Sketchplanations
Big Ideas Little Pictures

Sketchplanations in a book! I think you'll love Big Ideas Little Pictures

Sketchplanations podcast photo of Rob Bell, Tom Pellereau and Jono Hey

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Explaining the world one sketch at a time

Sketchplanations makes complex ideas simple with clear, insightful sketches. Explore topics from science, creativity, psychology, and beyond explained in pictures.

New sketches by email

Learn something new in a sketch each Sunday

Recent sketches

Someone gets a much better response by asking 'How was your day?' instead of 'Good day?'

Prefer open-ended questions

Great practice for research. Good practice for life too. Also see: Don't fill the silence
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Everyone's a geek about something showing people loving all their different hobbies.

Everyone’s a geek about something

Of all my sketches, I have a soft spot for this one. We had some lovely family friends who were massively into birding. As a schoolboy, I was more interested in birds than most, but one day, my Dad and I went to stay with them. They talked us through trips they'd been around the world to spot rare and rectangular birds. They had an amazing telescope trained on the birds at the feeder in their garden. They had wonderful binoculars we used on a bird walk, which showed me birds clearer and closer than I'd ever seen. They knew what birds to look out for and had tape recordings of specific bird calls that brought the birds to nearby bushes. It was impossible to be around them and not start to love birds. As I've gotten older, I've realised pretty much everything and everyone is like that. Premier League football is boring if you don't pay close attention to it, but if you follow every detail, it can be engrossing. I didn't think much of textiles, but after spending an afternoon weaving in Laos, I loved it. Pretty much everything has the thing they're deeply interested in. The physicist Richard Feynman said: "Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough." And here's another similar sentiment from the writer Henry Miller: "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." It reminds me that just because I don't see something as interesting now doesn't mean that it's not or that people who are into it are somehow weird. Everyone's a geek about something. And that's wonderful.
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Investments are like building blocks

Individual investments, assembled together, make a portfolio, that is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
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