What Can an Information Illustrator Actually Help With?

Sep 4

5 min read

One of the slightly confusing things about my job is that there are approximately 47 different terms for what I do. Information illustration. Graphic recording. Live illustration. Visual facilitation. Sketchnoting. Illustrated summaries. Rich pictures. If you’re already working in this world, those terms make perfect sense. If you’re an event organiser, communications lead or Head of People thinking, “I just have a lot of complicated stuff and I need people to understand it,” they’re probably not particularly helpful.

So rather than starting with which service do you need?, I think there’s a much easier question: What are you trying to make sense of? Because different types of information need different types of visual communication.

So here's a flowchart I made expecially for you!

Got a Live Event? You Probably Need Graphic Recording!

You’ve got a conference, leadership event, panel, training day or workshop happening live. There are going to be speakers. Lots of ideas. Probably quite a few slides. And, if we’re being realistic, a room full of humans whose ability to retain information will gradually decrease as the day goes on.

This is where graphic recording or live illustration comes in. I listen to the conversations as they happen and capture the important ideas visually in real time. I’m not trying to create an illustrated transcript of everything everyone says. That would be both impossible and fairly useless.

Instead, I’m listening for the things that matter. What keeps coming up? What connects? What are the big themes? What has shifted? What does this audience actually need to remember when they leave?

Those ideas become an illustrated visual summary that helps people follow the conversation during the event and gives them something useful to return to afterwards. So, if your problem is “there is going to be A LOT of good thinking in this room and we don't want to lose it”, graphic recording is probably the answer.

Got a Smaller Group Trying to Work Something Out? Think Visual Facilitation

Sometimes the purpose of a session isn’t to tell people something. It’s to work something out together.

Perhaps a team is exploring a problem, planning a project or trying to reach a shared understanding. The ideas aren’t neatly packaged before everyone arrives. They’re being created in the room.

That calls for a slightly different kind of visual support.

Visual facilitation uses drawing, diagrams, mapping and visual frameworks to support the thinking process itself. Rather than simply capturing a conversation, visuals can help a group explore it.

That can be particularly useful when everyone is talking about the same issue but, if we’re being honest, may not actually mean the same thing.

Making the thinking visible gives people something concrete to react to. You can spot gaps, challenge assumptions and see where different perspectives overlap. Sometimes the quickest way to realise five people have five different interpretations of the strategy is to draw the strategy.

Got Research or Complicated Public Information? Information Illustration Can Make It Accessible

This is one of my favourite types of project. You have something important to communicate, but the source material is… hefty. Maybe it’s academic research. A report. A policy. An evaluation. Public information. A piece of guidance that is completely understandable to the people who wrote it and considerably less understandable to everybody else. Enter information illustration.

Here, the job is to take complex written or recorded information and translate it into an illustrated summary that makes the important parts easier to navigate.

And I want to make an important distinction here: making something accessible does not mean dumbing it down. Good information illustration respects the complexity of the original material. The skill is in finding a way to communicate that complexity without making the audience do unnecessary mental gymnastics to understand it. This is particularly valuable when you need information to reach people outside the group who originally created it. Because a brilliant 70-page report that nobody reads isn't necessarily doing a brilliant job of communicating.

Got a Lot of Messy Internal Thinking? You Might Need a Rich Picture

Then we have the projects where there isn't really a neat beginning and end. There are priorities over here. Challenges over there. People, systems, values, goals, dependencies, risks and approximately 400 arrows connecting everything together. Welcome to organisational strategy. This is where a rich picture or strategy illustration can be really useful. Rather than capturing one particular conversation, a rich picture brings together multiple parts of an organisation’s thinking into one visual landscape. It might show where an organisation is now, where it wants to go, what needs to happen along the way and how different teams or priorities connect.

This can be incredibly useful because strategy is often communicated in a very linear format.

Page one. Page two. Page three. Slide 36. But organisations aren't linear. Everything affects everything else. A rich picture lets people see those relationships in a way a traditional document often can't.

And when people can actually see the strategy, it becomes much easier to talk about it.

Trying to Understand Something for Yourself? That's Where Sketchnoting Comes In

Not every visual needs to be commissioned by a giant organisation or created live on a conference screen. Sometimes you're simply trying to get something into your own brain. That’s where sketchnoting comes in. Sketchnotes combine handwritten words, simple drawings, symbols, arrows, containers and layout to capture information visually as you listen, learn or think. And no, you absolutely do not need to be good at drawing. This is something I feel particularly strongly about because my background is in teaching. The purpose of a sketchnote isn't to create something worthy of framing. It’s to engage with information differently. The act of deciding what to write, what to draw, what to connect and where to place it means you’re actively processing the information rather than simply copying it down. Your wonky lightbulb is allowed.

So Which Type of Visual Communication Do You Actually Need?

The easiest way to decide is to forget the terminology for a minute and look at the problem.

If the information is happening live, graphic recording can capture it.
If a small group is trying to think something through together, visual facilitation can support the conversation.
If you have research, reports or complex information that needs to reach more people, information illustration can make it more accessible.
If your organisation has lots of interconnected thinking that needs to become one coherent picture, a rich picture or strategy illustration can help.
And if you're trying to process and remember information yourself, sketchnoting is a brilliant place to start.

They all look slightly different, but they're doing versions of the same job: making thinking visible.

Information Illustration Isn't Really About Illustration

This is probably the thread running through everything I do. Clients rarely come to me because their fundamental business problem is a shortage of drawings. They come to me because something is difficult to understand, difficult to communicate, difficult to remember or difficult to get everyone aligned around. The illustration is the tool we use to solve that problem. That’s why I think of myself as an information illustrator rather than simply an illustrator. Whether I’m graphic recording a conference in real time or creating an illustrated summary of a piece of research back in my studio, the thinking comes first. I listen. I filter. I find the patterns. I work out what matters. Then I draw.

Not Sure What You Need? That's Completely Fine

You don't need to arrive knowing whether you need “graphic recording”, “information illustration” or a “rich picture”. That’s my job. If you’ve got a conference, strategy, piece of research, report, workshop or generally complicated blob of information that you need other humans to understand, get in touch and tell me about the problem. We can work out the right visual solution from there. Because you probably don't need an illustration. You need to make something make sense. And that I can help with.