Danny & Marcel
Visual Friends Team
A time of change is upon us, like none we have seen for generations. A time of vulnerability, but also opportunity too. In this episode of Visual Friends Radio, we’re joined by Marcel van Hove and Danny Low of the Visual Friends team to talk about how they’re focusing on adaptability, innovation and channelling their creative power during the current pandemic.
Over a decade ago Charity watched a team of consultants at an offsite event create awe-inspiring visual content. She dreamed that one day she too could communicate with simple visuals from words but had no idea how to get there. Flash forward 10 years to discovering Visual Friends, bikablo and her journey has begun.
What could be better than an Icon Jam? A Global Icon Jam! We talk with Brisbane based Bikablo trainer Danny Low, Auckland based Visual Coach Yuliya Schamrel, and Visual Facilitator and Bikablo trainer Gill Cromhout from Breaking Ground Learning and Development in Cape Town about this exciting collaborative intercontinental event held in January 2020.
Over a decade ago Charity watched a team of consultants at an offsite event create awe-inspiring visual content. She dreamed that one day she too could communicate with simple visuals from words but had no idea how to get there. Flash forward 10 years to discovering Visual Friends, bikablo and her journey has begun.
Danny is a Certified Professional Scrum Master, Agile Team Facilitator and Visual Facilitation Trainer who is a strong believer in using visual language to capture and convey meaning. He uses Bikablo as a powerful way to engage Team Members and Stakeholders in his work. Danny enjoys Snow Skiing, Mountain Biking and Travelling. In his spare time, he instructs in Kung Fu / Tai Chi and coaches Junior Rugby Union Teams. He lives in Brisbane, Australia.
Here’s everything you wanted to know but haven’t had a chance to ask about Visual Friends‘ new training – Bikablo® Advanced.
For years our students have been asking us “what next?” after leaving bikablo® fundamentals sessions with their brilliant celebration posters.
Now you can continue your visualisation journey with Bikablo® Advanced.
In this interview with our Brisbane based trainer Danny Low, we talk about why Global Bikablo® has created this brand new worldwide curriculum, what you’ll learn, who it will be most useful for and how the first trial class went at last year’s VizConf.
Natalia has always loved words and talking to people. She has put that passion to good use and has been sharing people’s stories in the community radio, TV and print media for the last 10 years. Natalia is also a big fan of true storytelling events and regularly volunteers at the most famous one – The Moth, interviewing the winner. You can hear her own story of moving to Australia from Russia in 1999 here. She lives in Melbourne with her husband John and their two daughters and the whole family enjoys visualising and storytelling. Natalia believes Bikablo is a magic skill of today and she is thrilled to be involved telling Visual Friends stories. Please contact her if you would like to share your story!
Graphic Recorder and Partner at Visual Friends
In this episode we are talking to a talented graphic scribe, an illustrator and visual facilitator Alice Edy about courage.
Alice dared greatly and ended up scribing for Brene Brown herself. She tells us how overcoming fear has helped her create important career opportunities for herself, shares her advice about preparing emotionally for a scribing session and gives us her tips about failing publicly and how you can’t grow creatively without making mistakes.
We loved talking to Alice about how stepping outside of the comfort zone allows you to direct and shape your career in an exciting and unique way.
Podcast notes: during our interview conversation Alice mentions Brene Brown, Heather Martinez, Kelvy Bird and Jessamy Gee.
The article was written by Natalia Tsygankova. Natalia has always loved words and talking to people. She has put that passion to good use and has been sharing people’s stories in the community radio, TV and print media for the last 10 years. Natalia is also a big fan of true storytelling events and regularly volunteers at the most famous one – The Moth, interviewing the winner. You can hear her own story of moving to Australia from Russia in 1999 here. Natalia believes that everyone has a story – So what’s yours? Contact her today to share your story.
