In this episode, James Durno shares how growing up around art-focused environments shaped his creativity. He delves into developing diverse artistic skills, mastering spatial thinking, and examines the potential impact of AI on future generations.

Sponsored by Concepts

The Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil.

In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:

The Infinite Canvas as a sketchnoting power feature
How vectors give you complete control of brushes and sizing as you create sketchnotes and
How vector elements let you size and repurpose your drawings for ultimate flexibility.

The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts.

Watch the workshop video for FREE at:
https://rohdesign.com/concepts

Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop!

Buy me a coffee!

If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee

Running Order

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

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tips

Slow down to speed up.
Abandon the idea of perfection. Practice, but practice makes proficient, not perfect.
Learning the rules, principles, and elements of what makes a good art.
Listening to understand.
A drawing is not just what we intend it to be but also how it's understood. Make sure that we get it right in terms of what we pack into a drawing.

Credits

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

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here with James Durno from down in South Africa. Well, I guess it depends on your perspective, right, James? You might be up and maybe us in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe we're down, right? If you think about the way space works. Welcome to the show.

James Durno: Good to be here.

MR: James, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

JD: I'm an artist. I call myself a visual communicator because I communicate visually. I'm a visual thinker, but I come from a fine art background and illustration, cartoon, and commercial art background. I think that what defines my work largely is the fact that because of all of the different influences, I've kind of developed an offering and a way of working that's at the intersection of all of those different disciplines. My focus is largely on the kind of interdisciplinary osmosis that happens between fine art, drawing, painting different mediums, and then drawing those into the graphic recording and the visual communication space.

I don't define myself as a graphic recorder as such although that's what I do. I think in terms of visual language and disciplines and a range of mediums and how I can pull those all together into something that's exciting and different from the norm. Then what comes me beyond that is actually, I'm a husband and a dad.

MR: Excellent.

JD: And a human being, you know, beyond and before that.

MR: Always important to remember that. I think that's the most important thing we can offer, for sure. The word that struck me when you started to describe what you do is almost like a conductor of a symphony. So you're the one, you know, telling the symphony how to represent this piece of music in a sense except that it's your different disciplines kind of all coming together in this one pursuit of capturing what's happening in that moment. Would that be a fair way to describe it?

JD: I think it's a fair metaphor. Also, I think if you think more in terms of jazz than say classical music or popular music, it's about on-the-spot kind of being able to reinvent oneself in real time. It's kind of also like cooking as well. It's about a range of ingredients and not really working according to rules at a certain point. Like, the master chef doesn't work according to a recipe, but understands the principles of flavor and texture and color and the harmony of the dish and what works.

I think that goes for art as well. There's certain principles that we have. I mean, we're jumping straight beyond origin story and all of the stuff that would kind of be at the beginning of this conversation, you know, straight into the middle of things. But if one looks at graphic recording, sketchnoting, the whole broader area, and it's got multiple terms, and they're not exactly the same thing. I mean, sketchnoting and graphic recording people call them the same thing.

But sketchnoting, in terms of how I would understand it in kind of the working in a notebook versus a large-scale events drawing, or a strategy session. They may happen in the same space, but they're not necessarily the same thing. I think a lot of visual practitioners, awful term, but they have it—a lot of visual practitioners' kind of look at the practice as it kind of sprung fully armed like a theater from the head of Zeus.

MR: Yeah.

JD: Like, it happened. It's this new thing and everybody speaks visual thinking and visual practices if it's a new something, whereas it actually draws on multiple different disciplines. So it owes a debt to fine art and to drawing into architecture. It's kind of narrowed down and simultaneously broadened into different tribes that are quite strangely siloed. There's a—I'm trying to articulate what I want to say here.

MR: Yeah.

JD: This is where you're gonna have to pull me back into the thread of conversation before we go too far off at a tangent. But you've got people that think in terms of metaphor. Those that are all about visual storytelling. You've got those that are all about icons. And they seem to think within that very siloed mentality whereas the exciting spaces where those overlap and where one can draw on all of those. If there's a moment for working in metaphor, that's the moment. If it's something that lends itself to visual narrative and a narrative thread, then sure.

If you're wanting to use an iconography then great. You know, but they're different things. So for me, my focus, and to go back to the conversation around my background as an artist is the principles and also the metaphor, or the conductor or jazz, or the master chef is the principles of art, a balance, harmony, proportion, volume, unity, sort of tonal value, contrast, line, movement, depth perspective. Give me a few, help here.

MR: I think you've covered most of them.

JD: That those are not rules. They are something that is intrinsic to art, to design, to architecture, to the arts in general. Those are things that we need to internalize, that we need to then draw on and forget about. One learns those, and then we need to actually have them sort of embedded in ourselves and then draw on those. I don't know if that's—

MR: No, I'm tracking with you. I think about coming back to the concept of jazz. And so, as a jazz individual, you know, you're always improvising in the moment, right? But I think you always think about a jazz typically is some kind of an ensemble, maybe three, maybe four people, and each one of those individuals is doing something. Now, in your case, I'm guessing that you do this work solo. So in the sense, it's like the knowledge centers are like the different music. So there's a bassist and a drummer, and a someone on keyboard and someone on saxophone, let's say, right?

