Recently, I gave a presentation at the inaugural Sketching in Practice Symposium at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Here is the presentation:
During the presentation, I drew an analogy between sketching for information design and an information graphic about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing's climb to the top of Mt. Everest, which I helped put together at National Geographic Magazine. The original graphic was drawn by Hillary himself:
The x-axis is time; the y-axis is the height of Everest. The red line shows Hillary and Tenzing.
Here we see that Hillary and Tenzing reached the summit through a series of small sprints up-and-down the mountain, setting up basecamps along the way. This nimble approach is often better than trying to execute a single master plan when working with a great deal of information. I describe some working methods for this type of swift ideation in my presentation, and I present a sample data set from which you could produce sketches in a National Geographic-style presentation.
*For my detailed notes about the journey to the summit of Mt. Everest, please see this PDF: