Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Designer Mike Rohde was hired to created real time sketchnotes for this year’s SXSW. I am only on slide eight and my eyes are wide:
1. Love the way this tells the story of SXSW.
2. SXSW’s brand is catapulted thanks to this and similar types of UGC. What happens when great creators are allowed to express their engagement with a brand or brand event?
3. The art direction is inspired. It would be difficult to plan this depth design + content.
4. It’s on Flickr — why not the SXSW web site? It might be there, but the user chose this platform for his own reasons — Flickr offers so much more for the user’s benefit. Now it’s up to SXSW to leverage this, if they can…
5. Slide 8: “Couldn’t write fast enough…” This guy’s humble.
Speakers and presenters should feel honored to be in this moleskine. To hear more about how Mike Rohde creates these real time sketchnotes, you can listen to this Thirsty Developer podcast from last October. Thanks to David Feldt for the link.
Craig Ritchie
Comments
Connections
Craig, thanks so much for the blog post about my SXSW sketchnotes!
As to your thoughts on 1 and 2 above: I think lots of credit goes to Shawn and Hugh at SXSW who let me do what I felt was right with these sketchnotes. They made no demands on what I had to cover or how much to deliver or where it would appear.
That level of freedom and trust is very helpful, because it freed me to be myself, capture what I saw and be pretty much independent.
3. I’ll point at my notes above for art direction and content along with having done these sketchnotes at a variety events over the last 2 years helping me establish an approach that works well for me. I suppose being a designer and art director professionally helped some too.
4. Actually, there have been a few posts on the SXSW site, though they have quite a volume of news during and after the event, so it might have been lost in the shuffle a bit:
http://www.sxsw.com/node/1534
I will say however that posting these on Flickr with a creative commons license has helped them spread. There’s a natural group of web/social media people already on Flickr, and the terms of licensing I’ve chosen free bloggers and sites to post my images with an attribution and link, without waiting for my approval.
I truly believe this is a BIG part of why these have spread so well and so quickly (in 2008 this was also the case).
5. Heh, humble and not as fast as some might believe! I debated digging up these remaining points Tony made, but after suggesting to Dave Gray the message I ended up adding, I felt it would be a fun way to speak to the readers. I’m glad you noticed that tidbit.
Thanks again Craig, your thoughts are appreciated!