What is Graphic Recording?
Graphic recording is the real-time translation of conversations or presentations into text and pictures. It takes advantages of the human brain’s preference for visuals to enable meeting and conference attendees an opportunity to absorb, connect with, and build off of information in astounding ways. ImageThink visual strategists do three things simultaneously when graphic recording: they listen for key ideas, synthesize them, and document them in visual form.
The value of visuals
Captivate Attendees
With keynote graphic recording and social listening murals, ImageThink helps solidify information into memory, and facilitate attendees’ direct engagement. The striking visuals across ImageThink boards are perfect for your audience to share on social, or for your team to share with clients and colleagues.
Elevate Meetings
Our facilitators draw on over a decade of experience running meetings for the biggest companies in the world. Our process begins with a consultation designed to uncover your meeting’s true objectives and includes robust and detailed agendas, custom visual templates, and exercises that ignite creativity.
Drive Transformation
Capture and communicate your most valuable insights with beautiful and informative visual storytelling. ImageThink may be best known for its on-site visual note taking, but our team also creates elegant, eye-popping strategic visuals for clients in our studio, allowing for more consideration, collaboration, and iteration.
How Does ImageThink Do It?
In-Person
Analog on foam core boards using markers or digitally piped into to an onsite AV system, participants can interact with our visual strategists and the art first hand.
Hybrid
Ideal for distributed teams, a visual strategist can join on site or online to stream the visual capture to participants around the globe, at home or in another office.
Remote
For fully remote teams, get the fully digital experience of graphic recording performed over any virtual meeting platform. Visuals can be the spotlight, or shared during breaks.
Examples of Recent Work
Frequently Asked Questions
Graphic recording is much more than graphic design or illustration. While drawing skill, composition and visual fluency are required, graphic recorders and graphic facilitators are not simply artists in meetings.
Every organization and department can benefit from graphic recording. Graphic recording is a tool ImageThink visual strategists use to help clients at blue chip companies drive innovation, communicate big ideas, and align on strategy.
In a presentation, graphic recording increases engagement and memory-retention for the audience. Many people are visual learners, and studies indicate that people remember more information when combined with visuals than they do from spoken words alone.
During a brainstorm or strategy session, a skilled graphic recorder will synthesize all of the group’s contributions into a coherent visual while revealing connections between ideas that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This promotes creative thinking, collaboration and deeper engagement by capturing everyone’s contributions and creating a literal collective vision.
At a trade show, convention, or conference, graphic recording adds a human element to branding, marketing, and booth design. It engages participants at a conference and can illustrate their voices while capturing insights and ideas. And ImageThink’s social listening murals create a dialogue with attendees.
The short answer is that ImageThink visual strategists can perform graphic recording services on just about any surface. Whether it is classic markers on foam core boards, sharpies on flip charts, dry erase markers on a whiteboard, or grease pens on glass, we’re comfortable with any analog medium.
Increasingly, our clients elect digital graphic recording, which we do via tablet, as it is infinitely scalable, editable, and can directly be streamed to remote and hybrid teams. Digital graphic recording also allows for a lot of flexibility in post-event editing of your visuals.
Whereas graphic recording focuses on capturing and organizing information in a visual format, graphic facilitation takes a more active approach in shaping and leading a group conversation. A graphic facilitator might employ pre-populated templates like mind-maps or customer journeys to guide a discussion and ensure that crucial topics are addressed.
Unlike many other professional services and consultants, there is no formal educational training or certifications for graphic recording. Our visual strategists undergo rigorous training over several months, and our creative development and client services teams ensure that every job is appropriately scoped and that your practitioner will be well prepared and versed in your company’s unique needs.
Graphic recording should always be tailored to the specific event and its unique objectives, which can vary considerably. From large scale, high-visibility events, to internal brainstorming and strategy sessions, to the most confidential patient advocacy sessions, ImageThink visual strategists can provide graphic recording in any environment.
At ImageThink, we recognize that our clients’ conversations and intellectual property is their most valuable asset. Most sessions are highly confidential and often pertain to business strategies or trade secrets. For your protection, we are willing to sign an NDA.
ImageThink visual strategists will work with you during the planning phases of your agenda. They will offer expert guidance on how best to integrate their visuals into your meeting in a way that supports your meeting objectives, rather than serving as a distraction. Our services also come with a full complement of pre and post event support to ensure you get the value you’re paying for.
Following your engagement, ImageThink will provide you with your physical ImageBoards on site, as well as digitized versions of your illustrated notes. Your notes can be displayed and shared internally or externally, and serve to help our clients think through next steps for the project. Read a few of the specific ways we recommend leveraging visual assets.
At ImageThink, we price our strategic meeting facilitation, graphic recording, and in-studio visual services according to the nature of your engagement – whether it’s an internal meeting or public conference, for example – and how much support you need. Staffing, time, and materials are all factors in our rate card. Get in touch to discuss how we can help bring your biggest ideas to the surface and we’ll provide you with a custom quote.