’t found any authority on the optimum width for a document. So far, it seems like 50 – 75 characters per line or about 12 words per line is the right width.

What does this mean for documents? For Word documents, set the columns to about 4 inches. That’s a one inch margin on the left and a 3.5 inch margin on the right. Use the extra space for pull outs or graphics. Alternatively, use two columns. For PowerPoint documents, don’t use the full width for text. Ideally, you wouldn’t have more than six or seven words on a slide anyways. If you absolutely need to, only use half the slide and fill the rest with a graphic.

What are your thoughts?

Most people read the newspaper, the one that’s printed on paper. The typical newspaper font size is between 8 and 9 points. A typical newspaper compresses a lot of information in a very small space. Large headlines are used to generate interest and the reader can selectively choose what he/she wants to read. Take a look at the game scores in the sports section or the financial information presented in the business section. Again, a lot of density, a lot of information in small spaces.

Yet when we produce business documents, we are compelled to use comically large font sizes to accommodate our audience. If our audience is capable of reading a newspaper, then we should compress more information into fewer pages. At higher density, people see the big picture, the flow, the structure, and can selectively choose what they want to read. They’re also forced to focus their attention on your report and really digest the information presented.

More thoughts and examples on this later.

Here’s a good quote from Mark Zuckerberg in his visit to the Seattle Facebook office:

“One thing you find in engineering is a really good person is like 10 times as productive as pretty good person. I’m not talking about a bad person – I think bad people are negatively productive because of all the externalities of stuff that has to be cleaned up around them – but pretty good people, who would be the best engineer at a lot of companies.”

Source: Seattle Times