Diana Ayoub collaborates with clients using a user-centered approach to visual thinking - S16/E08

Sketchnote Army Podcast

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Art Tools and Creative Inspiration

In this chapter, the speakers delve into their preferences for art tools, comparing brush pens with traditional markers, and discussing the utility of digital platforms like Procreate and Huion graphics tablets. They also share practical tips for enhancing creativity, such as doodling and community engagement, aimed at helping visual thinkers overcome creative blocks. Additionally, a lighthearted conversation about potential visits to Australia underscores the importance of community connections in the art world.

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Episode notes

In this episode, Diana Ayoub, co-founder of Sh8peshifters, shares her tech-infused upbringing, journey into sketchnoting, and efforts to build a vibrant visual thinking community through regular meet-ups.

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Running Order

Intro
Welcome
Who is Diana Ayoub
Origin Story
Diana's current work
Sponsor: Concepts
Tips
Tools
Where to find Diana
Outro

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Zig dual-tip brush markers
Tombow dual-tip brush markers
Procreate
Adobe Photoshop
Huion Tablets
Notion

Tips

Just doodle. Just let yourself go with the pen.
Keep a sketchbook on you all the time.
Talk to people. Find a community, a group of people who inspire and motivate you to think outside the box.
Join the Think Visual Meet-up.

Credits

Producer: Alec Pulianas
Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Diana Ayoub. Diana, it's so nice to have you.

Diana Ayoub: Thanks for having me, Mike.

MR: Yeah, so Diana is coming to us all the way from down under, and she works with someone who was on last season's Sketchnote Army Podcast, Alan Chen. They are the two superheroes that make up Sh8peshifters with an eight. Where the A should be, there's an eight, is that right? S-H-8-P-Eshifters.

DA: That's Right.

MR: Yeah.

DA: Yeah.

MR: Yes. You're probably one of the dynamic duo, I guess, going with the superhero theme, I guess. I don't wanna belabor it too much, but anyway you guys make up Sh8peshifters. You do amazing work. Both Alan and I thought it would be great to have you on the show since he was on last season, to kind of talk about your perspective about visual thinking in the world, in Australia, and with the clients that you work with, the students that you teach, but first, let's get started and learn who you are and what you do at Sh8peshifters.

DA: Yeah, thank you, Mike. I'm very lucky to work with Alan. He's actually the reason I started this journey of drawing and sketchnoting again. But I guess going back to who I am, I'm a designer and illustrator, and I originally come from Lebanon. I studied my bachelor in graphic design in Lebanon. When I was growing up, I wasn't really pursuing drawing too much. It was more like something that I did in my textbooks in class. I just doodled while the teacher was talking, I guess to focus.

I found that if I had a pen in my hand, I would focus more, but I never really pursued it as a hobby or anything. I just really enjoyed it. What I was really more into was technology 'cause I grew up in a very tech-savvy family. My dad was a software engineer. My mom teaches middle school students' computer and information technology. I taught myself Photoshop when I was 13, and I just really loved exploring software and, you know, doing animations and all these little things.

I ended up doing graphic design and I worked in graphic design, web design for a while in Lebanon. And then I felt like I was kind of, let's say stuck creatively. I felt like I was being more like an operator for clients, just doing whatever they wanted on the software. So I decided to leave, and I pursued a master's in design in Australia. That's when I was introduced to a much bigger world of design in terms of design thinking and human-centered design. I realized that there's a bigger world out there of design where I could have more impact than just behind my screen, and I really fell in love with that again.

At the same time, that's where I met Alan, who's now my business partner, but I was lucky to have him as a mentor for a few years. We collaborated on lots of different projects. We went into education together, so he was already teaching, obviously, and I started teaching as well. And then we headed an animation and design course together at a college for a couple of years. And we were working on lots of creative projects together for a while there.

And then even after our paths kind of separated, he went into consulting and I became the head of the design course at a different college, we kept working and collaborating together on different creative projects. I guess, eventually we decided we'd like to do that full-time, and that's how Sh8peshifters came to life. Now, yeah, we work on Sh8peshifters, which is a visual communication agency where we love to help teams have more impact through the power of visual storytelling.