Those could be considered your different, maybe the strengths or the areas that you need. And at the right moment, you know, the saxs is important or at a different, you know, maybe the foundation is the keyboard. So it's always there. That could be some other aspect. So you're sort of bringing them and leaning on each one at the right moment to kind of make things happen as a rough maybe not perfect metaphor for what you're doing, but I totally understand that. Yeah.

JD: It's a very good metaphor. I think for instance in a graphic recording, in a live capturing as a visual summary, one is tracking a linear process. Once there's a beginning to the day and there's an end to the day.

MR: Yes, yes.

JD: It's not entirely linear because certain content will conglomerate over time. It'll build out. A drawing will develop a certain gravitational pull that can hold other information around that. So rather than visual redundancies, one will backfill those visuals. At the same time, some of it will be information drawing. Other ones will be an image that lands that's strong enough to hold a lot of information. We can kind of zip file and pack information into that picture as a holding device.

So we've concentrated and distilled a whole lot of stuff into one image that is a powerful visual. That's quite different to just information drawing, but then what does that visual communicate? How is it understood? How is it perceived by an audience? What is the quality of the line? How alive is it? How engaging is it? You know, what are the emphases, et cetera. So there's so many elements to that.

And then what is the overall vision, the harmony of the actual picture, how balanced and harmonious is it? How readable is it? And then what is the comfort, in terms of the actual viewer or the audience, how well can they actually engage with it? And is it so cluttered or so messy or so detailed that it's inaccessible? It's about the information and the narrative thread. It's about the essence of the day, the mood and the atmosphere and the spirit. Oh, losing my earpiece. There. The spirit of the actual event or the room or the people. All of those things kind of soak up in the drawing. So there's so many different dimensions to it.

MR: Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking about that in some ways it's like, you need skill, but you need to have balance of skill. So knowing when to use the right skill, which is what you talked about with the jazz band. But it's also in a way like meditation and being in the moment so that you can do the right thing at the right time. And I think ultimately, it comes down to experience that probably the only way to get better at this is to study and practice, and then actually practice doing it.

And then there's a spiral of skill. Like as you get better, you start noticing like, "Ooh, that just happened. I need to capture that. Where can that fit?" Maybe like you said, you've got a kind of an anchor image where you keep up, that follows the same pattern, add that to the anchor image, and then the anchor image is getting richer over time, but knowing like, when do you stop adding to it? How do you avoid, like just packing the page with information and being more selective? Like all those are learned things just like a chef or a musician, right, knowing keeping the balance.

So ultimately, it comes back to balancing all those things because if you have the skills, but you just fill the page with tiny imagery, no one's going to take the time to go through that page full of, you know, a forest of information. Part of what you're doing is that filtering a little bit of the decision-making about what feels like the most important thing to get on this board or screen, right? It's a little tougher to capture that skill. I'm bringing AI into it. I wonder if AI is capable of doing that kind of work or not. I think it's the jury is out, and I'm not sure.

JD: I think the issue with AI—actually if we can park the AI for one brief moment, and I'll just respond to before that what you were saying is about hat flow state of experience and, and skill and confidence. It's not just about the information, what one is hearing and about what one is synthesizing and processing, but also responding to the room and to the moment so much that is intuitive how, just to take that and maybe it's a light touch. It's something that one senses rather than something that's conscious.

And you were talking about balance, and it's a small thing, but I think most people, when they think of balance, in their minds they see scales, and they think in terms of symmetry, they think this is equal to this. And balance is entirely different. If we think of the human figure, we—I've lost my use again. If we think of the human figure, it's constantly balancing and counterbalancing and cantilevering, every single movement is finally calibrated. And so, so I think if we use that as a metaphor for everything, the grace and the harmony and the balance versus a rigid symmetry in thinking or in the visual, it's a big difference.

MR: Yeah. That could be, you know, moving beyond just simply templates and doing the same template over and over again, which is maybe a good starting place to the level above that is being more in tuned to what's happening in the moment, and maybe breaking outta that template and doing something new or just following your—

JD: The thing about the template thinking is that one, I think when one is in a group space, one's role is contribution, and you are at the service of that group in that moment. What I struggle with in terms of a template thinking or pre-designed templates, a lot of digital graphic record pre-designed their entire canvas. Everything's prepped, and then they're dropping in and sometimes even repurposing a whole lot of images in real time. And yet, to some degree that misses the whole point 'cause although it's a safety net, you're not in the moment responding to—you are already trying to fit the content into a pre-ordained image, and I'm not so sure about that.

MR: You might be resisting the change in the direction simply to fit it within the template that you've predetermined, and then you maybe lose something. You lose an opportunity in a sense, maybe.

JD: Indeed. I think it sets a dangerous precedent. You were talking about AI and I backtracked it.

