In this episode, Peter Durand explores the power of using a pen as a creative thinking tool, the beauty of embracing iterative processes, and how collaborating with professionals from different fields has deepened and broadened his artistic perspective.

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Running Order

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

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tips

Create custom color palettes for each client/event.
Manage self-negative talk and nerves through preparations and rituals.
Approach your work as a gift to share rather than something to be self-conscious about.
Being positive and supportive of each other's work.
Look for inspiration from artists and eras that are not closely adjacent.

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 Peter Durand. Peter, thanks for being on the show. It's so good to have you.

Peter Durand: Thank you, Mike.

MR: Well, let's just get right into it. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

PD: Well, first I wanna thank you for giving me the heads-up that I should dress in stealth mode with the black shirt and black cap. You know, this is the Captain America disguise.

MR: That's right.

PD: Yeah. Well, my name is Peter Durand. I go by Alphachimp, and that name emerged way back at the dawn of the internet when I was just starting off. I'm an artist. I went to art school. I was a squirmy kid sitting in math and science class, having a rough time tracking what the teacher was saying 'cause My mind was always in cartoon land, and I was always doodling and drawing.

MR: Oh, yeah.

PD: And it was only much later thanks to this book called The Sketch Note Handbook, that I realized I could have been using that the whole time to be a neuroscientist or PhD in physics. Yeah, I was an artistic kid, visual learner, and fortunately had parents that always supported that. Was surrounded by nothing but support to, you know, follow that direction. So, went off to art school in St. Louis, Washington University. Studied painting, printmaking 2D design, 3D design, but landed in illustration as a major and visual communications 'cause I wanted to tell stories. I really liked reading and comic books and graphic novels.

And I think at that time, my real dream was to be whoever the dude or dudette is, who makes the illustration on the other side of a National Geographic foldout map. My grandfather was a geographer, so we grew up with a lot of maps and stuff, but I always liked the reverse side of those foldouts because they had little vignettes of watercolor paintings and, you know, it was like a full giant poster-size, graphic novel squee education thing. So that was my big aspiration when I went off to school.

MR: I suppose it's easier to get paid as an illustrator than as a fine artist. At least regularly. Although maybe there's a few—Banksy maybe can defy that logic, I suppose, with his work.

PD: My father was a lawyer, so I was actually born in Kenya because he went off to law school in the '60s after being in the Marine Corps. And he practiced law for one year and was super bored. And unfortunately, it was up near you, Mike. It was in Madison, Wisconsin.

MR: Okay.

PD: So he was in Madison, Wisconsin, and he was bored. He was like, "I don't think I wanna do this." Somebody had given him a brochure that he threw in his drawer for this thing called the Peace Corps.

MR: Yes. The Peace Corps.

PD: And so, he was in the first wave of the Peace Corps in the '60s and was working with magistrates and lawyers in countries that had just gained independence. So through that, well, he met my mom, who's also American, and they moved to Kenya. And so, I was born in Kenya, and he was using drawing and cartooning in his classes because he didn't have law books. I don't think.

MR: Yeah, yeah.

PD: So there's a picture of him over the right shoulder, his ear, his, you know, jaw, his shoulder drawing a cartoon. And so, now when I teach, I show a picture of that from 1965 in Malawi, and then this pretty much identical picture of my ear, same shaped head drawing is like, you know, this is—

MR: Wow.

PD: I'm just carrying the lineage forward.

MR: Well, the person that I work with who supports me in doing transcripts and the show notes for this podcast is Esther. She lives in Kenya. So that's pretty cool. It's a cool connection.

PD: Yeah.

MR: Yeah.

PD: Yeah. And then for me, it's gone full circle. About 10 years ago I went to Kenya on a project as a graphic recorder and visual note taker. And was working with a group that was studying the effect of climate change on women and girls and visiting a lot of different locations. And at that time, I don't think there were any, you know, professional graphic recorders, sketchnoters in Nairobi that I was aware of. I've just recently reconnected or connected with several that are there. So it's been great to see how this practice is put into use all around the planet.

MR: Yeah. I have a feeling like graphic recorders, visual thinkers, sketchnoters, a lot of times we fly under the radar. I'll kind of include myself. You know, that I think people are there, but you don't always know about them. And I think that's one of the things that IFEP is trying to do in connecting more professional graphic recorders and facilitators so that there is that community.

And I think the sketchnote community is doing the same. That's part of the international Sketchnote Camps job. We run a Slack thing for Sketchnote Army where people can practice and chat with each other. we share activities and whatever's coming up as a way to kind of tie the community together. So I think there's always, I guess, more work to do in that area to help us be aware of like who's where because you know, we can help each other for sure.

