Pencil Me In

by Christina Wodtke

Want to get better in business? Learn how to draw.

There’s no faster, cheaper prototype in the world than a sketch on a sheet of paper. What’s unclear in words is suddenly crystal clear in a sketch, and you—and your team—can tackle problems in entirely new ways. Play around with ideas. Document your process. Think on paper. Visual thinking brings a whole new power to work.

Think you can’t draw? Don’t worry! The simplest sketches are the most effective at communication and problem solving, so you can begin drawing in less time than your average coffee break. Pictures and visual communication harken back to the stone age for good reason--they’re natural, they’re quick, and they work. And they’ll work for you.

If you’re looking for the next tool to help you solve your hardest (and most interesting) challenges at work, try a paper and pencil. This book teaches you how to use them well--and have a bit of fun along the way.


With contributions from Amelie Sarrazin, Aleksandra Micek, Taylor Reese, Dan Brown, Daniel Cook, Kate Rutter, Eva-Lotta Lamm, Matthew Magain, Sunni Brown, Cristina Negrut, Daryl Meier Fahrni, Marc Bourguignon, Laura Klein, David Gray, Melissa Kim, Mike Rohde, Brian Gulassa, Andrew Reid, Rolf Faste, Raph Koster, Stone Librande, Robin Hunicke, Alicia Loring, Erin Malone, Stephen P. Anderson, Giorgia Lupi, Alex Osterwalder, Noelle Stransky, James Young, and Dan Roam.

Genres: Business, Design, Drawing, Art, Management, Nonfiction, Productivity

227 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 2, 2017

About the author

An established thought leader in Silicon Valley, Christina is a “curious human” with a serious resume. Her past work includes re-design and initial product offerings with LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, Yahoo! and others, as well as founding three startups, an online design magazine called Boxes and Arrows, and co-founding the Information Architecture Institute. She is currently a Lecturer at Stanford in the HCI group in the Computer Science department.

Christina teaches worldwide on the intersection of human innovation and high-performing teams. She uses the power of story to connect with audiences and readers through speaking and her Amazon category-bestselling books. Christina’s work is personable, insightful, knowledgeable, and engaging.

Her books include Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Pencil Me In, and The Team that Managed Itself. Her bestselling book is a business fable called Radical Focus, which tackles the OKR movement through the powerful story of Hanna and Jack’s struggling tea startup. When the two receive an ultimatum from their only investor, they must learn how to employ OKRs and radical focus to get the right things done.
To connect with Christina or to get more information on how to become a whole-mind, high performing team, visit http://cwodtke.com/ or http://www.eleganthack.com.

Reviews

[Vuk Trifkovic]

Excellent guide for improving sketching / drawing skills. Great format too - easy to carry with you and use as doodling inspiration.

[Andrew Violette]

I really enjoyed this book and found it slightly more useful than the The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking. The beginning of the book has good examples and exercises for the building blocks of visual notes. The latter half of the book describes how to apply those building blocks in various business contrxts (whiteboarding, mindmapping, wireframes, etc). I found that very useful and will continue to practice these techniques.

[Afref Fetter Fetter]

Didn't particularly gain much from this. Thought I'd learn how to get better at drawing for drawing architectural diagrams. Looks like the secret is to just put effort into drawing itself.

[David Hyder]

Cuts to the chase.

I've read several books onn this topic over time. This one is especially useful for its references and the nifty ideas.

[Felipe Delgado]

I always wished I could draw boxes and arrows more neatly when explaining things to people. This book is a great primer on how to do that and much more. It teaches you how to improve and apply your doodling skills when designing products.

Thanks to this book and a little bit of practice, I can already draw basic shapes pretty decently. I also love the book's small format, since I can keep it handy at my desk whenever I need to practice or get inspiration.

I wish it would have given more tips to draw trickier shapes common in sketchnotes (e.g. banners, quote marks, etc.). But I'm sure it becomes easier to do on your own with practice. The book also has a ton of references to outside source material, which is great for when I'm ready to dig deeper.

[Stephen Collins]

A nice little, quick-and-dirty guide to using sketching and visual thinking for improving creativity. For me, a valuable reinforcement of some techniques I use, though I'm much rawer.

If there's one flaw to this book (like many other books discussing the same kind of approach), is that it emphasises you can sketch with just lines, arrows, stick people, and basic shapes, but then shows beautiful, finished work by expert sketchers. They're inspirational, but I'd like to see something that shows idea communication with much less expert work. I could use that roughness to show clients and colleagues how these tools can work.

[Kyle-pierre Nfr]

synthesizes entrepreneurial drawing

For several years I have collected works (many of which appear in the bibliography of this book) to develop a culture of visualization in my organization. This author wrote a compelling narrative that justifies the use of drawing to think and communicate while mapping a pathway to develop sketch-competence. For us, this approach makes digital tools such as Solidworks, Photoshop, Tableau, and Blender less intimidating because the user has already drawn what he wants to communicate before he begins using them and he can therefore focus on *how* to create it. I highly recommend it fir personal and professional use.

[HITWM]

My favorite part is the long guest list! Interesting to see a variety of names, projects, books and websites I will now further investigate.

Part 1 was useful and easy to reference. Succinct basic sketching drills + clear modification prompts.

Part 2 was not the drawing mechanics I was looking for. But I am interested in business workflow, so I accidentally read it all. Briefly steps through (a possible way to) sketch for business decisions.

[Chiara Cokieng]

It's good for getting comfortable with starting to draw. I found the early exercises useful like, drawing lines and shapes, writing more legibly, copying drawings, etc. It's not so good for learning strategies for translating words to visuals, like how to think about creating a good timeline or a flowchart, etc.

[Divyesh Sheth]

A quick but very good read. The book explains the importance of visual communication and how to learn drawing and expressing ideas, information and strategy through pictures and how to learn to draw quickly.

[Amanda]

a quick little read that argues convincingly for more drawing / sketchnoting / graphic recording / visual communication in the workplace. i enjoyed it!

[Jasmina Begusic]

Cute book, very easy to read, reignites the love for doodling adding simple hints on how to make it even more fun and useful.

[delfina]

Sketchbooks are my new experiment this semester.

[Shashank]

a quick read on improving drawing skills to better communicate business ideas.

[Albanis]

This is a great reference book related to visual notetaking.

[Toni Tassani]

Small, easy to read, beautiful book. With interesting contributions from well known names, the author has known how to distill different ingredients of visual thinking.
I've loved some of the special contributions, specially Eva-Lotta Lamm and Stephen P. Anderson.