Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Have you ever noticed how some designers take notes? I work with a lot of designers in a strategic communications agency and we talk a lot about how to help our clients meet their goals. Much of what we do is story-telling through design. In our agency we do an enormous amount of brainstorming in special brainstorming rooms. 

When we are running through dozens of ideas for a particular client several days after a brainstorm some of our designers will pull out a moleskin or sketchpad they used to record the session. In that book are a multitude of doodles or sketches having what seems to me to have nothing to do with the brainstorm we both attended.

Our designers will open to the page and read back through their sketches, recalling exactly what happend in a strikingly accurate blow-by-blow.

I am so impressed by that. It is like a parallel syntax they use with fluency.  What's more, in much of our work, it gets used in our creative concepting and its smart.

So, if you are in a brainstorm and your designers are doodling, don't worry, its their way of taking notes, passing time, rapid prototyping and rendering a flurry of ideas into an indellible picture for later.