MR: Yes. I think I saw something just last week on LinkedIn, a little video that was shot of you and Alan helping two authors, I can't think of their names now, writing a book. I think it was something like Design for Tomorrow or something like that. Was like, samples of you guys working. You must have been aware enough that you would shoot things while you were working so you could at the end, put this video together. It was really cool.

DA: Yeah. Thank you. Actually, that video was created for an application for an award, which we won.

MR: Ah, okay.

DA: The book is called Designing Tomorrow.

MR: That's it. Okay.

DA: Yeah, and it was launched at the beginning of the year. It's an amazing project that we were very, very honored to work on, and we won the Good Design Award for Communication Design on that project. Actually, you can see the award right behind me.

MR: Oh, there we go. Nice.

DA: Yes, it's very recent, so we're very proud of it. I think what was amazing about the process was the collaborative aspect. We really love to work with the client collaboratively, and the way this project was created was not very typical of a book design process where the authors write the whole book and then send it off to the designer. What we did was we were working in parallel with them, so we would meet every couple of weeks, and they would've written two more chapters.

MR: I see.

DA: We would go through the chapters with them and live-sketch the different concepts, and they'd kind of have live input into it. Sometimes they'd even go back and change the words based on what we were discussing. So it was a really amazing co-design process. I think that's why the book I feel like it's quite powerful and impactful because of it.

MR: Seems like it would be very well integrated, right, because it's not just a manuscript which you then convert individuals, but it's actually the visuals and the words sort of evolved together so that they became much more a unified whole in a way.

DA: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It feels like they complete each other quite well. Sometimes if we were developing—there's a lot of practical tools in it as well, so we were developing quite complex things and trying to make them very simple and easy to use by different people. And so, it was definitely complimentary. The content and the visual storytelling in it is quite complimentary.

MR: That's really cool. That sounds like that would be the kind of a project that you would do at Sh8peshifters where ideally you would be in this collaborative mode with your clients to produce something. Obviously, not every project can be that way. Sometimes you just get last-minute stuff that you need to solve, but I guess, that would be like your ideal client kind of client, if you could get one, would that be fair to say?

DA: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think we try to at least pitch that to every client. Unless it's a live graphic recording where we're doing a live event, and we're just listening and synthesizing. Over the past couple of years, especially, we've been really pushing that because we feel like it's—first of all, the clients really involved, and they feel quite happy with the experience, but also it reduces the amount of feedback around and back and forth with the clients. So it's very effective, and it saves time, and it's quite like a really good way to work.

As I mentioned before, I really love the human-centered design aspect and the design thinking principles. And this is a way for us to bring that into visual communication. It really produces much more effective outputs because it's exactly what the client wanted because we're basically creating it with them.

MR: Yes. Yeah, so I suppose if someone comes to you and says—a client comes and says, I want something like this book that you just did, well, you would have a pattern for how that works and then say, this is the way we operate those projects, or does that work for you? And then, you know, bring them through that process in the same way. Interesting.

DA: Yeah, exactly. Yep.

MR: Interesting. You kind of hinted a little bit, you originally started in Lebanon taking graphic design. Can you tell me a little bit more, like, go back even further in time when you were a little girl, like you said you, you learned Photoshop by yourself when you were 13. I think there's some interesting origin story stuff before you get to Australia. Tell me a little bit about, what was it like growing up. Did you do a lot of drawing then? You said technology, you probably were playing with technology. If you folks were into technology, it was probably laying around waiting for you to discover. Talk a little bit about your early childhood and how that influenced kind of what you're doing now.

DA: Yeah. Well, my dad was always on the computer 'cause he was a software engineer. It definitely influenced how me and my siblings saw technology. I think it was just such a normal thing around us. Yeah, it was at the beginning of Photoshop and all of these digital tools, and I just kind of felt like—it was just sort of a very intuitive way thing for me to just kind of go onto a new software and just start clicking around and exploring how it works.