PD: I know going to one of these gatherings is like being a unicorn at the Unicorn convention where you're just like, "Hey, wait, I'm used to being the only weird one in the room, and now they're all bunch of us."

MR: "These are my people." That's what I said.

PD: Which is a combination of like excitement and like, "Wait, I wanna be special again." I was just on a call right before this conversation with an artist who had just learned about this field, you know, she's maybe mid-career, and was so excited. I gave her my philosophy, and it's to build on what you just said, Mike, is that the greatest competition that we have, if we're doing this professionally, is nobody knows what to call us.

MR: Right.

PD: That's number one. Like, nobody knows what Google.

MR: Describing it. Yeah.

PD: Like, guy who draws while people talk and has a little book. You know, they don't know what to call us. And then the other is just, if somebody has a negative experience. So if a client does, you know, try out a sketchnote artist, story boarder, you know, whatever visual part of the spectrum, designer, and they have a negative experience. That's really bad. So it's up to us—

MR: You gotta overcome that.

PD: You've been a big part of this, just, you know, helping people raise their awareness, their basic skill set, being super generous with your time and knowledge, and that just makes everybody smarter, faster, better, stronger, and have more fun.

MR: Well, that's the hope anyway. You know, I kind of increase the awareness is part of what I like to do. And we can certainly always improve that. Always looking for opportunities. Well, this is cool. So this is what you do professionally. I know you do teaching, you have Rockstar Scribe, at least it used to be your teaching program. Is that still true? Is that something you offer?

PD: Yes. Yeah. It's gone through, you know, it's ups and downs. As you know, you go into it thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be so much fun, and I'm gonna make so much money." But actually, you produce a product that you have to take care of, right?

MR: Yes. Yeah.

PD: And so, all the marketing and reinvention and everything. So sometimes I get tired, you know, and I'm off doing other things. But just recently with my friend Christopher Fuller in California, he's a long-time superhero of graphic recording and facilitation, we did a course in Houston, called Learn Describe, and it was basically us just kind of like bringing our toys over to each other. And it was like, "Ah, here's my Legos mashed up with your GI Joes. Let's make something cool." For me personally, that's the real pleasure is people in a room lots of different experiences, different ways that they want to apply this skill, insights that they have. You may have one or two people who are instructors, but we don't know everything, right?

MR: Right.

PD: And so, getting to learn with and from other people, and then seeing the confidence level grow because they already had it inside of them, they just didn't know it, or they were shy about it, you know, and you get to see them just get looser and more confident. And then to see people learn from each other—

MR: That's cool.

PD: - that's where the juice is.

MR: I suppose, too, that you, being a professional graphic recorder, your engagements tend to be similar, right? You're going into a company event, you're going into a conference, and they tend to follow pattern, like they're structured in a certain way. I think the advantage of maybe doing a scribing thing like this would be, you might get exposure to like, what does it look like if somebody does scribing as an internal person inside a company to maybe pitch an idea or to build a PowerPoint deck or something, you know, integrated that way. That might be something that you don't really encounter much just because of the nature of the kind of things that people are willing to pay you for, where you could see that this can have an influence, you know, in different areas of the business. Is that something you encounter?

PD: Yeah. It kind of depends on what world you're from or you're stepping into. So I think for a lot of people who grew up in some area of the arts, you know, it really doesn't matter. It could be theater, could be a 3D sculpture. When we see this being done, we're like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense," right? 'Cause that's how we work. Iteration, sketch things out, try things, you know, show it to somebody. They're like, "I don't know about that." Then you recombine. And for people that don't just kind of grow up in that natural way of working, it seems really exotic. Correct me if I misrepresent your background, but you kind of came through this through your whole design UX?

MR: Right.

PD: Web design—

MR: Exactly.

PD: - path, just thinking with a pen, right?

MR: Mm-hmm.

PD: And blocking out images, text interfaces.

MR: Right.

PD: And so, that's what's really cool is to see that people come with different experiences from their different genre. Engineers are really cool to work with as well. Because that's like the four-dimensional thinking is what I call it. You know, they're able to think of stress levels on curvatures and screws. You know, that's not what—

MR: That that's not what we think about, Peter.

PD: Oh, I would put googly eyes on it and say, "There you go." Yeah, but one of the masters that I learned from early on, and this does come back to your point of being inside a company and seeing the rapid sketching is my first professional gig was as a temp worker where I was sent to an innovation center where a lot of my friends, you know, that we come out of that world, the accelerated solution environment, it's called lots of different things now, but it's basically people in the room trying to figure out software and how to make it work for a company. And one of the guys that was my heroes is Brian Kaufman, and he went to the Colorado School of Mines.