Kate is a recognised expert within the global community of visual practitioners, with a specialism and passion for digital mediums of capture. With over 7 years experience globally as a graphic facilitator, scribing sessions across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, New York, Houston, Delhi, Barcelona and London.
In the latest episode of Visual Friends podcast, we interview talented and fabulous Kate Baxter – a recognised expert in the global community of visual practitioners and an amazing graphic facilitator with a passion for all things digital.
Learn about how Kate, a reluctant and shy scribe with a background in fine art, went from thinking she can’t do it to successfully scribing for big clients all around the world. Find out what helped her transition from scribing on a whiteboard to nailing it as a digital graphic facilitator. Kate shares advice on how to develop your own style and deal with difficult topics talks about the challenges of this profession and what you need to succeed in this job.
We hope you’ll find it as interesting as we did. Enjoy!
The article was written by Natalia Tsygankova. Natalia has always loved words and talking to people. She has put that passion to good use and has been sharing people’s stories in the community radio, TV and print media for the last 10 years. Natalia is also a big fan of true storytelling events and regularly volunteers at the most famous one – The Moth, interviewing the winner. You can hear her own story of moving to Australia from Russia in 1999 here. Natalia believes that everyone has a story – So what’s yours? Contact her today to share your story.
Graphic Recorder Strategic Visualiser, Award-winning Cartoonist, Writer and Animator.
Sarah Firth is an award-winning comic artist and writer based in Melbourne. Since 2011, she has run a successful small business, offering graphic recording and facilitation, animation and event design. With the mission to help clients clarify, align, resolve, connect and communicate – through powerful visual modelling, storytelling and strategic mapping.
Sarah works across industries and sectors, with a particular interest in supporting clients navigating wicked problems, systemic change and high levels of complexity, environmental justice and social impact.
She has worked locally and internationally on projects and events with; Vienna Complexity Science Hub, Google, The Rockefeller Foundation, CSIRO, The Red Cross, Conservation Zoos Victoria, Melbourne Faculty of Business & Economics, Comedy Central, Environmental Justice Australia, SIEMENS, Vienna Complexity Science Hub, Not For Profit Law, ACMI, Aboriginal Victoria, KPMG, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Planning Institute of Australia, Ernst & Young, City of Melbourne, Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet, Oxfam, PLAN International and many more.
Alongside her business Sarah maintains a professional art and writing practice. Some notable achievements have been; receiving the Talking Difference Fellowship with the Immigration Museum, being named one of Australia’s top 25 artists by Art & Australia Magazine, winning The People’s Choice Award in the Australian Shorts section of the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival, performing at the Yogyakarta Biennale in Indonesia, the Lakes International Comic Festival in the UK, and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.
Most recently, she was appointed deputy chair on the board of directors for the Cultural Development Network, she received a Frankie Magazine Good Stuff Award, was a finalist in the Incinerator Social Change Art Award, and her graphic essay on complexity was listed in The Conversation’s ten best literary comics in Australia.
Sarah has a new illustrated book Badass Mums out now with Affirm Press, along with comics in upcoming publications with Allen & Unwin, Abrams Books and Picador Australia. She is currently working on her debut graphic novel thanks to the support of the Creators Fund.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Visual Friends
An interview with Visual Friends co-founder, Marcel van Hove and one of our visual coaches, Yuliya Schamrel about a new and exciting program for our students – The 60 Days of Coaching. If you ever wanted to take visualisation skills to the next level, refresh your bikablo technique or develop a work-related visualisation project, this is for you. Hosted by Natalia Tsygankova.
The article was written by Natalia Tsygankova. Natalia has always loved words and talking to people. She has put that passion to good use and has been sharing people’s stories in the community radio, TV and print media for the last 10 years. Natalia is also a big fan of true storytelling events and regularly volunteers at the most famous one – The Moth, interviewing the winner. You can hear her own story of moving to Australia from Russia in 1999 here. Natalia believes that everyone has a story – So what’s yours? Contact her today to share your story.