I think in terms of drawing specifically, it was always something—again, I think everyone in my family just knew how to draw and it was just something on the side that no one really put too much emphasis on. So I never really pursued it. Whenever I would try to do some crafts or painting and things like that, I would always start a summer project, for example, and then I just kind of leave it. I guess, I would give up too quickly. I'd be like, "No, this is not working. I'll just give up and let it go. But the thing that I was very persistent with was software.

And so, I learned Photoshop and I started creating all these little greeting cards for my family. Every time there was a birthday, there'd be a nice little greeting card. I was drawing, I was actually drawing on Photoshop with the mouse. Manipulating different images and all of that. I remember experimenting on how to print on different cardboard, and I just really loved the process of discovering a new tool.

I guess at school, the way that showed up was in my projects when whenever we had presentations and things like that, I would go all out. I would create this video of like—I would just direct a video and just edit it and present it. Yeah, so it was always a lot of fun. I think that was my fun way of my creative outlet.

But in terms of drawing, yeah, as I said, I was just doodling a lot in my textbooks. I was almost ashamed of my textbooks to show them to anyone 'cause they were quite just messy. Very messy. Then, when I did my bachelor's in design, we took a few drawing classes. Again, it always was just part of design and I just didn't really see it beyond that.

MR: Means to an end kind of thing.

DA: Yeah, exactly. I did buy a Wacom tablet, and so I started drawing on Photoshop. I think that made me draw a little bit more on Photoshop, but even then, I didn't see it as drawing. I saw it still as kind of digital art, and I don't know what the difference is there, but so years later when Alan asked me if I drew, it was more like, "No, I haven't drawn in ages. At school, I used to doodle. Yeah, so that's my story.

MR: You were kind of doing it, but you just didn't think about it in the same way. It's a little bit like, you know, well, of course we all speak English at home. You know, it's English. That's how we communicate to each other. You know, we all draw, and we don't make a big deal out of it. You just do it. That could have been the case as well.

DA: Yeah, yeah. I think that's how it is. Yep.

MR: Interesting. In the projects that you do for Sh8peshifters—well, I know Alan is very talented. I've seen his work. He's definitely done some training and he's got skill. So where do you fit in? If you're doing sketchnoting or visual thinking stuff, do you also go up to the board and draw or do you do drawing in that same way, or do you sort of divide up the roles differently based on what you like to do? How does that fit together as a team of two?

DA: We have complementary skills for sure. So when we're working together on a project or with a client, we kind of work to each other's strengths. When I take on live events and things like that, I do come up and draw. I do live sketchnoting and things like that as well. I have definitely been lucky for the past 10 years to have Alan as an influence and a big mentor for me. So it's been yeah, quite good to rediscover that skill and hone it.

But when we're doing live sketching sessions with clients usually Alan's the one live sketching and I'm the one facilitating. That's how our dual collaboration works. We find that it works really well 'cause I'm really good at bouncing off people's ideas and challenging them and questioning them. Alan is very good at creating live sketches that are very high quality so that people can see exactly what's happening on the page.

We also have done a few projects where we're doing graphic facilitation and there's a workshop we're running, and we're both drawing at the same time we're running activities. So it depends on the project. But yeah, I think that's how it kind of is divided up mainly. With projects like explainer videos and book design and things like that, I'm usually the one on the software and Alan is on the iPad drawing.

MR: I see. I see. Those skills that you built being comfortable in software definitely helped. I think that's a great way to say it. You said that you're complimentary. I think that's a really great way to think of a good partnership is I go back to when I did a Typeface. For my books, my Sketchnote handbook, I was a print production designer, so I knew how painful print production was, and I thought, there's no way I'm gonna hand write this whole book and then scan it because you know there's gonna be typos.

So I reached out to some friends that said, "Who do you know that does typography? 'Cause I need to do a typeface of my handwriting." I found someone, my friend Delve Witherington, and we made an agreement, and we together worked on this Typeface, which now you can buy and use it on your projects. If you're an Adobe user, you can find Sketchnote Typeface for free as part of the Adobe Creative Suite.

