January 2012 – Kosta Peric

If you follow this blog or my tweets, you will have noticed my recent tendency to illustrate my posts, presentations and tweets with various drawings and paintings.

It all comes from an aHa moment I had around September last year. I’ve been watching for several years many “scribes” (illustrators) in the context of my work (for example the people from The Value Web), and notably my team members Mariela (@mela_atanassova), Martine (@mdeweird) and (most recently) Dominik (@ddebuyser). What they do is give a totally different, fresh perspective to things by drawing rather than (only) writing.

So, on this one particular day in September last year, I was updating the “white board” of my team (a board in my office capturing our activities and plans), and I figured it’s…. very boring. I was wondering on how to make it more exciting, and it’s where the aHa struck – scribe it! Make it more authentic, fun, attractive, drawing rather than writing. Do it like Martine, Mariela and Dominik would!

So I jumped in the pool, erased the whole boring mess on the white board, and started jotting. Very quickly, some memories came back – in my early teens, my friends and I were doing some tagging! Mind you, not on the walls of my native Belgrade, but at our school on specially prepared surfaces. So some drawing memories flooded back.

So, what happened?

Well, I won’t share with all of you on the wide internet our new white board – after all, as open as we Innotribe are, we still have to keep some secrets so that we can surprise you all 🙂 However see below for other examples.

Since that aHa moment, I practiced. In the way I work, I tend to draw and erase a lot, try things, so very quickly i settled on my iPad as the tool of choice, where you can draw and erase as many times as you wish. I bought one of these pens, some apps, and experimented a lot. Then I started illustrating some events – here are some examples to date: compass summit scribings, the “essence of innotribe” prezi, and the recent “castle and the sandbox” post.

Most recently, I also started another exercise, capturing some scenes of particular importance, or surroundings that felt particularly good. More paintings than drawings. Here are some examples.

Fall evening in NYC