An Embarrassment of Sketches*
The buzz about data and information visualization has been picking up in its volume exponentially in the recent times. Data- and info-visuals are ubiquitous in business and in media. However, there’s a side to visualizing — as in using images/sketches to convey an idea — which seems to receive a considerably lesser amount of buzz. This post is my attempt to level the imbalance, however slightly, by spreading the word about the upsides of visuals as our personal aides for generating and sharing ideas.
... and, I can’t think of a better way to bring my point across than to recommend a great book:
Rest assured — and you have my word for it —no other book in the world would provide such a clear and in-depth account of the benefits that come with thinking visually.
Here’s the flagship quote from The Back of the Napkin:
“Visual thinking means taking advantage of our innate ability to see — both with our eyes and with our mind’s eye — in order to discover ideas that are otherwise invisible, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way that they simply “get.”
First, this book provides an exhaustive answer as to why does it make sense to develop a taste for visual thinking. A brief answer would be: this kind of thinking might prove to be faster and more efficient than the non-visual one, both for sharing your vision and for helping your mind process a line of thought with more focus and depth.
Second, Dan Roam goes beyond just listing the reasons why visual thinking is cool. He uses sketches as a proof, in the book, thus showing their excellent power in winning people over — that’s actually one of his points, too. If you want to skim through some of the book’s visuals, I highly recommend this Slideshare presentation.
A point to note about “The Back of the Napkin”, before you pick it up for reading, is that it has nothing to do with data-based visual reports. The very name suggests that the book teaches to use visuals in a formal or an informal social setting. When meeting someone over a cup of coffee, we grab a napkin to sketch an idea and/or to explain a concept. Or, well, a smartphone, or a tablet, which in this context wouldn’t be any different from a napkin. Dan Roam takes a very step-by-step, clear and confident pace in getting his points to the readers. I must confess I’ve never seen anyone champion an idea with such a clarity. In fact, the concept of visual thinking does deserve to be championed as brilliantly as done by the author.
Addressing one other common concern, there’s no need to be a graphic artist in order to think visually, and you’ll see why as you read the book. With such a great intro to visual thinking, the readers of “The Back of the Napkin” save the time they’d otherwise spend learning to make sense of visuals in general and of visual graphs in particular.
Sounds great: save time, think and solve problems efficiently, and… how about having some fun with those visuals? :)
[*] The name implies a pun on this idiom :).
This post has been re-written from an earlier version.