In the beginning, we just did it because I needed a Typeface so I could do the production, but then in the end, and as we were building this Typeface, I kept thinking, "Man, I've got the best deal in the world. All I have to do is draw the Typeface and give it to Delve, and he turns it into this amazing font with kerning and all this cool stuff." And then if you talk to Delve, he would say, "Oh man, I got the best job in the world. I don't have to draw anything. Mike gives me all these samples, I scan 'em, and I tweak 'em, and I can nerd out in my software."

He thought it was the best thing ever. So we both kind of felt like we got a great deal. And I feel like the best partnerships tend to be that way where you both feel like you got the better end of the deal and then it works toward, you know, a solution or a collaboration that feels really natural. It seems to me, which you guys have been doing, is that, so that's really cool.

DA: Yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah, that's exactly that. I love the way you put it. Yeah.

MR: I would also note that not always easy to find good partners who feel that way. I've worked with many different people and some people are easier to work with than others. It's just the way life is. So it's cool that you guys found each other and you found a way to make this work, and it seems like a good fit. So, pretty cool.

DA: Yeah, I think we both count ourselves lucky. I mean, I feel like I am the most creative when I'm in a good kind of collaborative space. I think Alan has had lots of different partners you know, throughout time. It's really a very important thing to find the people you're very aligned to. And I think if you have the right vision even if you're not exactly the same, we're not the same at all, but as you said, quite complimentary. It can make things much more creative, but also fun. It's a very fun working environment.

MR: That's great.

DA: And I think sometimes artists they get a bit isolated in their minds, so it's really helpful to have someone else to get you out of that.

MR: Yeah. Yes, a different perspective for sure. Interesting. Well, the last thing I'll mention about what you're doing with Sh8peshifters is it seems like, at least I see from LinkedIn, is having guests in and having groups of people come, and you're offering this teaching for like—I dunno what you would call this. A meetup of some kind pretty regularly, which is pretty cool. Were did that idea come from, and how is that going?

DA: It's going really well. It's called the Think Visual Meetup.

MR: That's right.

DA: We started it in our office. We were very lucky to have an office in the city at the beginning of the year. And so, we've always talked about building a community around what we do around meeting new people that do the same thing, but at the same time opening up this visual thinking space to people across different industries. Because we meet lots of clients and people who say, "I can't draw." And we know that drawing is more of a thinking process, and it's something that both Alan and I are passionate about. We wanted a way to open it up to people to kind of come and see how they can put into practice in their own life, you know, even if it's just their personal life.

So having that space at the beginning of the year made us think, "Okay, well, now that we've got a space in the middle of the city, why don't we use it to do that?" We have a big network of people that we know across different industries, so we started bringing in guest speakers every month. Every month we'd bring in a guest speaker and try to bring them in from a different industry, a different perspective, and they talk about how they use visual communication or visual thinking in their own practice. And it's usually very different.

You know, we've had people talk about prototyping, we've had people who facilitate in workshops, and they use visuals to map out things with their clients. A very big range of people from education, product design, tech. And so, it's been a growing community over the past six months. We've got the next one on Wednesday, actually. This Wednesday. It's being hosted at KPMG. So we've got some graphic recorder friends at KPMG who have opened up the AI Innovation lab there in the city to host a bigger crowd 'cause it's grown too big for our office.

MR: Yeah, in the office. Yeah.

DA: Yeah, yeah. So it's been really good. I think people really love it. Every time people come, we encourage them to sketch notes. So it's really amazing. It's not like other meetups. You don't see people looking at the guest speaker. They're all looking down at their papers and sketching. And it's really great to see just everyone not hesitating and just feeling comfortable with drawing.

MR: That's awesome. I love that. I have to find a way to come down under, and if I do, maybe I can come and visit your group. That would be fun.

DA: That would be amazing. That would be great if you'd be a speaker.

MR: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

DA: Share your experience.

MR: I have to get myself over there. That's the hard part. So Diana, tell me a little bit about the tools you like. We mix both theory and practice on the podcast. And one of the practical things I think that can help people is learning what types of tools you like. I always seem to discover some new thing that I—you know, you'd think after doing, I dunno, 160 of these episodes, I would've learned about every possible tool under the sun, but that's not true. I continually learned about new things. So tell us about the tools you like. Start with analog first and then digital second.