MR: Oh, really?

PD: He's a geologist. Yeah. He studied rock formations. And when he did drawings about strategy, about conceptual stuff, you know, it always had this time-based plus three-dimensional aspect that blew my mind. You know, I was just like, how does your mind even convert this abstract thinking into that? So there are lots of different family trees that bring us to this, you know, way of working.

MR: And we can learn from each other, right. What you saw there, maybe in some situation, if you somehow could get, like even the high-level understanding what he was doing, maybe there's a way to apply it, you know, in your setting. Maybe not to the degree that he would, 'cause he's got a different frame, but there might be interesting things you could steal from that that would make sense in certain contexts.

PD: Yeah. One thing I'd add that I saw him do that at the time was a magic trick to me was synthesis. One of the first experiences I had with him, there was this big 3D or three-day strategy session, and it was about software, software implementations, like SAP implementation for this multinational company. And so, people have been working in breakout rooms on flip charts and whiteboards for two days, and all that stuff was up.

And he came late, he parachuted in and then just walked all the different rooms and like, took everything in, and then went off in a corner and just started making models, sketching out models that synthesized a lot of that different stuff. And this was overnight, it was like late into the evening. So the next morning he presented that back and there were a lot of jaws that dropped from his capability. But it's a tool, it helped advance the work. So then people say, "Yeah, those two spot on. This third one, you're missing this critical aspect." And then it became a dialogue, you know, and a collaboration.

MR: Yeah. Opens up. Yeah.

PD: I think that's where it becomes really interesting, where you're not an artist in a corner or off to the side or the back of the room. You're in dialogue with the audience building something together.

MR: I think that's a challenge in some ways because we often think of the work we do as the dead end. I mean, we would call it a dead end, but it's like the summation, the ending point. And nothing changes it. I think that's can be—I know that from design side that when I include my customers, like when I used to do logo design or icon design, I sort of built this practice where we would have discussions in writing.

So I would try to understand what they were trying to do, and they would see every sketch that I made, and I would put in the bad sketches and the bad concepts, number 'em, and then tell them, "Yeah, this is not gonna work, and here's why." And so, it became a conversation. It was a means to an end, which was the brand or the icon. And I've noticed that too, when I did it with software where the sketch was just the means to the end, which is the software actually working. We're just using this as a way to think visually as well as like, we can talk as a way to capture that.

But it was never seen as the final thing that you couldn't—you know, it's not like some holy document. It's just another step towards the solution. And maybe after we use the thing for a while, even though we think we've solved it, we might have to go back to the whiteboard and draw like, "Hey, here's the problems. How do we solve these and make some revisions?" So thinking of it as more of a in progress document and a way to kind of further the discussion, like you're talking about, is pretty cool.

PD: Yeah. Do you use Figma, or do you?

MR: I have used Figma. I'm lately using UX Pin, but I've used other Sketch and XD.

PD: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

MR: Similar tools. Similar tools.

PD: I use Miro, you know. So it's—

MR: I do as well.

PD: So I think that that history of the iterations, super important. It's one of the things that I think generative AI shortcuts and becomes—and I'm not a doom and goner, I'm not, a like, "Uh, doh, doh." It's that it's so fast, and it looks so good, it looks so complete, but there was no process in the middle for the group to think through things.

MR: Right.

PD: And when you're using something like whichever tool we just threw out there, if you have that track record—and this comes from architecture and graphic design, having that big wall, right? Where you have everything up, you get to see the history where it went off the rails. You know, the end product may look great, but it doesn't work.

MR: Yeah.

PD: Or, you know, I forgot this key aspect of functionality or a use case or a user story that was like the whole point of building the software. So having that living memory is just so useful especially when the client has to bring their stakeholders along. So, as an example, I did a whole year-long project that culminated in just a two-minute explainer video, which looked really simple, but it was community health workers.

And there were interviews that we did. There were multiple whiteboarding and post it notes sessions. There was writing scripts. There were creating version A, B, C, D, trashing them all, starting all over. And we have all that in a huge mirror board. And that's what I use and that's what the client sometimes uses to bring their funders along and some of the institutions that they need to convince to be a part of this is to say, "Here's the story, but here's how we discovered the story."

MR: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really important to remember. It seems like every discussion in this season sort of touches on AI somewhere. How could it not? It's in every part of our lives now, right, at this moment in 2024. And I think the thing that I think is—if you use AI in the, I guess, I dunno if there's a right way, but the way I think makes sense is in tedious things that don't benefit from you spending seven hours, you know collapsing Excel spreadsheets into something, right?

