The Productive Solopreneur — On Visual Communication

Tools that help to visually communicate ideas with drawings, infographics, and other design tools.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Beyond mind mapping, this post suggests alternative applications that help to communicate ideas visually. As complex as they come, ideas are hard to organize, refine before sharing those with the public.

This blog is a part of “The Productive Solopreneur”, a series of articles about tools that help Solopreneurs to stay sane and productive. If you are more into technical stuff, read “AppEconomy” series instead.

Following tools helps to narrow complex ideas down to simple chunks that comes with running a business, or designing new products.

• Paper and Think — I’d recommend any 53 products, but these two plays a major role enhancing usability of physical paper. There is nothing that can replace old school pencil and paper, though aesthetics and ease diagrams these two sister applications give iPad users is game changer. Adopting them may improve the way you conceive, design and share your everyday business ideas.
• Canva — This application comes with templates that helps presenting ideas visually, some of them in form of infographics, more suitable for marketing purposes. Adioma is a good but more expensive alternative. Pixlr — on another hand, works more as an online image editing.
• AutoDraw — This is yet another “AI powered” Google product. The way to look at it, is more of an “auto-correct” but for drawings. In case your drawings sucks, you should really give this one a try. It is suitable for both engineering and marketing purposes. Since it is a Google product, you may expect it to be compatible with a wide range of other Google G Suite products such as Docs, Draw or Slides.BeeCanvas (and web)— iPad is like a Swiss knife, when you have the right tools it can make wonders. This app is one of a multitude that turns the iPad into a electronic paper. Mural, RealtimeBoard(has a free plan), Sketchboard(has a $7 plan for personal use), UpWave($4 dollars), Smaply(starts at 25 euro), UX Pressia.
• Vecta — Like Cacoo but a lot more “hippier” and free as long as they are in beta mode. These two applications specialize with creating a various range of diagrams. Diagrams, along data visualization techniques, are essential while communicating ideas on various media. WireFlow is a bit focused on UI Flows.
• Sketch — This is application is aligned more wire framing tools than drawing on web/mobile. The other wireframe-ing tools are Balasmiq, inVision and Marvel App.
• DrawChat — In case you want to add extra information on pictures, maps or annotating PDF documents, this one can make your “visual idea communication” endeavours a less hectic. It is powered by Sketchpad.
• UnDraw — This service provides free illustrations you can use for your project. You can take is as Unsplash, but for illustrations.
• Sketch Systems — Instead of dummy mock ups, this application adds an extra depth: states. Same portion of UI can have various behaviours, look and feels, depending on state. To display same portion in all those states, can create some redundancy, therefore more work from the designer, especially when it comes to amend the initial draft. This is where Sketch Systems can come in handy, by connecting various states and transitions with almost same number of mockups. It gives life to dummy mock ups.

If you have more tools that you love, please share with us in comments section below. It is hard to model ideas visually, that is not a showstopper when you have the right tools.

Reading list

• What is user experience mapping?