MR: We can come back to that.

JD: Your question about AI, what was it?

MR: My thought was basically the way you're describing this expert level ability to balance and maneuver and have different skills and deploy them at the right moments and maintain the balance that AI, at least not yet. It has a hard time, you know, with that kind of complexity, I think.

JD: My take and what do I know, I'm just an artist.

MR: Yeah, same here.

JD: We both work off prompts, don't we? You know, in real time.

MR: Yeah.

JD: There's just more lag with me, you know, with AI. I think the issue that I have is that with AI, it's not so much that it's kind of trying to eat everybody's lunch. It's that, to some degree, people are outsourcing their thinking. I commented on one of your posts and said, "It's like a prosthetic brain out." People are outsourcing their creative process to AI or abandoning creative process. I remember in the Midjourney when it first came out, in an article that I read, it said, "It can't take away mundane tasks like the initial stages of design."

MR: That's the most critical stage of the whole thing.

JD: That's the point, is that AI—and the greatest advocates of AI are those who actually can't do it. Those who can't really draw, go. "Wow. You know, isn't it amazing?" So people speak about the democratization of various spaces from writing to poetry, and I think there's a level people actually believe that they've created those things because they gave the AI some promise. Not to take away from the really great prompt engineers who produce amazing stuff, but AI starts at the end and skips the whole middle. For us, it's all about that middle bit. It's drawing as thinking and, in that process, it can go anywhere.

We might have an idea in mind where we think it's gonna go, but it seldom ends up where we think it will. So in that process, there's the push and the pull and the divergence and convergence and divergence. Even in a fine` artwork, one is producing a painting, one is euphoric with the experience, and then suddenly you just lose it, botch it, mess it up, and have to pull it back from the edge. And then you make a mistake. And the mistake defines the direction. You have those happy mistakes in the creative process. AI just, that's just not—that's part of our humanity.

MR: Yeah. You kinda lose that process. Yeah.

JD: So, and I kind of go, if people are talking about AI and as an ultimate creative freedom when it's anything, but ''cause it's kind of it's freedom that isn't tethered to our humanity. Like a kite, you know, you cut the string, you know, and I think that's what we are kind of doing to some degree.

MR: My big concern in the post you mentioned around that, and we can wrap the AI discussion 'cause we could probably talk the whole session about that.

JD: Sure.

MR: But my bigger concern than AI doing things which obviously it's going to do, and it's not going away at least anytime soon, how far it reaches is unknown, but my concern was more for creative people, like you said, outsourcing the creative process, thumbnail, sketches, conceptual things, leaving it in your subconscious while you have a coffee and go for a walk, all the hard work of arriving at a solution. By bypassing that, you're actually losing creative muscle.

And then what happens when the tool changes because the AI company decided they didn't need that feature anymore, and the feature you rely on is now gone, and now you've lost all your muscle to do that work. Now you're kind of in a pickle, right? So my call was for creative people just to be careful about how they use it and where they use it, and to not give away too much of their muscle because never know who might need it.

JD: And to that point, and I mean, I know we gonna move on from the AI conversation, but it's relevant to everything else.

MR: It is.

JD: At a certain point, I don't see upcoming generations putting in the effort to learn things that AI can do. So will they pursue careers in these areas? Because most of the conversations are professionals in this area talking about how it currently impacts them and how it's a good thing, and you know, they can use it and harness it, but what happens with future generations where the less and less and less people actually put in the effort to learn those skills and at that point, what will AI be trained on? Will it become an infinity loop of copying itself?

MR: Yeah, that's problematic because of model collapse which is basically when AI runs out of organic stuff that we produce, and it starts to ingest its own stuff, it starts to really hallucinate and have problems, so.

JD: It's gonna eat its own tail.

MR: Exactly.

JD: Yeah.

MR: Well, you said something in there that I thought could be a good segue, and that was how you got to this place. What I thought was it might be interesting to hear your story of how you got here from where you began. It sounds like maybe you didn't arrive here intentionally. Like most people on the show, they sort of come from all over the place. So I would love to hear like from when you were a little boy till now, what would be that journey maybe in a highlight view, the key moments where you shifted direction, maybe that could be interesting.

JD: Sure. I think the people are only coming into graphic recording or into the whole area of visual practice as a career choice now because it's been—you know, but historically everybody has to come from somewhere else or has had to this point.

MR: Yeah.

JD: I've been doing this for 21 years down at the tip of Africa. I'm based in Cape Town, right on the peninsula, at the very tip of Cape Town. So I can't go much further, drive for half an hour, and you're at the end of the continent.

MR: Wow.

JD: I live on a mountain slope. My studio is on a mountain slope overlooking at a valley just five minutes' walk from the sea. I lead a less existence. I was born in Cape Town in 1968, so I think we probably are similar vintage. I'm not sure.

MR: Yep.

JD: Would you divulge your age on this podcast, Mike Rohde?

MR: I could. I could. I'm a little bit further along than you. I'm at '64, but my brother is '60.