DA: With analog, I really like black and white. I love brush markers like Zig and Tombo. They're the dual tip brush markers. I usually, most of the time it's black that I use with that. But of course, felt tip markers. So I usually use 0.3 or 0.4 felt tip markers. I started Inktober last week. Are you doing Inktober, Mike?

MR: No, I've decided this year not to do Inktober with just so many things going on, but I have done it in the past. It's fun.

DA: Fair enough. So I've had this brush marker for a while. It's not a brush marker, it's a brush pen with ink in it. So it's a refillable ink, and it's this Chinese tip brush. I started using that for Inktober, and it's just been really, really fun to use. It's very different. It's like painting rather than the brush markers that feel more like markers.

MR: Yeah.

DA: Yeah, so I'm really enjoying that one at the moment. For digital, usually Procreate is my go-to. Procreate on the iPad. Right after that would be Photoshop obviously, and I use a graphic tablet called Huion, and they're really good. Very affordable. And yeah, for the big screen and a smaller one.

MR: I haven't heard of that brand. Maybe that's a newer one. Wacom, I've heard of a lot of, but maybe Huion is a new competitor.

DA: Yeah, yeah. I think so. I can't remember, I think they're Chinese. A Chinese brand. I'm gonna have to check that, but—

MR: Yeah, it sounds like it could be. Yeah.

DA: Yeah. It's definitely newer than Wacom and more affordable. I was gonna say, that's why I discovered it. I used to use Wacom and I wanted to upgrade, and I found Huion and I thought, you know—

MR: Give it a try.

DA: Yeah. Both Alan and I actually thought we'd just kind of try that one, and it's really good pressure and the screen is very good. So it's definitely a new competitor.

MR: Cool. Well, we'll have to put a link in there. Maybe it's something you can only get in Australia right now, but we'll see. We can put the link in to that in the brush pen. Any other tools that you like? Are there tools that help you do your work that aren't necessarily visual thinking tools, but you think maybe a visual thinker could benefit from software-wise or hardware.

DA: Software wise? Notion. I think that's an interesting tool that over the past year I've been tinkering with. It's more of a project management, task management tool, but it's got so many tools and it's quite flexible. You can really use it to document everything you want, from projects to your schedule to writing content in it, so it's got a document kind of database. So I find that it's such a versatile tool, and you can even share different pages with clients. So it's quite flexible. Yeah, I think that would be the tool that I'd recommend.

MR: Yeah, that almost seems like a box full of tools in a lot of ways, right? If you wanna build something, all the parts are there and you can kind of configure them in unusual ways if you wanted to, to achieve what you wanna do, which is pretty cool.

DA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, instead of having several different tools, right? That's a kind of an all-in-one.

MR: Probably the challenge there is any of those all-in-one type tools is you could spend hours and hours fiddling and making it just right instead of doing the work. So that's the flip side challenge of an all-in-one is the care and feeding of your tool, so.

DA: I've definitely been guilty of that.

MR: That can happen in any tool.

DA: You spend hours.

MR: Yeah.

DA: Yeah.

MR: Interesting. Let's talk a little bit about tips and tricks. So we love to have tips and tricks for people who are on the show, or—and the way I frame it is this way that imagine there's someone who's listening, who's a visual thinker, and maybe they feel like they've hit a plateau, or they just need some inspiration, what would be something, three tips that you would give that person to encourage them? They can be practical, they can be theoretical, whatever you like, and you can do more than three. Three is just a nice round number.

DA: Well, I think I would start with just doodle. Just reflecting on my story, I realized that sometimes it doesn't matter what you're doodling, it's more about the relationship between your mind and your hand. If you let it go on for a while, you're bound to discover something new. And it's just about holding that pen and letting yourself draw even if you don't have any purpose of doing it, and even if it looks like just marks. I would say definitely just doodle. Let yourself just kind of let yourself go with the pen.

