Visual Facilitation

I keep experimenting with layouts for retrospectives. Here are two versions, on paper and on screen. Both leave room to look back and decide what to improve.

The paper version groups prompts around a central title: what went well, what did not, what was surprising, and what to improve. A timeline adds two useful questions: what happened when, and what should have happened?

After my first retrospectives, here is another chance to put my lettering practice to work. I prepared three flipcharts: a title, four questions, and an agenda.

The questions are Loved, Learned, Lacked, and Longed—the 4Ls. Each has its own field, leaving room for contributions. The title, meanwhile, got plenty of room of its own.

My lettering practice has spread across sketchbooks, learning pads and flipchart sheets. Now I am also practising on the myWorkBoard WB from Neuland, a small board that fits beside the laptop.

The board was fine for what I wanted to do. The only annoying thing was its sharp edges. Apparently, even lettering practice sometimes needs something other than another marker.

I have been reading Lettering Journey: Fast. Functional. Fun! by Heather Leavitt Martinez. What an inspiring book! It also left me with a few rather specific questions about the letters I was practising.

So I wrote Heather a letter. Were there lowercase Roman letters? What would the German letters ä, ö and ü look like in one of her fonts? And what about the slightly strange German capital ẞ? Quite a lot of questions for a single letter.

After experimenting with different markers, I wanted to practise writing bigger. Much bigger. With 5 cm and 6 cm markers from Montana and MOLOTOW, my alphabet took up most of a door.

I used Neuland’s handlettering practice sheets as a reference. This was lettering practice at a rather different scale. The wide, flat nibs give a good idea of what 5 cm and 6 cm actually look like. There is a lot of marker to work with.

This time, I wanted to play with the markers themselves: MOLOTOW Liquid Chrome, Coversall and Speedflow. A magazine page became my test surface. No finished flipchart required.

I tried broad curves, overlapping letters and large dark shapes. Some strokes let the print show through; others almost covered it. The magazine article was having a difficult time competing for attention.

Having plenty of marker colors is one thing. Having the right ones is another. At paydirekt, I wanted to mix the company’s corporate design colors for my visual facilitation work.

I had already used the corporate design when renovating the Scrum boards. Now I wanted to get the inks closer to that palette. So I started mixing, using printed tables to record the ratios and paint a sample of each mixture.

My enthusiasm for markers has made its way from my sketchbooks onto our shared boards. As I wrote in Renovating Scrum Boards, I wanted my colleagues to enjoy those tools, too. That also meant giving the markers a home.

Before putting the sets together, I tried different colors on glass. A few icons, strokes and swatches helped me compare the inks on the board itself. Lettering practice was another chance to get to know the tools.