JD: You're at 64?

MR: Yeah.

JD: Oh my goodness. You're in very good, Nick.

MR: Yeah.

JD: So I'm 56.

MR: Born, born in '64, so I'm at 59. I'm a little bit ahead of you.

JD: Oh, sorry. Born in '64.

MR: Yeah.

JD: Okay. That makes more sense.

MR: Yeah.

JD: So born I'm in 1968 in Cape Town. Then moved when I was six years old to a tiny, tiny town. The reason I'm kind of going back this way is I actually started storyboarding a little bit of my origin story, and for the first time certain things actually popped in a way that they hadn't before. Yesterday was my youngest son's 22nd birthday. We pulled out photo albums and I actually pulled out my photo album of when I was a little boy.

MR: Wow.

JD: I saw few photos relative to the digital age. When you look through that, you've got these photos as kind of that punctuate one's history, but scattered between that is so much stuff that's missing. One of the big things, I moved in when I was six years old, we moved to a little town in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. I grew up kind of in the center of it where I lived one block from my primary school, my junior school. Five blocks from my high school. One block further is where I studied art. I was seven blocks away from the theater and from the museum, and less than two kilometers from the art gallery.

So if I look back as a bird's eye view, I can see the edges of my entire childhood and all my experiences. In terms of visualizing spatially, that has had a huge impact on my work and my thinking, because I had the opportunity to be involved in all of those things. I was involved in theater and in set design. I worked at the art gallery. I studied art, I went to school in one—but it was all within a tight, small area. I think that's one of the big things that's defined me to a large degree.

I grew up with the—I'm a middle child with two wonderful parents. Both passed away now, but loving, wonderful parents, happy home. My father's fascination with books and history and art. And in terms of just his general interests, very much a kind of a renaissance man, very eclectic, but both my parents were involved in amateur dramatics. And so, as a founder, we got involved in that as well.

I remember being a young boy sitting in the theater while they were rehearsing for a production and looking at the set and running up onto the stage afterwards because I couldn't believe that there was this miniaturized world. There were the cutouts of the city escape and then the perspective just in the shallow space. I think to a large degree that's also influenced my work, just looking back, is the idea that even in the work that I do, that when I draw little people, they are actors within a visual narrative. They tell a story in terms of how they act, their body language. When they speak, it's dialogue, little speech bubble. If they're thinking, it's a soliloquy.

The whole idea of perspective or shallow perspective for a lot of my work, and I think in a lot of graphic recording and a lot of visual practice, the surface of the page is cluttered with content. You only have got so much space in which to draw stuff, but perspective or shallow perspective by breaking the picture plane, one can punch through that, and one composition content so that you can navigate that within space. So there's a spatial element to it as well.

So I think that's one of the things that defines my work as well as I think spatially. Even my studio, I have different workstations where I'll draw there. I'll be at my computer here, I'll paint over there, and I lay out my projects spatially. Then I navigate that space. I walk from one to the next. Then—how are we for time by the way?

MR: We're good.

JD: Are we good?

MR: Keep going. Yeah, keep going.

JD: I studied fine art, and then I taught life drawing and painting for a couple of years. That as well is something that's foundational to how I think and how I work as well. Again, all the principles of art and design and that we spoke about earlier. Also, I think learning to think critically and to view things critically. I don't mean critical in a negative sense. I'm sure you would understand that, but not everyone does. To be constructively critical. So as a teacher to be able to constructively criticize someone's work whilst at the same time affirming them and being generous with one's praise, but pinpointing where they need to grow or change.

We live in a world where one can if one criticizes somebody's work, they tend to take offense, but not see it as constructive input. I remember life drawing and life painting as a student and spending time drawing and painting, and then having my painting master come along and grab a brush and dip it in, you know, like squeeze out black oil paint and start drawing, you know, with a brush straight through my drawing and saying that, "This structurally the axis runs in this direction. The emphasis is there, the weight is there, the pelvis tilts that direction."

And then he'd walk away, and I'd be left with this kind of. And yet it did teach me to think in terms of structure and foundations. I still work with a pencil. Not as a safety nest, although it is, but because it's a thinking tool in a way that a pen isn't. You can't un draw. You can't un draw this.

MR: Yeah.

JD: As one teases out ideas and pushes and pulls ideas with pencil, those thoughts, those visual thoughts, those are kind of nascent thoughts, but until you pen them, they remain charged with possibility. When you see it, you can understand it. And there's this kind of it's draw, see, process, push-pull, and explore and then pen. So for me, that's—I think a lot of people see that penning immediately is kind of like a gungho thing. You kind of, you jump straight in, you listen, you draw, because you've gotta do this quickly because you really gotta race through because time is marching on, and you've got, you know so many hours.

MR: Window of time. Yeah.

JD: One can get a lot further, a lot faster by slowing down. I work on the sidelines with a clipboard, and I'm constantly doing thumbnails before committing. Some of those, I'll loop back to much later in the day. Some I won't draw at all. It's a way of testing ideas and my understanding of those ideas before committing. Learning not to commit prematurely as well.

