"Breaking the empty slate" is always the hardest thing. Starting with the event title or a logo of the host organisation helps me get my hands warm and my body remember how this works ;-)
My "lookbook" with ideas for symbols, icons and visual metaphors helps me preparing for a new event, new content, an industry or sector I haven't dealt with so much...
The European Microfinance Network meets every year in a different european city, this year in Dublin.
Getting into the flow of listening, filtering, synthesizing and "translating" what is being presented and discussed into a visual protocol.
What belongs where? What do I capture, what's ok to leave out? Where's the patterns that start emerging? These and other questions are much more important than just the ability to draw pretty pictures (in my opinion anyways).
And patterns always do emerge over time, which is why I often choose to work with very few colors in the beginning, and only later use more colors to cluster, differentiate, accentuate, and so on.
...in this case, the client specifically asked to use more color, so I used pastels for differentiating the various parts of the plenary inputs and discussions. Unfortunately, they don't photograph very well ;-(
Harvesting template created by my client somosmas.org to enable the workshop moderators to bring back the very essence of each of the 3 parallel workshops to me, so that they can be captured visually as well.
Part II of the Harvesting Template
Resulting visual scribe of workshop stream I, consisting of 3 workshops over the 2 day event.
Resulting visual scribe of workshop stream II, consisting of 3 workshops over the 2 day event.
Resulting visual scribe of workshop stream III, consisting of 3 workshops over the 2 day event.
