Sunni Brown

If you missed our Martini Hour Doodle Revolution episode with Sunni Brown (or more likely, you haven't found 37-odd free minutes to listen to it) check out this five-minute take on Sunni's attempts to overthrow the anti-doodle establishment. Read more » 

My dear dekeArtistas, did you get in trouble for doodling when you were supposed to be paying attention in school? (I didn't, because I was all about the words, baby. But I might know a creature or two who did.) Good friend of the dekeLounge, and recently published authoress Sunni Brown (whose book Gamestorming is storming the Amazon charts as we speak!) comes back to the lounge to explain what she actually, ahem, does for a living. Call it graphic recording, call it visual notetaking, or join Sunni's movement and call it "strategic doodling."

Why, in the name of all that is visually holy, is doodling frowned upon? And what exactly is the form and texture of Sunni's "doodle revolution?" Here are some thoughts that Sunni shared on this week's show: Read more » 

That is the gamestorm and the Sunni Brown. (See what I did there with the visual communication.) This week, Deke and I welcome one of my newly fledged authors whose book,  Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, hit the shelves this with a big splash very week  (As you can imagine, Deke and I identify with the rulebreakers in that list.) Sunni and her co-authors (poor boys who weren't able to join us for Buddy's tequila), have crafted a collection of games you can play to work through your creative obstacles, communication roadblocks, and quest for innovative problem solving. Gamestorming, you see, it's like brainstorming with games. And Sunni tells a great story this week about how we can use graphics (which you, dekeSters are vaguely familiar) to open up collaboration and creativity. Sunni's a visual thinker extraordinaire, but she's also awesome with words.

I think Martini Hour might be a game itself (pour drinks, queue the band, and explore something creative.) What do you think, dekeStormers? Read more » 

In this week's Martini Hour, you'll meet Graphic Recording Artist Extraordinaire, Sunni Brown, who also happens to have joined the ranks of book authors this week. More on that in a minute, but in the meantime, during our conversation, I was reminded that I took this "video" of Sunni graphically recording the keynote at SXSW 2010. Really, it was a haphazard series of shots from the fourth row without a tripod, but I aligned them in Photoshop and then turned the layers into a Quicktime movie. It was actually my first, on-the-fly experiment with such things. Read more » 

Or maybe we do, depending on how you define school...Some of you may remember a couple weeks back, where I showed my joy at learning how to draw cartoon people with actual personalities, which I learned from cartoonist, author, and visual notetaking guru Austin Kleon as part of VizThink U's webinar. I'm telling you, dekeTopians, this visual notetaking thing is something to pay attention to, especially for a visually wired set of folk like the denizens of dekeTopia. One of my favorite "Viznotes" from the seminar was Austin Kleon's recording of what graphic recorder/facilitator Sunni Brown was saying about listening. You gotta a) love meta commentary, and b) love any piece that graphically depicts "draw the meat" with a raw steak worthy of Alex the Lion from Madacascar:

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The aforementioned Sunni actually employs these skills on a very large scale in front of live audiences (no pressure, girl)...