MR: Almost like letting those form on the clipboard until they're at the right time to be placed. And then you would lift the concept up, and then build it in final form on the big board, it sounds like.

JD: Even on the big board, I still will map in pencil just a few marks. It might just be a rhythm or a structural line just to—it's not built out or developed, but it means that I'm able to work confidently over that and give the work a strength and an energy that it might lack if I didn't have those. For me, that's an important something. On that note, I work with a one-millimeter B lead 'cause otherwise it scores the paper and then a high polymer eraser, because not all erasers are created equal. If one has a poor eraser, the friction will fix the pencil.

MR: Doesn't erase it. Yeah, it forces it in. For those listening, A one millimeter B lead basically means a very thick, soft lead, so that it flows on the page and you could brush it with your finger and it would rub. Yeah.

JD: Thanks for the translation.

MR: I know what you meant, and I assume there must be people who maybe don't work with pencil much and wouldn't know what that meant to them. If you get too sharp of a lead, too hard of a lead, I mean, it can literally cut paper. If it's the right paper, it could be quite sharp. I could show you my 1.4-millimeter Faber-Castell with a soft lead that I like for sketching as well.

JD: Lovely.

MR: That's really fascinating that I've heard several people who practice, who use pencil. I like pencil. A lot of the reason I teach pen, it was more strategic in that when I'm teaching people, I think it tended to be too much of a crutch for people learning to draw. I wanted to show them number one, that using basic shapes is enough for now, and that you can do basic shapes with pen. And by committing, it kind of freed them from overthinking. Because I think the problem for new students is maybe they overthink it, and if I gave them a pencil, it would only reinforce that. So it was more of a strategic thing.

JD: That's a fair point.

MR: Yeah, in that context. Right. Not in every context though, but I use pencil as well.

JD: I think if one always relies on the safety net, you don't necessarily go beyond a certain points. It's how I work, not because it's right, but because it works for me.

MR: Right.

JD: If I were going small scale on a sketch noting in a notebook, I would work directly with pen and just have a really nice, you know lovely quality black line.

MR: Yeah. I mean, I've seen—

JD: But for a larger scale.

MR: Yeah, you probably need something. And at that scale you can see the pencil up close. That's another pro tip, I guess. Where you, up close to the board, you can see the pencil, but someone standing five feet back or something would never see it. Especially in contrast to the heavy ink that goes on. They would just—

JD: I don't actually mind if they do. It's just part of the honest process. It's not really about the big reveal so much as being able to get the job done as well as possible and as eloquently as possible. Sort of like a visual eloquence.

MR: Yeah.

JD: To be visually eloquent and articulate.

MR: Interesting. I'm really curious. You talked about being a life drawing teacher, you've talked about being a painter. Was there a moment when you discovered graphic recording as a practice and made the shift toward it? I'm really curious about that moment.

JD: I came into that from being a—after I taught, I moved from that little town to the business center of South Africa to Johannesburg. That's where I met my wife, and we had kids, and I lived there for 25 years. I worked as, as an artist, but struggled. I worked as an illustrator, as a cartoonist, as a commercial illustrator, so for magazines, editorial stuff, advertising and that taught me to be a chameleon, to reinvent myself, to brief. If a job came up, and they said, "Can you do this?" I'd say, "Sure." And then I'd go—

MR: What did I just get myself into?

JD: Yeah. And then I had to learn how to do that. My wife, her name is Yolanta. My wife, I remember one day—I did work obviously through agencies. So there would always be a middleman and generally, so often you'd find that that would be there'd be miscommunication from the end-client through the agency to me. Also, they would've been sitting on this for ages, and I'm at the end of the line in terms of delivery and they're charging the client the expedite fee, and I'm doing the hard work for them. So I remember my wife saying, "Why do you have to go through an agency? Can't you just go directly to the business?" And I remember saying, "My darling, you can't do that. There's just no way that you'd say, 'Hello business. Can I draw pictures for you?'"

MR: Yeah.

JD: Then in 2003, two friends of mine that were management consultants, said, "There's this thing overseas in America called graphic recording." And so, they introduced that to me, and we worked together where they would facilitate groups and I would draw at that stage, just standing at a flip chart and sweating, adrenaline. It was terrifying. But it didn't really work out. The businesses didn't need somebody to facilitate so much as have someone that could draw. At the point of which they went back to get a job, a year or two later, I carried on, and it took up for me from that point. I think that at that point I had this kind of epiphany. It was like in three parts.

Essentially, the one was you know, selling a cartoon or being commissioned to illustrate a cartoon or an illustration for editorial or for advertising, et cetera. There's a cap on what would be paid, what is the intrinsic value of that piece of art, you know, even selling a painting, but what is the value of a well communicated strategy? What is the value to that organization? That was one of the big ahas.