That would be a great application for it. And it's bounded and limited, right. It's not asking it to invent something. Where it becomes problematic, I think from a skill maintenance perspective, is what you talked about, is like, if I go in there and tell it to do—it's like, take an example writing. I just wrote a post a few weeks ago about what it was like to be a designer in the pre-computer era. And I struggled with it. It took a long time. I had to fight with it and really struggle. I had to reorient all the information the right way.

If I'd gone to check GPT for an example, and I asked it to write a story like that, you know, it would've taken away that whole process of like, what am I trying to say? What's the message? There's a bunch of stuff that I wrote, and I just threw it away 'cause It was like too much detail. No one's gonna care. It doesn't move the story forward. And I think the same too with like visualization. It's really easy to go prompt and like get really complex with your prompt, but again, you're not entering into this understanding with living with it and iterating. And you're sort of losing that.

And I think that's where we have to be careful is not letting AI take over the thing that helps us maintain our creativity and our ability to see. I think sometimes, like you might be going one direction and then through this process you see like, "Oh, we have to change direction." You wouldn't see that if you just sent it off to, you know, some AI tool to throw something back at. You'd miss that and maybe miss these opportunities.

PD: Another fun thing that I've discovered is zooming in on whatever the AI has, you know, created. So like crowd scene, if you start zooming in, like the faces just start to become horrific. What I've figured out is—I'm probably not the first person to figure this out, is it's really an expressionistic and impressionistic tool.

MR: Right.

PD: So just like, you know, when we do sketches, if you're doing a crowd scene, you don't draw every single detail. It's just the suggestion of a face or leg or arm or shoulder or whatever. And then the aggregate, our brains as the viewer, we look at that and say, "Oh, that's a, you know, group at a café, or whatever it is. And that's what it's doing with writing as well is like it feels like a professional whatever. But then you start like zooming in. Like, this is a weird phrase, you know, that people don't use. They used to use it in maybe 1900s, or whatever.

A final little side note on the expressionistic part is I did a lecture for a group of retired business people. And I was just giving a overview of like, you know, here's some of the tools that are out there and some things I'm playing around with. And I showed this crowd scene of people in Houston. It was like, "Eh, that looks great." But then you start zooming in and went, eh, you know, all the jaws, all crooked and eyeballs are up there.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

PD: I showed paintings from Francis Bacon. You know, Francis Bacon, the eagle?

MR: Mm-hmm.

PD: You know, and he did that on purpose. He'd painted like the Pope and it'd be all distorted and everything. And I was like, this is what artists do is, is we take snippets, we make suggestions, we use just enough information so that the brain fills in the rest. And that's what, you know, the computers and algorithm are learning from what we've done in the past.

MR: Yep, exactly. Well, I would love to hear a little bit more, I'd love to have my origin stories in these and so wanna make sure we have an opportunity to do that. You're born in Kenya. So take us from that point till now. What directed you to the place where you are? 'Cause obviously you probably bumped into a variety of things. You talked about your dad wanting to be an attorney and finding out like, "Oh, this maybe not for me, and went in a different direction because of it." What are the things that happened to you along the way that brought you to where you are now?

PD: Yeah. Well, just to finish up on my dad, fortunately he remained an attorney, but you know, he just took this turn over to Africa for a little bit was a teacher and then returned to the United States. I grew up in East Tennessee, in Knoxville, Tennessee in a leafy suburb watching those movies that are in the background on those posters down here. I'm a child of the late '70s, '80s, and drawing and doodling and cartooning and doing all that stuff, you know, watching a movie and then recreating it on paper and all that kind of stuff.

And then, as I mentioned got a lot of support to go off to art school. Never got any pushback at all. And was really fortunate the school I landed in was a university. So we had to take courses outside of just, you know, the fine arts and illustration and graphic design. So I was studying history and biology. This was in the late '80s, early '90s, as the Soviet Union was falling apart and massive transition in Eastern Europe and the first Gulf War.

I was the art director for a political magazine on campus. Which meant I did all the illustrations. So I had to practice, even though my name was next to everything, I would experiment. And it looked like 18 different people illustrated this monthly magazine. That was 'cause I was messing around, you know? I had different heroes that I was emulating, or I wanted it to look more like a wood cut, or this one more as like a super hybrid detailed drawing.

And that was great practice because in illustration, you have an assignment, so you have an audience, you have a theme. You have a topic you gotta execute. If you're a good, you know, illustrator, you have your style. So you kinda have these five ingredients say you're working with, and you got a deadline. So that was great practice, you know, and sure enough, Mike, I don't know about you, you're probably a lot more well-prepared. Every single time that magazine had to go to print, all-nighter. It was just like all-nighter, every single time doing all illustrations.

