By Juan Velasco
Dozens (hundreds!) of international friends and graphics colleagues have passed through the Show Don’t Tell workshop at one point of another since it started around 20 years ago. I’ve been lucky and honored to co-teach it since 2000. I’ll be there again this year with my friends and co-instructors John Grimwade, Alberto Cairo and Geoff McGhee.
The workshop is a terrific opportunity to spend a few days getting to know professionals that create graphics in diverse corners of the world. It starts on Sunday March 10 and ends on Wednesday March 13, preceding the Infographics World Summit in which the majority of Malofiej attendees will join us for the beginning of the conferences (and the lineup is really impressive this year!).
During the workshop we’ll work on a couple of exercises that will allow us to go out and enjoy some amazing places around Pamplona, always with the excuse of making a graphic about them. Over the years we visited medieval castles, crawled in the tunnels of Pamplona’s underground belly, admired Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, studied the path of the famous running of the bulls through the Old Town… It’s always fun.
Participants will act as reporters by gathering information, asking questions, taking notes and making quick sketches. Then, back at the Journalism School we’ll all come up with ways to explain what we learned with infographics conceived for multiple platforms.
We’ll emphasize the importance of planning, hand sketching and conceptualizing information before jumping to the computer. We have seen quite a few people rushing to their laptops and 3D applications to try to create stunning illustrations before having a solid plan, entirely missing the point! To me it’s always fascinating to see people from different cultures engage in brainstorming about how to visualize information and telling how they would do it in their respective publications. Those heated conversations surrounded by pencils, crayons, coffee cups, doodles, mini-sketches and little balls of paper with discarded ideas are what it’s all about.
The participants will work in groups that are always a fun mix of international characters. Think of Mexicans teaming up with Norwegians, British and Taiwanese or any other odd combination, all speaking the universal language of infographics. After each exercise, the groups will present their work to the class. All four instructors will also do a one-hour presentation during the workshop.
And after class, it’s time to enjoy the wonderful tapas bar and restaurants of the Old City in Pamplona. The anecdotes over the years are as countless as the diverse group of people that gathers every year in this corner of northern Spain. By the time the conference starts on Wednesday we are already good “Malofriends”. So many people stay in touch with each other after the Show Don’t Tell!.
I hope to see you in Pamplona in just a few weeks.
SDT, that terrific opportunity