The other one was, you know, in terms of the middleman. And this was essentially my entire business model. There's the client and there's me, and wedged in between is the agency or the middleman. And there's the broken telephone of miscommunications up and down the pipeline because one doesn't have direct access to the client. There's the money aspect and what I'm getting paid versus what the client's being charged. There's the money aspect, and then there's the time aspect. There's the you know, "I'm getting this thing at the end of the line."

MR: Last minute. Yeah.

JD: And they've been sitting on it for a couple of months. You know, what if one can leapfrog that entire chain of command and I deal directly with the business?

MR: Just like your wife suggested, right?

JD: Just like my wife suggested.

MR: Your wife was right again.

JD: So I drew for myself a picture of pouring a cup of tea through a hose pipe, it arrives cold and late and, you know, how necessary is that? How necessary is the hose pipe? You know, you don't need it.

MR: Yeah.

JD: So, choice to go—I didn't abandon working with the middleman. I just went, "I will not work with a middleman who wedges themselves in the middle and doesn't allow access to the end client. I will only work with the middleman where I'm able to partner with them."

MR: Yeah, that's smart.

JD: Or work directly with the end user.

MR: That's possible. Yeah.

JD: That was a big sort of aha.

MR: A subtle shift, but important shift, right? You know, that getting the direct [crosstalk 44:27].

JD: Aha in three parts, AH-AH-HA.

MR: Exactly. Well, it sounds like then, you know, the two guys you had partnered with sort of fell away and you continued. Did you find it hard? I mean, this was early, not only was it early in South Africa, it was early, I think across the United States. I mean, David Sibbet's been doing this since the '70s and has had a good business down in Silicon Valley where there's lots of business stuff happening and has found himself in a great spot. But I do know, like, you know, 2003, 2005, it was pretty early.

I didn't really stumble into sketch noting until 2006, and that was just, "Well, this just makes sense to me." But I do know that that practice had been going on before that. So what were the clients like, and did you just have a unique angle that provided you access that allowed you to practice and continue that work?

JD: It was by word of mouth. The work that I had it created more work. So it kind of seeded new work.

MR: That's the best work.

JD: Just in terms of word of mouth and because there weren't other people doing that. There wasn't really competition at that stage. Well, you know, or just there weren't other people in that landscape. Although I might not have been servicing a lot of clients relative, you know, relative to what was out there or the potential that was out there. I was busy, or increasingly busy.

MR: It was enough for you, which is really all that could you think about.

JD: It was enough for me . And so, I kind of worked in isolation because I wasn't really connected at all with what was happening abroad. In terms of a journey of the explorational visual language, 2010 kind of going icons, and I created in collaboration with a local business. We started looking at building an icon library that we called Conversation. Still have the domain, but we never launched it. It defined to a large degree my work as well because I was able to use that as a visual thinking tool, less in terms of like high-powered, you know, high performing organization, HPO.

You know, and you've got rockets taking off at 45 degrees, equals or, you know, time flies, you know, alarm clock, you know, or whatever time is of the essence or whatever. It's kind of those where you pack where you have a whole swades of text and an icon sort of punctuating that. I think that that one can be maybe a little bit more thoughtful with those as a learned as a library. I think they're valuable, and I think it's good. I just think people are a bit lazy with them at times.

MR: Yeah, they can be. Yeah.

JD: I think where they're not really—what people don't generally do, but what I think is very valuable is to look at them in terms of the building blocks of the component parts as pictograms or for pictographic sentences in the sense. You can actually in combination build pictographic sentences or use them in various ways or build them out.

MR: Interesting. And so, then the practice started running. and you started serving local community. Is that still the case now? Do you focus on these clients that you've worked with for years? Have you spread out to more businesses in the in South Africa and I guess worldwide, and how does that work?

Especially, we sort of commented about digital. Lots of graphic recorders have shifted to using iPads to do the same work, but digitally because of the pandemic, right. It was a necessity. I do know that there's a few people, and it sounds like you're one of these who went in a different direction and maintained the analog practice, but simply upped their game with camera capture. So can you talk a little bit about that and how you arrived at it and how you use that in your work?

JD: I stuck with analog because there are other people that do digital better. For me, virtual is a huge chunk of my work, but not necessarily digital. I use digital for my illustration work, but not for live graphic recording for live meetings.

MR: Interesting.

JD: The reason is a big chunk of my time is spent in a kind of a visual meeting space where I work with groups exploring ideas and co-creating that visual. So instead of just listening and drawing, we have a conversation, and we push and pull the idea under camera and collaborate on what that looks like until one reaches a consensus view that can then be taken to finished piece of work. And it's full of parts—

MR: It's pretty unique. Yeah.

JD: - because it's producing that in real time and everybody's able to contribute to what that looks like. It's not my drawing, although I'm drawing it so much as a co-created output that is shaped in the space between us. So in terms of getting on the same page, that drawing pan beneath the camera is that page on which everyone gets. And so, it's a very powerful tool for groups to be able to all contribute towards a single visual output in real time and push and pull that. The reason that I don't do that digitally is because seeing a digital illustration spidering across the page as a disembodied picture is not the same as seeing something that's—there's an honesty to the messiness of the process, to scribble with a pencil, erase, rub that out—

MR: Not to sanitize. Yeah.