But great practice because I was working with writers, editors, the head of the magazine who was also a student, and learning to respond to other people's opinion. Then having to meet that deadline. So when I've graduated from school, I was super lucky. I applied for a scholarship, and you had to write an essay and submit work, it was a travel scholarship. So I wanted to go to Eastern Europe where all these changes were happening, and I landed in Poland.

MR: Oh.

PD: Yeah, I was in Poland and the summer that I arrived was the summer the Russian army was pulling out of Poland finally.

MR: Wow.

PD: So now we're like full circle, you know, with the Russians saying, "Hey, we made a mistake, we're coming back." That was a time where it was transitioning, and I was just trying to figure out what the hell's going on here. I'm not Polish, I didn't speak Polish. I was working in a school teaching English, but it was a school for local democracy. They were training young people to go into the local government, basically like state and regional government. And they were just, you know, learning the basic skills, computer skills, writing, all the economics. And then I was teaching English.

Through that I was really trying to understand and document what was going on. So it was sketchbooks that became my main, just primary activity was just writing, taking notes, journaling, sketching, diagramming stuff out. The organization that I worked for, they saw these, and they said, "Hey, can we use that drawing to explain that these people who are coming in to talk about sanitation or, you know, tourism, what's going on? 'Cause it'll help us explain it." That was another pivot point. I was like, "Oh, these little notes I'm taking are useful for other people." That was like the first time my sketch notes were used by my client to just get people up to speed and, you know, codify a bunch of stuff.

MR: Sweet.

PD: So I'm gonna jump cut. That was like time outside the United States. When I moved back, I moved to Chicago and was temping making PowerPoints, not having a great time, professionally. Complaining a lot to my temp agent who is my age. And she got a assignment that she didn't understand. She's like, "I have no idea what this is, but it mentioned drawing. You seem to draw a lot. Young man. You show me your sketchbooks all the time, so go check this out."

And it was an innovation center in Chicago. They were using, I think I just mentioned this a few minutes ago, they were doing SAP implementations. My mentor, you know, he parachuted in, but you're in software, so it's one thing in a design software, it's another thing to sell software and it's another thing to buy it and then make it work for your business. So that's what this large multinational company was doing, was helping people integrate this software into making their businesses more efficient.

And so, it was kind of a line from that moment where this organization in Poland looked at my sketch notes and said, "Hey, can we use that to explain what's going on to these new people, to just being in the process." So listening to people present, talk, creating big drawings or small drawings. And then they were part of the churn. So it was just iterations forward, iterations forward.

Well, after couple years of doing that and helping develop or open innovation centers in different parts of the world Including Europe and Australia, I just got burned out. For me, it was the same conversations over and over again. I did want to do more illustration, more storytelling and to kind of be out of that technical environment of implementing software. And so along with my—she then became my wife, with Diane. We started Alphachimp.

Then we're in the crazy phase of building company, being freelancers, starting a family and building that up. So I've gone through a whole bunch of different phases inside organizations, starting a company, being in a independent, moving around the country a few times. And now, I'm really enjoying not having employees, not having a boss, but having a lot of friends that I have all over the world that I collaborate with.

MR: That's cool. Yeah. That's kind of nice 'cause then, you know, if it's something you can do solo, you can just do it. And then if it's something that requires additional help, then you can call on your network and team up. That's kind of fun.

PD: And I think because of the pandemic, it's just so much more fluid, you know? It's just with everybody being able to collaborate online.

MR: Yeah. Yeah, especially with tools like you mentioned Miro makes some of that possible, and many other tools that make that possible too.

PD: Yeah.

MR: Wow. That's pretty interesting. And so, now you're still solo. You work with collaborators when necessary. I'm kind of curious, what are the kind of customers that you work with mostly? Maybe there isn't a group, maybe it's pretty varied. I don't know.

PD: Yeah. Fortunately, it is varied, but I did spend about 15 years in healthcare. So for three years I was helping to run one of these innovation centers at Vanderbilt University. You and I ran into each other in Nashville, a time or two ago.

MR: Yes.

PD: I lived in Nashville for about 10 years, and through that developed deep relationship with healthcare. So that's one sector. And I also really appreciate how the medical mind works because when we were doing software in other parts of my life, people would say, "Well, it's not neurosciences, you know, and no one's gonna die if we get this wrong." Well, in healthcare, yes—

MR: They do.

