Sketchplanations
Big Ideas Little Pictures
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Explaining the world one sketch at a time

Have great conversations about ideas through simple and insightful sketches.

Big Ideas Little Pictures Book

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In a Book: Big Ideas Little Pictures

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Absorb big ideas with crystal-clear understanding through this collection of 135 visual explanations. Including 24 exclusive new sketches and enhanced versions of classic favourites, each page shares life-improving ideas through beautifully simple illustrations.

Perfect for curious minds and visual learners alike.

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Hi, I'm Jono 👋

I'm an author and illustrator creating one of the world's largest libraries of hand-drawn sketches explaining the world—sketch-by-sketch.

Sketchplanations have been shared millions of times and used in books, articles, classrooms, and more. Learn more about the project, search for a sketch you like, or see recent sketches below.

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What is diagonal billing in cinema, film credits, titles, and design? Example of Steve McQueen and Paul Newman from the Towering Inferno in a movie theatre. Also staggered billing.

Diagonal Billing (or Staggered Billing)

A solution for equal movie star billing The 1974 disaster movie The Towering Inferno had the advantage of two huge stars: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Supposedly, neither of them wanted to be portrayed as second to the other. So the studio had a problem: whose name should go first on the movie poster and in the credits? What is Diagonal Billing? Diagonal billing, sometimes called staggered billing, is a way of arranging the names of movie stars to give them equal prominence. Instead of listing one above or in line with the other, the names are placed diagonally: • one name in the bottom-left, • the other in the top-right. This balances the natural reading hierarchy—left to right, top to bottom—so that either name can be read first. It was the clever compromise used for McQueen and Newman in The Towering Inferno, and it has been repeated in many Hollywood films since. Why Diagonal Billing Works In English, we naturally read from left to right and top to bottom. We start reading this way in articles like this, but also posters, adverts, and web pages. Which means what we see top-left is naturally emphasised compared to what we encounter towards the end in the bottom-right. It's also why my sketches typically have a title in the top-left and a logo in the bottom-right: you're meant to see them in that order. Diagonal billing cancels out a name on the left by placing it at the bottom, and emphasises the name on the right by placing it at the top. Examples of Diagonal Billing Balancing Steve McQueen and Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno is how I first learned of staggered but equal billing (from my Dad, though he denies it). You can see the staggering of names in the original movie poster. Other examples include: Cheers TV credits: Ted Danson and Shelley Long Scenes from a Marriage (2021): Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac Chicago (2002): Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones Westworld (1973): James Brolin, Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004): Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow Righteous Kill (2008): Robert De Niro, Al Pacino Keep an eye out for it in movie posters and opening credits, and help me add to the examples! Related Ideas to Diagonal Billing Also see: The Gestalt principles of visual perception The Blur Your Eyes Test F-Shaped Reading The Rule of Thirds Use styling instead of colons Design for a Glance, a Look, a Read Information Radiator The real shape of a crossing (diagonal!) The site TV Tropes also discusses diagonal billing.
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Cornwall vs Devon cream tea styles shown side by side: jam first for Cornwall, cream first for Devon.

Cream Tea: Cream First or Jam First?

The classic cream tea is a simple and delicious affair: a freshly baked scone, clotted cream, jam, and a pot of tea to share. But there’s something brewing, and it’s not just the tea. It’s a question that divides even the most peaceful tea room: should it be cream first or jam first on a scone? The Devon vs Cornwall Cream Tea Debate The two neighbouring English counties most associated with the cream tea are Cornwall and Devon, both in the southwest of England (I included a little map). I learned that, traditionally, each county prepares its cream tea in different ways. The Devon cream tea is cream first, then jam. The Cornwall cream tea is jam first, then cream. As someone with more ties to Devon, I’ve always gone the cream then jam route. But I know that some people swear by the other way. Either way, I can vouch for both a Devon cream tea and a Cornwall cream tea being delicious. Unsure how to eat a cream tea? Perhaps you should follow the locals. If you haven’t had one on location, I recommend you give it a try. Which way do you go? Cream first or jam first? Related Ideas to The Great Cream Tea Debate Also see: Types of sushi How to make Irish coffee The egg float test The tomato test Mandarin, clementine, satsuma, tangerine Fruit or Vegetable Hedgehog a mango Dice an onion Gelato, sorbet, or ice cream P.S. This is a revision of an early sketch I did on this subject. It deserved a stronger one!
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What are the contradictory traits of creative people? Illustration of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 10 paradoxical personality traits, showing each pair of opposites such as energetic and restful, smart and naive, and passionate and objective.