JD: - pen it. All the while, there's a hand drawing it, which is the human point of contact. So people are able to connect with it, and they're able to position themselves at any given time within that drawing because they can see where the hand is and where the pen point is.

MR: Yeah. It's a reference. Yeah.

JD: Where the pen is. And it's important. My focus is kind of on the humanity of like the paper and pens and hands and art.

MR: It's interesting. It's important for that context, and I think it provides a unique—like everyone's along for the ride. Everyone's had a sense. I've told this story before. I used to do this with software developers on a whiteboard, and they were there for the whole session. What they were saying I would be capturing, and then we'd have back and forth about certain things. Often, I would invite them to come and draw on the board. So altogether we would craft this visual structure about a feature that we're talking about and how it would work with maybe drawings in black and then annotations and say, red white whiteboard marker.

And they would be part of that process. Then a photo would go into a repository so any developer could pull it up and look at it or pull it and use it as a reference to build the thing we talked about. They really loved those sessions that we did together. 'Cause If you ask somebody at the end, like, "Who designed the features?" Like, "Well, we all did. We were all in the room together."

JD: Yeah.

MR: It's a really powerful thing.

JD: I think people are invested in that. That co-ownership is important in terms of workshopping and output as well. Because everybody's a part of it. At the end of it, there's a visual brief that everybody is agreed so constitute sign off. So there's no comeback. I don't need to—and it's a direct translation into a visual of our thinking, of our collective thinking as opposed to my interpretation of a brief, and they're different things entirely.

MR: That's really fascinating. That can be a challenge for those listening to maybe find ways to get yourself in a situation where you can be a partner in that sense of a group and do that kind of capture. That might be a challenge for those of you who tend to be just recording from a distance or interpreting, like in a sketch note where you're putting your own spin on things, but maybe actually to be a collaborator could be a fun, a space that you haven't explored yet. That could be really valuable not only for you, but more importantly for the customers you're serving.

And then they would see—I think what I see in that is people see the value of the visualization because they were part of it, right. It's often hard to defend why a visual is important. And yet, going through that process, you would see exactly why, because you were part of the process, and you saw it unfolding, right. Again, coming back to the AI, that's something an AI would struggle to do, right. To do that kind of interactive collaboration, I think, at least right now, but we'll stay away from the AI topic 'cause we could get lost.

JD: Yeah.

MR: It's pretty fascinating. It's really interesting to hear, you know, where you started and where you've come from and how your background really informed and provided you skills to do what you're doing now, which is really cool. I'm really, really happy to hear what you're up to and how you're having an impact with the people you work with. That's really, really wonderful.

JD: Thank you.

MR: Let's shift a little bit. I wanna talk a little bit briefly about tools. I think primarily using analog, if I were to guess, I would guess you're using Neuland, but maybe there's other markers that you're using.

JD: I use a mix of anything and everything. I'm not sponsored by anybody. I don't necessarily draw on Neuland paper. We can Neuland here in South Africa. I do work with Neuland, but I work with a mix of acetone-based pens. Just because of the speed at which it dries. So I work a lot with Copic. I still have the Copic wide and refills, and I use that a lot as well. Then it's a mix of markers and a range of sizes. I tend to work probably kind of like 900 mils—90 centimeters, what's that in?

MR: I'm not sure. The math is too heavy for me to do on the spot.

JD: Anyway, just in terms of, it's easily scannable. It's kind of like any kind of corner print shop size. The running length, you know, isn't the issue, but the height. I can get good high-risk scans. So I tend to work to sort of set size. And then, this week I've got the South African Innovation Summit. So there, I work on a giant, you know, on a 10-meter by 1.5-meter wall. And that's over two days. Which is pretty intense.

MR: I bet.

JD: I don't do that often. I used to do it a lot when I was younger, but it's quite physically involving.

MR: Physically demanding. Yeah. I would think so. Interesting.

JD: There I work on a roll of Fabriano. It's good paper.

MR: A big roll of paper.

JD: Yeah. That's the paper materials. Pencil and pens and sometimes paint.

MR: As a painter.

JD: Not only on paper, but I've done some events, graphic recordings where, I've worked on giant canvases with paint.

MR: Interesting.

JD: It's a totally different exercise.

MR: I bet.

JD: There's the layering and the flow and the freedom of it. It's less words and far more imagery and far more kind of essence than information.

MR: I would think. Yeah.

JD: Different kind of approach. I don't know what else there is in terms of—

MR: Pretty simple palette, it sounds like. Yeah.

JD: Yeah. I work full color because of what color communicates as well. How we respond to color. One can tell a story with, with color in a way that one can't in a monochromatic kind of visualization.

