Graphic facilitation (aka visual recording) comprehends creating images by meanse of freehand drawing in real-time to visually convey ideas during meetings, workshops, seminars and conferences. Interest in graphic facilitation has surged in the age of Youtube as businesses and individuals noticed that visual facilitation, particularly if carried out by a professional artist, could be a great way to introduce various ideas, promote brands and even display products to the enormous Youtube audience in a fun way.

Graphic facilitator can create dynamic, out-of-the-box visual presentations of almost anything unlike videos, which are more complicated in production, or slide-shows, which are less dynamic and hence boring. I could even compare graphic facilitation with advertising because today’s graphic facilitators try to bring as much fun and creativity to their visual recoding performance as advertising agencies do with more conventional ads. Visual recording is fun to watch and we all know that people memorize anything funny, interesting or emotional much better, faster and for a very long time.

Some businesses have already discovered the power of graphic facilitation in conveying ideas and awareness about products and brands. Thus you can observe the growing number of videos featuring graphic facilitators creating some cool drawings on whiteboards in Youtube. A number of professional teams emerged to create end-to-end visual graphic facilitation videos ready for Youtube. Those teams ask a high price for their visual facilitation services, however they can boast of high quality production, creativity, experience and outstanding drawing talent.

I had noticed graphic facilitation videos on Youtube long before I was hired as a visual facilitator for the first time. I regarded these videos as a rather curious marketing idea, so I began to think it would be interesting to get involved in a visual recording project. Although I was not much prepared, three weeks ago I was commissioned to create a set of time-lapse videos to be used for graphic facilitation purposes by John M. Tate, an Executive Vice President for Systematic Development Group LLC, who was to present the LOK-IT Secure Flash Drive at the 2012 Annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS 2012) Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas. Mr. Tate had been kind enough to provide me with the recording of his presentation which fragments I used as voice over for the graphic facilitation video you can watch below.

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Visual scribing for an IT security company

My first graphic facilitation commission has not remained unnoticed. Shortly after I had published my blog post about graphic facilitation I was contacted by a representative of CipherEx (a computer consulting services company that designs, models, tests, and builds secure networks) who asked me to create an entire series of graphic facilitation videos to visually capture some important office and network security rules for their customers to remember. The guy who contacted me called this work visual scribing and I think this term, indeed, suits the visual facilitation process which suggests no live drawing. So, from now on I’ll call this kind of work visual scribing or simply scribing.

The main challenge in the CipherEx’s assignment was that the customer wanted the drawing hand to be invisible in the final video. I knew that it could be done with some iPad applications which make it possible to record the drawing process through a stylus. However, taking into consideration more important needs, purchasing an iPad was not an option. It took some time to develop my method of the “invisible hand” visual scribing with the equipment available to me at that time. While honing the method I managed to complete the first video of the series in September 2012. And the customer was happy with the result. I’ve got customer’s permission to share this video, so you can watch it below:

rel="nofollow" style="font-size: small;" target="_blank">Watch this video on Youtube