This week I participated in an exercise by Nick Sousanis. For who doesn’t know him, Nick is internationally famous for his dissertation “Unflattening” which is completely written in as a graphic novel.
The exercise is called grids & gestures and it stimulates us to draw each day of one week in just panels and lines. We’re not supposed to use words or real drawings of stuff and it shouldn’t take more than about 15 minutes to create it.
I started with this drawing on Monday.
Monday. My wife and I both had a day off work and went to the beach.
Nick responded in Twitter, stimulating me to leave out the words.
Being the educator he is, Nick stimulated me to leave out the words
So on Tuesday I made another ‘grids&gestures’ and posted it on Twitter. Besides working (writing) on my computer, I had a couple of long meeting with people sitting across the table in front of me. I used the rectangular forms for that.
Tuesday. Meetings and working on computer. I guess you can see how I get to work?
Wednesday evening I posted my third drawing. This day started with my piano lessons. After that I sat in my office room (with view on early 19th century building) and had to do a lot of reading.
Wednesday started with piano lessons
Thursday, yet another day with lots of meetings, yet each with different numbers of people attending and with different constellation of seats. I got some great feedback on Twitter which encouraged me to keep going.
Thursday. I added panels on my page and got some stimulating feedback by Nick and Mariana.
Friday I finished some last work from home and used most of the day to make digital artifacts like photos and drawings, using my iPhone, iPad and Mac computer.
Friday I spend most of the day working on digital artifacts
Saturday was a day for shopping and gardening.
Saturday, a day for shopping and gardening, next to being creative and watching some TV
Sunday, lazy day. Lots of watching movies in my pajamas. This is the last day of the week of grids & gestures.
Sunday, a lazy day with lots of movies to watch.
These were my contributions to the ‘grids & gestures’ exercise by Nick. It helped me to think about telling something without actually trying to draw stuff. It also helped me get more ‘free’ to use a page as I want to, to let conventions of how a page must be set up go.
Thank you Nick for this inspirational event!
Ron Leunissen 
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[…] his thoughts and contributions here. Kevin Hodgson shared his week-long contributions here, as did Ron Leunissen here, and Mariana Funes here. Finally (and no doubt i missed some of the reflections along the way), […]