Eva-Lotta Lamm
User Experience Designer and Illustrator
Clearleft Says
Eva-Lotta Lamm has single-handedly helped popularise sketchnoting in the UK, and we’re not just saying that because UX London features in her book. Sketching is a core skill at Clearleft, and many of the team have participated in one of her workshops over the years. Back from a long and exciting round the world adventure, we’re looking forward to welcoming Eva-lotta back to UX London.
Sketching with confidence, clarity and imagination
Being able to sketch is like speaking an additional language that enables you to structure and express your thoughts and ideas more clearly, quickly and in an engaging way. For anyone working in UX, design and product development in general, sketching is a valuable technique to feel comfortable with. Thinking through complex problems on your own, spontaneously pitching a design idea at the whiteboard, bringing a user scenario to life in a storyboard or creating sketchnotes during a research interview: the ability to sketch is as versatile and useful as the ability to write. And like writing, it’s daunting to learn at first, but with a bit of instruction and a lot of practice it can become second nature.
In this session we will use the full three hours to develop and practice our sketching skills. We will look at the underlying principles of visual perception and clarity and practice sharpening the skills of our eyes, mind and hands.
We will start by warming up and sharpening our motor skills. We will work on our line quality and hand-eye-mind coordination. Then we will focus on ‘seeing’ the world around us and explore how to sketch objects, people and expressions. We’ll try out some techniques that can help to get the images in our mind onto the paper and discuss the difficulties and find ways to overcome them. We practice how to develop our own visual vocabulary and how to generate visual metaphors for abstract concepts. We’ll explore how we can make our sketches sharper and clearer, both visually and conceptually.
This session is 90% practical. We’ll take the luxury of using three hours to focus just on making marks on paper. We’ll practice, we’ll play, we’ll experiment and we’ll improve. All you need is pen and paper, an open mind and a little bit of courage to play and explore.
About Eva-Lotta Lamm
Eva-Lotta is a User Experience Designer and Illustrator. She grew up in Germany, worked in Paris and London for a few years before packing up her backpack and travelling the world for 15 months. She has over 12 years of experience working on digital products as an in-house designer for Google, Skype, and Yahoo! as well as freelancing and consulting for various agencies and her own clients.
Besides her daytime mission of making the web a more understandable, usable and delightful place, she regularly takes sketchnotes at all sorts of talks and conferences and has self-published her notes in several books.
Eva-Lotta also teaches sketching and is interested in exploring the area of Visual Improvisation – looking at the parallels between sketching and improvisation to explore how some of the principles from her regular theatre improvisation practice can be used to inspire visual work.