PD: Yeah, neuroscience is involved and human longevity and suffering are at stake. I really like working with healthcare professionals of all different levels. Whether they're on the medical side or the technical side or system side, because they know that there's a lot of stake. It's very complex. And then right now I'm in Houston, Texas. I've moved here in 2001, in October 2001. This is the energy capital of North America definitely and the great energy transition is going on.

So more and more I'm working with either companies that have a ESG or climate focused initiative. Last week I was working for a company that has 9,000 hotels, resorts, and properties. And this was with their engineers. I have to say it was 110% dudes. It was like big large men who have to keep the boilers going and the air condition going, and the water flowing. But they were implementing their net-zero promises, which are very difficult to do.

MR: Yeah, it is. It's tough.

PD: So that's the new world that I'm spending a lot of time in.

MR: I spent a little time, like three years with Johnson Controls in that space. So worked with facility managers and kind of an unsung hero in a lot of ways.

PD: Absolutely.

MR: You do a lot to make you safe and secure and keep the building going, and you're sort of outta sight, outta mind down in the basement. So really important people for sure.

PD: Yeah.

MR: I don't know if any are listening to this podcast, but if they are, thank you for your service.

PD: Absolutely. You don't think about 'em until something goes wrong. Then you'll be really glad when they show up.

MR: That's right. Yep.

PD: Yep.

MR: Well, that sounds like a pretty varied selection of customers, and you've got challenges that you're facing for sure with, you know, climate shifting. I imagine with energy, you're talking about maybe a move from fossil fuels to solar and battery and electric power kind of things. And that's gotta be a huge shift to think about. You know, how long ago we developed the gasoline car network that we now enjoy, at least from a convenience perspective, to kind of ramp up, you know, EV charging at the same degree. It's gonna take a while. It's not gonna happen overnight, you know, and we realize it's been a hundred years or something of building that network to where it is now. It's not gonna happen in, you know, even in 5 years or 10 years, maybe not to that degree.

PD: Yeah, and it's all the things. That's what I'm learning. It's not like, let's move to one thing, it's a total reinvention.

MR: Yeah.

PD: It kind of maps back to my first experience going off the Poland where there is a whole reinvention of everything, the economy, energy, power, the political system. And that's the unifying theme I think, at least in my life, is just trying to understand systems and visualize them so that people can make a decision about what to do next. And whether it's software or healthcare or energy, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of moving parts.

MR: Interesting.

PD: And there's a lot of them, just like you said, the engineers are invisible. A lot of these systems are invisible too.

MR: Yes.

PD: So that's what we can do as visualizers is help make that invisible system visible, or it is just so large we can't wrap our heads around.

MR: Yeah. That's a really valuable place for us to be, is to sort of identify the unidentifiable or the hidden things and make them visible. That's pretty powerful in an in and of itself, I think. Well, I would love to shift now and talk a little bit about the tools that you like to use. We'll start with analog and then go digital. You sound like you're using Miro, so you're probably digital guy too. What would be some of the pens and paper, and you mentioned sketchbooks, are there favorite tools that you like to use that maybe somebody could get inspired to try?

PD: Well, Mike, I've learned that if I buy something really expensive, I will lose it. So I went down the whole route of, you know, Lamy pens and all these different pens. So it's kind of like whatever pen I can get my hands on and find 'cause I keep losing them in my bags. And now here's the whole cupholder right here, just like randomness.

MR: Oh, wow. Yeah.

PD: Yeah. But yeah, Moleskines are still like the consistent primary tool. It's just got that perfect balance of weight of paper and thickness. It's like an heirloom object. You know, I would be shocked if anybody listening to this, it's like, "I'm gonna get rid of all my old Moleskines." Like, no way. I invested a lot of filling that up. So that's that is definitely a primary tool. I still work just in, you know, black and white, so just black pen and Moleskine especially for me. I went through this phase last three months of taking in a lot of information, so I was going to a lot of sessions, webinars.

MR: I saw that. Yeah.

PD: Yeah. And that's what I—you know, you're work is inspirational to me. I just was like, "I need to show this." You know, this is just these are my scratchy notes. They aren't even sketch notes. They're scratchy notes, you know? And it's not meant as a product to be displayed. It's me trying to remember stuff. So Moleskine, number one. Any sort of black pen that doesn't fade over time. So that was analog. And then Neuland markers. So when I'm working, you know, doing my professional thing, like that's the go-to.

That's a family-owned business. And I think Guido is either second or third generation, Guido Neuland. They have the craftsmanship. They pay real close attention to their users who are us, and they're always like throwing out, you know, new products and super responsive. And they're sturdy. I have those pens. I've had 'em for a decade. I still fill them up. So just in terms of a footprint on the earth, you know, you buy it once, you refill it forever.

MR: Yeah. Those are great, great pens. As far as black pens, if you did go to like a Walgreens or something, or an Office Depot, like is there a pen that you would sort of gravitate to? I tend to be the guy who's in, you know, Office Depot looking at the gel pens. And I like those because I feel like, I guess pretty much in any city that I'm in, if my pen craps out, I can go to a Walgreens or an Office Max and like find a replacement or something approximating it. Is there a favorite one there that if you had a choice, knowing that you would lose it anyway?

PD: Well, my daughter is 16, and she is very put together. She's got all the—you know, everything's dialed in, color coded, sleek, and so she turned me on to the Sharpie gel pins.

MR: Oh, really? Yeah. I think I've liked those. I've tried those before. They're quite good.

PD: They're pretty good. It does depend on the paper. I have this weird notebook that's made of stone. Paper's made of stone. I don't know if you've played with that. And this stuff just, you know, it just bleeds, so.

MR: Oh, really.

PD: When I teach as well, Mike, both online and in person, I emphasize go with what's easy and available. You don't have to plop down a thousand bucks on the high-end stuff. So I'm still dropping by CVS, Walgreens, picking up Sharpie from the school supplies, you know? And then I have the kit, like the professional kit.

MR: Right. It's got your Neulands and such in there.

PD: Yeah.

MR: Interesting. What about digital? I'm guessing you maybe use an iPad and a Pencil and some applications, or?

PD: Yeah, and probably not gonna sound unusual if people listen to this podcast a lot, but yeah, iPad with Apple Pencil and Procreate or Virtual Scribing and Note-Taking. Those are the go-to. I keep things fairly simple. So I developed—I either stole, bought, or made my own brushes in Procreate. And I keep it really simple. So it's like four brushes just because the more choices, that's the more cycling time you have to, you know, make a decision and go back and forth.

MR: Yeah, that's what I recommend when people shift from one tool to another is kinda limit the template size, limit your brushes, limit your colors so that you focus on very few and you don't have many choices. It forces you to really adapt to the tool. Then once you nail that, then maybe you can do some tweaking and stuff. And that seems to be a good—

PD: Yeah, exactly.

MR: - recommendation.

PD: We're kind of sliding into recommendations, but that's one of the recommendations that I have is, you're doing this virtually for a client, just know what the pallet is and then in Procreate, you can make your own infinite amount of pallets. So I have a pallet per client or per event, and it's usually just based off their corporate colors or their logo or the event colors sampled from that.

MR: We'll shift into tips then right away. That could be your first tip is, you know, create new palettes of colors for your events or your clients, if they're clients so you can keep them separate and go back to them. I do the same kind of thing.

PD: Yeah. Let's see. I was supposed to have three tips, so that counts as one.

MR: Yep.

PD: The other tip is around ego and negative self-talk. So this is not about drawing, it's about that insecurity. We all have it. I have it every time. Especially if I'm standing up and they're proud people behind me. Like, how do you spell any word? I forgot English. I don't know how to write. You know, the first board is usually janky and kinda awkward because I'm nervous.

MR: Getting into the groove.

PD: I'm thinking about me, I'm thinking about the audience's perception. So that negative self-talk, it's always gonna be there. And just, you know, getting rid of it. Whatever rituals you can do to help with that. A lot of times just getting prepared, like tidying up or, you know, if I'm working on Moleskine, just writing the title, you know, date, all these simple things, it gets me outta my head and into my hand.

MR: Into the mood.

PD: And then the ears just like, you know, focused on the content.

MR: I know a trick that works for me in that case is I tell the client and I tell myself, this is gonna be fun. I mean, I believe it. It's not like I don't believe it. But I think when I look at it as play and an opportunity to play around and have some fun, changes a little bit of my mindset. That often helps me.

PD: Yeah. There's only been one time I almost fainted in front of a crowd. That was 'cause I stopped breathing. The audience, this was doctors, they had just come from a really serious, I think, budget conversation. They were all on suits. I was Captain Goofy at the front of the room, and I just turned and looked at them. And in that case, I was like facilitating and drawing. So graphic facilitation, and I couldn't get anybody to smile. I couldn't get like—and I knew people in the room, but they were thinking, they were like in their head and the whatever. And I started to get tunnel vision and I got really lightheaded. And there was a guy at the back who was videotaping, and after, you know, we wrapped in, I went back there and sat down. He is like, "Dude, what happened up there?" Is like, "Oh, I don't know, man."

MR: I was freaking a little bit.