10 Contradictory Traits of Creative People

Creative people display contradictory personality traits. This finding has stuck with me since I read it over 20 years ago in psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Csikszentmihalyi drew this finding from over 100 interviews with exceptional people—engineers, writers, historians, chemists, musicians, business people and more—and his lifetime of research into psychology, happiness, and flow. Alongside dismantling several myths surrounding creativity, such as the tortured genius, Mihalyi explores the central idea that creative people do not lean only toward one side or the other on a range of personality traits. Instead, creative people will display quite opposite characteristics at different times, or even at the same time. The 10 Contradictory Traits of Creative People Creative people often display both sides of these traits: Energetic and Restful Smart and Naive Playful and Disciplined Imaginative and Realistic Extroverted and Introverted Humble and Proud Feminine and Masculine Traditional and Rebellious Passionate and Objective Sensitive and Joyful The Importance of Contradiction This idea of contradictory personality traits was exciting to me when I read about it. I was a young design and engineering graduate learning and applying the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving (TRIZ) for what seemed like creative solutions. I was fascinated with where ideas come from, what creative people do differently, and how I could become one. A fundamental idea in TRIZ is that solutions evolve through the resolution of contradictions. For example, you want a tent to be strong and sturdy so it doesn’t blow over or break. The standard approach for this makes it heavier. But you also want it to be lightweight to carry. How can it be both strong and lightweight? Enter creative solutions. Compromise and trade-off are sometimes necessary, but whenever you find what seems a truly creative solution, you’ll usually find that someone’s resolved a contradiction at its core. And here was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi finding that creative people benefit not just from being imaginative, but also, at times, from being realistic. Not just smart, but also, at times, naive. Resolving a contradiction of personality. Resisting Labelling Labelling others or yourself usually seems to me a misguided and often harmful act. For example, attribution bias is the tendency to attribute behaviour to fixed personality traits rather than to circumstances or actions. Considering someone a genius, a loser, or a natural artist, without considering the circumstances and actions that got them where they are, gets us off the hook. As David Macauley pointed out (video), when people say they can’t draw, they’ve usually never really tried. The idea of displaying contradictory or paradoxical traits was very freeing to me. To be creative, you don’t have to be this or that. You can be this at times and that at times. And perhaps this fluidity helps us towards creative insights. I generally consider myself fairly introverted—I easily recharge through time by myself—but in the right company and the right time, I can appear quite extroverted. The smartest people can also ask naive questions. Being proud and confident can help try things that others won’t. And being humble enables you to accept help and ideas from others, and not drive collaborators away. At times, you may be energetic and productive; at other times, you may want to rest and recharge. We don’t have to be one or the other. We can be open to being both. Excerpt on Creative Individuals and Complex Personalities Here’s Csikszentmihalyi from the book: “Are there no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes – instead of being an ‘individual’, each of them is a ‘multitude’. These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturant, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire. Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time. A third paradoxical trait refers to the related combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other. Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion. Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape this rigid gender role stereotyping [of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’]. Creative people are both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.” Related Ideas to 10 Paradoxical Traits of Creative People Also see: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis Everyone’s a Geek About Something, and no one is one-dimensional, as I like to say The Spectrum Policy Attribution Bias Flow Match challenge with skills for flow at work Yes sayers, no sayers The Bandwagon Effect Groupthink The same excerpt above is also in the excellent Farnum Street.
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How to remember latitude and longitude on a world map, understand which is which, which is x or y, and how to read lat–long coordinates using an easy mnemonic: latitude is flat and longitude converges

