![]() This counterintuitive creative technique has broad applications for strategy and execution This is another “I” story, not a “we” story. And it draws on the past—quite literally. Years ago, I worked as a quick-sketch artist at a portrait shop on the Atlantic City NJ boardwalk. I used charcoal for black-and-white, and pastel for color. This was before iPhones. But hey, it paid the bills, handily, all the summers I was in college. Now there’s a good chance you’ve never sat for a portrait artist; the whole “quick” part of the “quick sketch” is a lost art; heck, it was already getting killed off by Polaroid cameras when I was behind the easel. Here’s the thing. The artist will ask you to pose, and hold that pose as well as you can. (Side note: Drawing babies is nigh impossible!) And while you’re sitting still, that artist is doing anything but. He or she is working frantically, trying to capture your likeness. You’d see the easel creak and sway, you’d hear the scratching of pencils and chalks, and maybe even smell the dust. You’d also see the artist doing some strange stuff. For example, I’d hold out a pencil at arm’s length, and use it (by aligning it) to measure the features on someone’s face in order to replicate the proportions on the page. I would also squint. This would always elicit the most startled reactions from my sitters: “Why are you squinting?” “Are you okay?” “Do you need glasses?” “Can you see?” Making the case for clarity First off, I had perfect vision back in those days. Second, I did not invent the squint technique. It’s common practice among artists, but since most people aren’t artists, they’re unaware of it. Which is a pity, because it’s really cool, and, as we’d teased at the outset of this article, surprisingly applicable to a wide variety of challenges. There is no secret society of portrait artists. I will teach you this technique. You can try it right now. It’s cool. Even if you wear glasses, your eyes pull in an amazing amount of detail. So much, indeed, that it can be overwhelming. Squinting eliminates the noise. Specifically, it’s great for delineating zones of light and shadow. People’s faces are very subtly contoured, and with your amazingly powerful eyes/brain combination, it can be hard for you to easily discern the “line” which divides the brightest and darkest parts. There are so many shades of gray; indeed, all the colors make the job even harder. But when you squint, you instantly reduce everything you see into black and white, light and shadow. The harder you squint, the more binary and obvious it becomes. Try it. Look at yourself in the mirror. If you’re sitting near a window, the window-side of your face will be lighter. You already knew that. But if you need to very quickly see where to draw in the shading, squint. Voilà. It’s right there for you to see. Now just scribble it on the page. Going deep People in business will often talk about the ability to acquire a “30,000-foot view” of a situation. Or the ability to “peer around the corner” of where things are going. If they only squinted. Artists have known these tricks for millennia. Don’t believe me? Consider the time-honored thumbnail. It’s a tiny little sketch you make of a drawing (or layout, or web page, or UX display) which purposely can’t even accommodate any detail. It’s a technique for forcing you to eliminate noise, clutter, and distractions. See where this is going? You can apply the squint technique, both literally and figuratively, to a host of challenges. Use it to filter out fine print and executional flubs in a piece of artwork-in-progress. Use it to discern and bifurcate your audience, much like we do via the simple two-button layout of our own home page. Employ it to carve up projects into tasks, and groups into teams. The only limits are your imagination, and as is the case with all raw creative endeavors, this technique is never constrained by budget. What have you got to lose?
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