Visual Thinker, Mum and Educational Manager
Melaine D’Cruze has been a visual thinker all her life. Through her school years and her career, she always took visual notes and doodled to focus and to remember ideas. She didn’t know that there was actually a professional field for visual thinking until one day when she discovered the TED Talk from Sunni Brown, Doodlers, unite!
Melaine read the book, subscribed to an online course from the Doodle Institute, read several books and through that became a very good sketch note taker. She even got invited by the Harvard Business School to publish a blog post after visualizing one of their online courses. However, her main application for visualization and visual thinking is not at work. Her main application is in the field of educating her kids.
Visual Notes
Melaine D’Cruze
Melaine has two amazing boys, who are much faster understanding and accessing information when seeing them visually. She started to visualize ideas together with the boys and through that, they could memorize the content easily. The other boy stammered from time to time and with visual cue cards she could remind her boy to slow down whenever they stumbled. Today both boys are doing fine, and we’ll talk more about ideas on how we can educate kids visually.
In summary, this episode is a statement to believe in yourself, follow your passion and let no one take you down. I hope you enjoy this episode with Melaine D’Cruze from Karachi, Pakistan.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Founder of Let's Letter Together!
A couple of words about Heather Martinez. Heather likes to live in the mountain valley of Durango, Colorado. Heather is a visual practitioner and also an ‘Agile guy’ like me or Danny. She spends a lot of her time running virtual lettering classes for visual practitioners on LetsLetterTogether.com where you can improve your lettering skills on a 1:1 based via Zoom. Additionally, she will be offering 2 online courses associated with her new book and a virtual version of her in-person workshop: Level Up Your Lettering starting in the spring. In parallel, she runs her coaching practice where she offers life and art life coaching to artists. Here Heather believes that everyone can become an artist!
We talk about her whole life from the beginning where she grew up, where she chose to live and how she got into graphic facilitation. We learn how it feels being graphically recorded for the first time herself and what we as graphic recorders might need to consider when recording someone talk.
Last but not least, we talk about her new book which will have the title the ‘Lettering Journey’. It’s based on a cross-country road trip she took after leaving Washington, DC. She has a great plan for how she will create her next book: She travels and teaches lettering across Europe over the next 2 months. While all of her workshops have filled, she will offer an additional 1-day Lettering tour in each city. She will take the participants out of the training room into the environment, walk the streets and look for lettering styles they can break down and use in their work at the wall. The “tradecraft” of lettering will be covered, including how to find inspiration in your environment and how to break down each style into the strokes and tools used. Please have a look at her travel schedule here:
Lettering Tours:
Other locations may include:
Other upcoming workshops:
Now you might think Europe is far away and I can’t travel right now! – Here we are delighted that Heather has confirmed to be our keynote speaker for VizConf 2019. Additionally, she will also run a pre-conference course about lettering the day before VizConf and might even take everyone on a lettering tour through Melbourne.
Stay tuned and make sure you get your Visual Friends newsletter updates so that you don’t miss the spot in her class.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Trainer & Partner at Visual Friends
Let me introduce to you Danny Low. Danny is not only a bikablo® trainer and partner at the Visual Friends. He is also a very good friend of mine and in many ways, we are very similar. We talk a bit about that but we forgot to talk about one great story. So in the early days when I met Danny, he told me that he will take time off and travel with his family around the world.
He told me that he would like to pass on some of the experiences he and his wife Anna had and to show the kids the world. With that, we pretty much hit the core DNA of Danny. He likes to pass on his life experience to others – not only to his kids but also to his students at the Visual Friends. He likes to help others and is a great mate that everyone would like to have as a friend. We follow his personal journey, learn how to visualise legal contracts, hear about project management, agile coaching and how he became part of the Visual Friends. For me, Danny’s story is another great example of what can happen in life when you follow your passion and make a couple of choices at the right time. Please welcome our lawyer and Kung-Fu master Danny Low from Brisbane.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.