Latitude and Longitude: How to Remember Which is Which

Latitude and longitude together give you your position on the globe. They are the two types of lines that wrap the planet on globes and our world maps. One set is the horizontal lines, and the other vertical, but for the longest time I struggled to remember which was which. No more. How to Remember Latitude vs Longitude The mnemonic I've found that has never failed for me to remember which is latitude and which is longitude is: Latitude is flat. (or just Lat is flat) Longitude converges. So lines of latitude are the lines that lie flat on a globe or map. Lines of longitude are the tall ones that converge at the poles (latitude lines don’t converge). Two other ways that might work for you: Imagine the map grid as a ladder. Latitude lines are the flat rungs you could step on, and longitude lines are the long vertical lines connecting the rungs. Longitude lines are always long, as they all pass through the poles. Whereas latitude lines, as they encircle at different positions north-south around the planet, are long by the equator but short around the poles. Which Way Latitude and Longitude Run (and What They Mean) When you give a latitude for a city or location, you're saying which of the horizontal lines of latitude the location is. Somewhat counterintuitively then, this tells you how far up or down the planet you are between the poles—your north–south position. Latitude behaves like the y position on a graph. Latitude values increase as you go north from the equator and decrease as you go south. When you give a longitude, this corresponds to which of the tall vertical longitude lines you mean. Longitude tells you where you are east–west around the world. Longitude behaves like the x position on a graph. Longitude values increase as you go east from the prime meridian at Greenwich in London, and decrease (-ve) as you go west. So: Lines of latitude are horizontal, but latitude gives you your vertical position (y position) Lines of longitude are vertical, but longitude gives you your horizontal position (x position) Which comes first: latitude or longitude? Most consumer tools like Google Maps write coordinates as lat, lon. An easy way to remember which comes first is alphabetical: latitude, then longitude—a then o. So a GPS coordinate typically corresponds to your latitude (north–south) first and your longitude (east–west) second. Watch out for this if you, like me, are used to thinking of coordinates as x, y—horizontal position first, then vertical position. Although many consumer tools use lat, long, some technical formats use long, lat, so it’s always worth checking. It can be a real pain if you travel to the wrong location. A Lat/Lon Example To take a real coordinate example. The coordinates for The British Library in London, written in the way Google Maps expects (latitude, longitude) are: 51.53005,-0.12765 That is 51.53005 degrees north of the equator, and just a tiny bit west of the Greenwich Prime Meridian. You can type this into a search in Google Maps or Apple Maps to go straight there giving you: https://www.google.com/maps?q=51.53005,-0.12765 And you can see the GPS coordinates for any point on Google Maps by right-clicking. Summary An easy way for how to remember latitude and longitude: Latitude is Flat — the horizontal lines on a map Longitude converges — the north-south lines that converge at the poles As a ladder: Latitude are the flat rungs, longitude are the long rails of the ladder. A latitude coordinate is which of the latitude lines you are on, your north–south position on the planet. A longitude coordinate is which of the longitude lines you are on, your east–west position on the planet. Coordinates in most consumer mapping tools are written as lat/long. Hope that helps you, like it helped me! PS A mnemonic, pronounced nuh-MON-ik, is a technique that helps you remember something more easily. One reader told me what solved it for them was the Corona ad: change your whole lattitude Related Ideas to Remembering Latitude Longitude Also see: Find the North Star Know your poles Remember Days in the Month Bactrian or Dromedary Camel Kayak or Canoe Venomous or Poisonous Centipede or Millipede Dolphin or Porpoise Crocodile or Alligator Tortoise or Turtle Stalactite or Stalagmite Americano or Long Black? Maze or Labyrinth
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Apples and ideas quote (not) from George Bernard Shaw illustrated as a concept - giving an apple vs sharing an idea

Apples and Ideas

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." This quote, commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, though probably not from him, highlights one of the lovely things about ideas. They behave differently from physical things. They're not exclusive; they're additive and abundant. Ideas Don't Behave the Same as Apples Though we talk about intellectual property, ideas don't behave like property in the usual sense. One of the simplest ways to see the difference between ideas and objects is to look at what happens when we share them. I can give you an idea, and we both have the idea, but if I give you my apple, then I no longer have one. This also makes ideas very hard to take back once they are out. Ideas are harder to control than objects. Because ideas are abstract—they don't exist in a physical form—we use conceptual metaphor to talk and reason about them. What follows are some of my favourite examples of how we think about ideas, drawn primarily from Philosophy in the Flesh and the very readable Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The Ideas Are Objects Metaphor Metaphors are how we talk about abstract concepts, like an idea. And the Ideas Are Objects metaphor is one of the most common ways we understand them. This means that a lot of how we talk about apples and ideas overlap. So I can: give you an idea (or an apple), and maybe you'll grasp it, or perhaps it might go over your head Ideas can be: solid or weak shared or hoarded fragile or bulletproof cheap or gold Thinking Is Object Manipulation Because you can examine objects and manipulate them, we have the metaphor Thinking Is Object Manipulation. When you think about an idea, you might: play with it toss it around see if it sticks share it with others try to break it When you communicate with someone, you exchange ideas. you can give an idea get an idea across Together with the Mind Is a Body metaphor (mental exercise), a teacher might try to: put an idea into students' minds fill them up during the term see how much they've retained And I've certainly employed cramming before a test. Because Understanding Is Grasping—having an idea under control—when you don't understand something, it might: be slippery resist definition—has no shape be beyond your grasp As Thinking Is Object Manipulation, you can work on an idea: reshape it craft it fashion it analyse it by taking it apart deconstruct it Together with Knowing Is Seeing, we can: Turn an idea over to see both sides of it hold it up to scrutiny shine a light on it put it under the microscope Ideas Are Food and Acquiring Ideas Is Eating Another fun and common metaphor for ideas is rather more like apples. If the Mind Is a Body, then we need to feed it healthy, nutritious food. I like to think readers of Sketchplanations have an insatiable curiosity. In much of our reasoning, then, ideas are a special kind of object—they are our food for thought. Unhelpful ideas are unhealthy, and helpful ideas are healthy, so they might be: raw fresh half-baked sweet Or an idea might be: rotten disgusting or unsavory unpalatable hard to digest Or they might: smell fishy leave a bad taste in your mouth Or perhaps they need to be: put on the back burner chewed on for a while sugar-coated Significant ideas are: meaty something to chew on let stew for a while So What Are Ideas Really Like? So, given all this talk about Ideas As Objects, it's easy to assume that ideas should behave like them. But before they take on a physical form — say, as a building or product — they don't behave the same as objects. Hopefully, this sketch conveys this idea to you while keeping it with me, too. I think a more suitable conceptualisation is the magical powers of software with its infinite copy/paste. As software becomes more of our daily experience, we might gradually adopt more accurate metaphors for how ideas actually behave. These are not the only metaphors we use across languages for understanding and reasoning about ideas and thinking, Ideas Are Locations, and Thinking Is Moving in particular ("I don't follow you"). There are many. Do check out Metaphors We Live By if you're curious for more (or Philosophy in the Flesh if you really want to get stuck in). Thanks to Franc M for suggesting this one. Related Ideas and Metaphor Sketches Also see: Primary metaphor A Teacher is a DJ for Learning Since I cover a lot of abstract concepts, many of my sketches share and make use of metaphors. Here are some: Rivers and Buckets Muddy Puddles and Leaky Ceilings Pace Layers The Trust Battery The Spectrum Policy The Overton Window The Johari Window Don't Think of an Elephant Lateral Thinking Compliments Are Gifts Looking Under the Lamppost The Learning Pit The Frog Boil Metaphor Sharpen the Saw (poor trees) Eat the Frog (poor frogs) Chickens and Pigs (poor pigs) Metaphors for Ideas Here's a print of the apples and ideas quote by itself
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Spectrum of abstraction for finding and the essence of a symbol for communication and design. From realistic to abstract: symbols for love, death, excellence, awareness, and growth, as examples. Abstract-o-meter concept and heart example from Christoph Niemann

