This is the first part of a series of posts on Visual Expression. (Also see Dan Roam’s Technique’s to Visually Express your Ideas)

Through out my life I have always been a visual thinker. Concepts seemed to solidify when I could see them, whether it was in an illustration, graph, chart or video animation, for me visualization is the quickest way to learn. Professionally my career has taken me to Asia, Europe and Africa, far from my roots in Texas, and when faced with language and cultural barriers my universal translator has always been a pen and a whiteboard, flipchart or a piece of paper, along with some visual expression of a concept, problem or question. People universally, seem to understand pictures and illustrations, charts and graphs, maps, timelines and flowcharts.

Visual thinking is so fundamental to how we think, that when the tools of visual expression are used can understand what our ancestors where trying to express over 32,000 years ago. This illustration is from a cave in Lascaux, France and is among the oldest known drawings in the world.

You can clearly see a bull running in a herd, and then you can imagine the animals that existed and how fundamental they must have been in the life of early man.

This got me thinking, if I was to express my life today what would a visual expression of my environment look like, there weren’t any cave walls close by so I used a writing surface more familiar, called a whiteboard.

The visual expression of my environment shows a computer, my mobile phone, buildings, construction, and a herd of cars (aka traffic). Of course the caveman was a much better artist than me. Please share a visual expression of your environment. We will store them here for future generations to ponder.

Check back next week for part two.

~ Conrad