I guess, another one that I personally need to keep reminding myself of is to keep a sketchbook. Keep a sketchbook on you at all times. I feel like I go through sometimes where I either forget or I've got too many things on that I just keep my sketchbook at home, and I start feeling restless, and I don't know why. The moment I just keep my sketchbook on me, I feel like I just start drawing more. Even though I didn't plan on it, it's just because it's on me all the time, whenever I find a little moment, I'll just take it out and start drawing. And so, I feel like that's something that everyone needs to be reminded of all the time.

MR: Yeah.

DA: I guess if you're stuck, and you want some inspiration, the best inspiration I found is talking to people. So find a community, find a group of people who inspire you. It doesn't even have to be individual thinking, but who just inspire you and can give you some motivation to think outside the box. Yeah, if you're in Sydney, come join us, Think Visual Meetup.

MR: There we go. Yeah, I think there are a fair amount of Aussie listeners. It may not be in Sydney, but maybe if you're outside, if you're in another city, maybe you need a little bit of a tour, a visit. You need to take a little trip and attend one of these events. I know that if I live close enough, I would come, but it's a 24-hour flight or something for me. So we'll have to plan that. I've collected many friends in Australia, so I think I need to cash in my friends and come and see them.

DA: Yes, please do. Yeah, you're definitely welcome here. You'll find lots of friends and a big community waiting for you.

MR: Well, Diana, this has been great. Can you tell us what are the best places to find you? Of course, we have the Sh8peshifters website, which we'll put in the show notes. Are there any personal things that you'd like to share? Social media, websites, work, or any of that kind of thing that we can go and check out?

DA: I think the best place to find me would be LinkedIn at the moment. I do have an Instagram account. I haven't really used it for a while, but I do have some stuff on there. It's A8temis with an eight. Again, I'll just send it to you and you can link it. And I suppose the other place would be sketchlab.online where we host some webinars, and we've got an online course that's self-based as well.

MR: That's right. Yeah, I remember that. Alan mentioned that, and we'll make sure that gets into the show notes as well.

DA: Cool. Yeah, I think LinkedIn would be the best place for people to find me.

MR: Okay. Okay, great. I know when Alan was on before, he had talked about wanting as Sh8peshifters to do more publishing as a company. And he said, you guys are doing all this cool stuff, and you just weren't telling anybody about it. I would say in the last, whatever, however many months that's been, he's done a good job with you in kind of identifying those things and then starting to tell people about them, which has been really good. I think maybe going on the record on the podcast sort of made him make sure that he talked with you and made it happen. I don't know, but it's kind of fun to see what's going on with you guys.

DA: Yeah. Well, you've definitely given him motivation. Lots of inspiration.

MR: Cool.

DA: So yeah, your chats with him have been very motivational.

MR: Good. We'll have to keep the fire underneath him and keep him moving. Now I can put the fire under you, although I don't know that I need to, but. So thanks so much, Diana, for being on the show and telling us a little bit more about yourself and how you fit in with the Sh8peshifters work that you're doing with Alan.

Thanks so much, you and Alan taking the community and making something happen locally. I think that's just so inspiring to see communities forming like that. And then, as you say, it's not uncommon to go in there and see lots of sketch notes happening while presenters are speaking. It gotta be cool for the speakers at the end to see all these sketch notes of their talk, right? Maybe they haven't been sketch noted ever before, and suddenly you've got like 10 or 15. That would be pretty cool.

DA: Yeah. Yeah, they love it. They love it. It's very cool.

MR: Nice. Nice.

DA: Definitely, a great experience. Yeah, thank you, Mike. And thank you for doing this podcast. It's definitely a source of inspiration for a lot of people just to listen, including me, to listen to all the different perspectives and different people's experiences in this area.

MR: Yeah, well, no problem at all. I'm really happy to do it. It's a passion project for sure. And, you know, I would do it whether or not five or more people listen. It's hard to know how many listens, but I think it's an important thing to do. So thank you for listening, and thank you for now contributing and being on the show and inspiring a new group of people.

So we will make sure and get all these things that we talked about in the show notes for you. And until the next episode or the—oh, I dunno. I've lost my tagline, Diana, what's going on here? Until the next episode, this is Mike. Have a great day.