MR: It's a full richness in that sense. I'm curious—so let's switch to the tips section here. Popular part of our podcast. We collect these all at the end of the season and put them together in an all the tips' episode. So tell me, what tips would you give someone who's listening who maybe is feeling like they're on a plateau, or they could just use a little inspiration, what would be three things you would suggest to them?

JD: I think we covered them, but I'll put the—that was the speeding up to slow down. Don't be so panicked at how much work you need to produce, but actually the idea is to produce meaningful output, not just volume. So be kind to yourself and slow down.

MR: Okay. That's a good one.

JD: I said speed up to slow down. I meant slow down to speed up, so work slower. The other one is, I'd say, abandon the idea of perfection. What one needs to do is target proficiency, skill. So, practice, but practice makes proficient not perfect.

MR: I like that.

JD: There are no shortcuts, and there are. There's a yes and no to everything. There are no shortcuts, but there are. The shortcut is the more you practice, the better you'll be. The more concentrated that practice, the faster you'll get there to get to being good. So practice. And the other one is about learning the rules and the principles and the elements of what makes good art. Read up about that. Not from a visual practice standpoint. Sure, do that.

Probably somebody will be cross at me for saying this, but so many people have come through a how-to-course where they've learned the how to do this, but all of those courses, someone has a vested interest in that course. And it's not necessarily the way to do it. It's a way to do it. The more courses, or the more broadly one looks at drawing and art in general, and the principles of art, the more one has to draw on. It's to by all means, do that, but look more broadly.

So for instance, if one is drawing the stick figure, draw it well, practice it well. But then, if you've learned how to draw a stick figure, don't think of it as an icon that is a placeholder for a person. Think of it as an actor performing that visual narrative. And then you are unable to observe stick figures, obviously 'cause there are those stick figures. But if one takes another view and goes, actually all of us are built on a stick figure. It's called the skeleton.

MR: Yeah.

JD: Structurally, in its most basic form, a stick figure is our skeleton button. If you think of how articulated that skeleton is, how balanced, how fluid, how mobile, you could draw stick figures that are unbelievably eloquent and visually eloquent and mobile and flexible. So, observe the human figure, even if you're drawing something as basic as a stick figure.

MR: That's great. Those are three great tips, I think. Yeah, you got three. You can go more if you have one more.

JD: I'll go. Then the listening to understand is the big one. Our drawings communicate, and they're not just about the information that they communicate. We are not illustrating words. We're illustrating ideas. We're visualizing ideas and packing that idea into a picture. If we don't understand what we're hearing and jump prematurely into—and that's why I suggest having a notepad on the side, so that you can test the idea and check that you actually know what you—

MR: Before you commit. Yeah.

JD: - what you're hearing, whether it's in terms of acronyms or whatever. You know, in terms of misunderstanding, someone says, "The sky's the limit." And you go, "This guy's the limit, what guy?" You know.

MR: Yeah. Mishearing. Yeah.

JD: Or you know, how do you draw an unaccompanied minor? Well, you draw a minor in a hard hat with a light on the front, and there's nobody with him, you know?

MR: Yeah. Very literal. Yeah.

JD: So, what we hear is not necessarily what is intended. And a drawing is not just what we intend it to be, but also how it's understood. Apart from the slightly facetious kind of comments on—I think that we draw something with a certain intention of how it's to be understood, but ultimately that drawing is what the viewer reads it as, how they see it, how they understand it, how they experience it. Ultimately, that's what the drawing is. So, we need to make sure that we get it right just in terms of what we pack into that drawing, body language, et cetera, et cetera. That was a slightly convoluted point 3C.

MR: Or you could call it a four, right? You know.

JD: Yeah, you could call it. A clumsy four.

MR: So, all part of listening to understand. Yeah. Well, James, this has been really fun talking all over the place with you and exploring just this general space. I think these are some of my favorite episodes where we have fun and explore. Thanks so much for the work that you're doing, and you're having an impact where you are and influencing the world, and thanks for doing that for us and being part of this community. It's so good to have you as part of our family.

JD: Well, lovely to chat. The conversation did kind of ricochet all over the place. Actually, those are fun.

MR: Yeah, those are fun. Yeah. So let's wrap this up by, what is the best place for people to find you? Do you have a website or you're on social media?

JD: I do. I do. I have a website. That's jamesdurno.com. Just J-A-M-E-S-D-U-R-N-O.C-O-M.

MR: There we go.

JD: So jamesdurno.com and then on LinkedIn.

MR: Yeah, that's where I see you the most. Yeah.

JD: I'm on Instagram, but more active on LinkedIn.

MR: Yeah. That makes sense. I've seen a lot more activity on LinkedIn from visual thinkers, so it's fun to see people making an impact there and opening people's minds. So thank you for doing that as well.

JD: Well, very lively online community on LinkedIn.

MR: Yeah. Well, thank you, James. It's been so good to be with you. Thanks for being on the show making time for all of us. And until the next episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, for those who are listening or watching, this is Mike Rohde. Talk to you soon.

Restoring the Military’s Focus on Warfighting