Spectrum of Abstraction

A fundamental act of art is choosing what to leave in and what to leave out. These choices express a point of view and what you communicate. I’ve long been intrigued by iconography for exactly this reason. Icons strip things back to their essence so the message comes across without all the distraction. Choosing What to Leave In and What to Leave Out A pencil icon, like this emoji ✏️, ignores the scratches, the wood grain, the worn eraser, the pencil shavings, all the colour variations. It concentrates on the two ends and the colours, and the intent comes across more clearly. Whenever you draw a scene, you get to choose what to include and what to omit. And in photography, I’ve often framed a shot to leave out the road, the power line, the signpost or the rooftop that would otherwise detract from what I was trying to show. It happens in storytelling, too. You see a bottle of whisky and an ashtray for the grizzled detective in a film or novel. They also have cleaning spray in the cupboard and junk mail on the floor. But some of these add, and some detract. Christoph Niemann on Abstraction One of my favourite explanations of this comes from the Netflix documentary, Abstract: The Art of Design, in the episode with the brilliant Christoph Niemann. Here's how he describes abstraction: "I would say that abstraction probably is, for me, the most important concept of art. ...I start with a thousand different thoughts and then I, one by one, throw them all out, until, at the end, I have the one or two or three that are essential to the whole question. But the abstraction, for me, is this idea of getting rid of everything that's not essential to making a point. ...each idea requires a very specific amount of information. Sometimes it's a lot: a lot of details, a lot of realism. Sometimes it's really just this one line. The one pixel. But each idea has one moment on that scale. So, let's say you want to illustrate the idea of a heart as a symbol for love. When you illustrate it as, just, like, a red square, which is the ultimate abstraction of a heart, nobody knows what you're talking about, so it totally falls flat. When you go all the way realistic and draw an actual heart made out of flesh and blood and pumping, it's just so disgusting that the last thing anybody would ever think about is love. And somewhere between that abstract red square, and the real kind of butcher heart, is the graphic shape that kind of looks like that, and kind of looks like that, and it's just right to transport this idea of a symbol for love." The episode includes a brilliant Abstract-o-meter with the example of the heart and the scale: too realistic --- just right --- too abstract Just the Right Information It's stuck with me. In each sketch, with any icon or scene, there's a choice to be made about how much detail to include. What adds to the message? And what distracts from it? Are there things you can leave out to make your message stronger? Or are there things that are missing? Related Ideas to A Spectrum of Abstraction Also see: The Pyramid Principle - organise ideas to communicate clearly Skeuomorph - design that mimics earlier ones Design for: A Glance, A Look, A Read Word spectrum Mapping: "If your design needs labels, consider another design" Rich Pictures for making sense of complex problems The Golden Ratio The Rule of Thirds Design by Committee
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