Visual Minutes is the art of creatively capturing information at events in a colourful, fun and dynamic way. In today’s blogpost I’m talking about one of my most recent visual minutes gigs and how my drawings made the recording of the event a little bit more exciting! To find out more, read on on my website…
What are Visual Minutes?
Oftentimes you might assume there is no interesting way of recording the conversations and conclusions that happen at conferences, meetings or away days.
The minutes from the day are often dull as ditch-water, and they fail to capture the mood, the atmosphere, the FUN of the event!
This is where visual minutes come in. The visual minutes are produced live and the content is in response to the conversations happening in the room.
By the time the meeting is over the participants can feast their eyes on a unique wall-sized work of art that can be used in promotional material and displayed at their workplace and referred to for years to come. If you haven’t heard the term visual minutes before, you may have heard one of the many other terms it can also go by.
These include visual facilitation, graphic recording, visual recording, visual scribing, live scribing and just plain old live art!
Visual Minutes are a lively and essential addition to your corporate away day, conference or AGM.
In fact, any meeting could benefit from having a work of visual minutes created for it.
Here is an account of the day I created some visual minutes for The Active Wellbeing Society in Birmingham…
Visual Minutes for the Active Wellbeing Society in Birmingham
The Active Wellbeing Society is a community benefit society and cooperative based in Birmingham that focuses on people’s health and wellbeing, and having known and worked for the
organisation for a few years I was pleased and honoured that they asked me to create visual minutes for their ‘Re-imagining the Programme’ Away Day.
The day was scheduled from 11 to 4, so I arrived a little early to set up my materials and attach my huge sheet of paper to the wall where I would be working.
I had pre-designed a rough idea of what I wanted for the overall composition, but apart from that it was going to be a day of improvisation. Thrilling and scary at once!
Introductions and a video presentation began the day, meaning I had to photograph the video as it was happening and remember some quotes from the people I had photographed.
This involved a little mental juggling but was worth the effort once I got it down. I managed to capture some nice little images that represented the story well and some short snappy quotes.
One of the unique things about my style of visual minutes is that, being a caricaturist, I’m able to include a few accurate cartoon likenesses in my minutes. It was fun in the breaks to see people come over and say ‘Is that me?’ incredulously, or ‘I know who that is’! A friend of mine even commented that she recognised someone in the image when I posted it on instagram. Nice to know I still got it!
Next the group split into teams to discuss different topics. Now I couldn’t claim to be able to recognise ALL the jargon that was used, but part of the skill of the visual minutes person is to judge the importance that a term has by the way it is presented. Clients can request that particular credence be given to particular important terms but for the most part I feel my way through.
The visual minutes document is not a comprehensive one, as traditional minutes are, but rather a tapestry of flavours from the event that captures the feelings behind the decisions people have made.
As I was coming to the end of the day, pretty tired from 5 hours of drawing and listening, I realised I needed an image for the centre of the page that symbolised the day.
I remembered I had taken a photograph of the group doing a teambuilding exercise in a circle on the lawn outside the venue and decided this would work nicely.
It did, it brought the whole thing together, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the team-members came and gave praise for my work.
The money is good but to receive praise in person is the icing on the cake!
Summary
If you are part of an organisation who you think could benefit from having a live artist in the room creating visual minutes, get in touch to ask what might work for you.
You’ll certainly get a lot out of the document for years to come, and at the very least it is a lot of FUN!
My thanks go to Chris Murray who helped me refine my visual minutes and gave me solid gold tips. You can see his work at https://www.instagram.com/christofool.cm/ or https://www.instagram.com/morethanminutes/?hl=en-gb . Check out more of what The Active Wellbeing Society do here— https://theaws.co.uk/ .
Thanks all, and don’t forget to share and like!
https://penjones.co.uk/services/visual-recording/
