Visual thinking workshop in Toronto

A while back I asked if any of you would be interested in workshops. Well thanks to your feedback, I am giving a 3-hour visual thinking workshop in Toronto on September 8, 2006. The title of the workshop will be "The Power of Pictonics: Using Visualizations to Tell Your Technology Story."

I am really looking forward to this.

There will be plenty of hands-on exercises to help you hone your visual thinking and storytelling skills. You'll also learn some of the "secret sauce" that goes into making visual explanations.

This will be a pretty special event, to be held in the beautiful and hi-tech MaRS convergence and innovation center in the downtown Discovery District. It also happens to coincide with the Toronto film festival, one of the best film festivals in North America in my opinion. So if you've been meaning to visit Toronto you couldn't pick a better time.

You can get more information on the workshop here.

The workshop is on a friday, so if you're in or near the Toronto area, join me for the workshop, then stay the weekend and enjoy some first-run films!

Evolution of the speech balloon

"Here you can study various experiments and variations and the gradual change from bands to balloons. Even the later examples sometimes have tiny leftovers of the 'bands' on the other side of the balloon."

Thank you xblog.

Logical paradox

Logical paradox, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

What do you think?

Animals on the underground

Seventeen years ago, Paul Middlewick was on his way to work when he noticed an elephant staring at him from the London Underground map. Since then he has discovered birds, whales, and emu and even a wombat, not to mention the fish shown here.

Take a look.

Thanks again arno!

Fun with index cards

Since August 8, a blogger sporting the mysterious name Old Bag has been posting a series of pretty hilarious diagrams on index cards, at a rate of several cards per day.

If you like this one there's plenty more at indexed.

Thanks to arno and Josh for the link.

Unreasonable requests

What is an unreasonable request? According to Lisa Haneberg:

"Unreasonable requests are big requests that you are generally too chicken to make. Outrageous requests make great things happen. A well formulated request, when accepted by the person you ask, can reroute your progress and enable you to zoom to success.

Unreasonable requests that are turned down can also serve as important catalysts because often a compromise solution is offered that is still higher than you would have normally expected. Mahatma Gandhi said, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get,” and I believe this to be true."

Matt Homann on unreasonable requests

Curt Rosengren on unreasonable requests

Here's my unreasonable request: Watch this video. Then leave a comment with your unreasonable request.

The resume of the future

Paul Goode just sent me my first video message.

This video thing is definitely the wave of the future. There used to be financial barriers to this kind of thing. Publishing is rapidly becoming the province of everyone who has a computer and internet access. The walls continue to crumble.

On the road with Steve Smith

Steve Smith is a local blogger and entrepreneur here in St. Louis. Last week he took me on a drive and since I wanted an excuse to learn about iMovie I decided to videoblog the experience. If you live in or are interested in St. Louis Steve is a fascinating character. Check out his blog for more.