PD: I almost fainted. But that's a fear response, right. That's me worrying about me. So we'll put that all in the bucket of tip number two. Whatever habits or ritual you can do to just get in the zone. Athletes do it too. You know, if you've gotta listen to music or pace around. And then tip number three would be, yeah, you're sharing your work as a gift. And it kind of ties into that self-consciousness from tip number two is some people are like, "Eh, I'm not really an artist." Or, "I didn't do that good." Or, "I didn't—"

You know, it's like, look, this is a service, and if we're gonna help people move forward in their ideas or their progress or their process, this is a gift, you know, you're just offering. It's like, "Hey, you know, here you go." That's it. You know, you don't have to explain yourself or trash yourself. And the more you do that, the easier it is. You know, you separate your ego from your output. And that was that benefit of doing a call back to being in college where I had to like, pretend to be 18 different illustrators for that, know, political magazine.

MR: Different styles. Yeah.

PD: Yeah. I just wore that person. It's like, "Oh, I'm gonna be Alan E. Cober. That was one of my stars. You know, and do it in his style. So, you know, I'm saying you, I have to recognize I'm in a role and that role is service. I'm doing my small little part, and I'm giving back. And so just, you know, share your work. Austin Kleon, you know, he's got a whole book on—

MR: Show Your Work.

PD: Show Your Work. Yeah.

MR: Yeah. He's great. Well, that's really fascinating to hear the tips that you have. And they're a little bit different than our typical ones. I really appreciate them. They're great.

PD: I thought I was gonna be boring. Say what everybody else says.

MR: No, this has been a lot of fun. Well, I just wanted to take a moment as we wrap up before we send people to places to find you, is just thank you for all the work you've been doing in the community. I know you've been a huge cheerleader for me and inspiration to me. When I see your work, I'm just always inspired to see the cool stuff you're doing lot.

PD: Oh, man, that means a lot.

MR: Yeah. So it's really cool to have people in the community that you can cheer for and you can see the work they're doing and just live through how they're helping other people. So thank you for doing that great work.

PD: It's fun having friends, isn't it?

MR: Yeah. It is very important. I think we need more friends.

PD: Can I turn that into a tip?

MR: Sure.

PD: It's more like advice. Let's be positive out there, people. You know, it's hard for everybody. And so, that's one of the great thing, you've been a supporter of me. The people I respect they acknowledge that, "Hey, doing anything is hard, and here, somebody puts something out there, let's, you know, give 'em a thumbs up or a little added bonus." You know, all those whole comments like, "Hey, I really like the way you capture that metaphor, whatever." 'Cause We're all friends. We're all just still kids. We're just like, doodling. Like, "Hey, check this out." And you want somebody to go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. Look at this."

MR: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think I go back to that we kind of have this idea that it's a zero sum game. That for you to win, that means I lose. Or if I win, you lose. I don't think it's that. I think there's so much opportunity, there's untapped opportunity for us in this space to help people visualize stuff to the point that we're not competing with each other really. We're really doing it together 'cause there's so much work to do.

PD: We're competing against the robots now, Mike.

MR: Yeah, exactly.

PD: We all gotta stick together.

MR: Yeah, that's true. Well, if someone wants to find you, what's the best place to find you, Peter? LinkedIn websites, social media, what's your thing?

PD: Yeah, I think LinkedIn has really turned some sort of corner where it's actually been fun to hang out there. So I'm on LinkedIn. I'm just Peter Durand @linkedin/in/peterdurand. And then my website is Alphchimp. All one word, alphachimp.com. I am on Instagram, but I neglect it 'cause I'm just like, 'Beh." But that's @_alphachimp__.

MR: Somebody got it before you did, apparently.

PD: Yeah. I'm sure some like gamer kid, you know. This is how I use I Instagram, I follow artist-artists. So that may be tip number five is I look for inspiration outside. You know, from my friends, of course, but I look at street art. I look at old posters from 1900s. I look at Renaissance painting and illustrated books from the 1700s. You know, that's where I really get inspired is picking up visual language from artists and eras that aren't just like closely adjacent, you know, to the world I work in.

MR: I think that's helpful. Well, five tips. Well, who would've thought, Peter—

PD: Oh, bonus.

MR: - when we started, you'd have to drop five tips in here.

PD: Gotta pay extra for this podcast, baby.

MR: That's right. That's right. Well, Peter, thanks so much for being on the show. It's been really great to have you on and to share your wisdom and some thoughts with us. For everyone who's listened, it's another episode of the podcast, or if you're watching another episode of the podcast, until the next episode, we'll talk to you soon.

PD: Thanks so much, Mike.

MR: You're welcome.

Mental Edge 38: The Path To Discipline & Mental Toughness