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.

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Learn something new in a sketch each Sunday

Recent sketches

Learn the Kano model

I regularly find the Kano model a useful way to think about design. Kano highlights 3 different types of benefits your product can provide: Threshold These support the minimum requirements of the product. Like the brakes on a car, you’re not going to buy one without them, and yet no matter how good you make them they are unlikely to thrill people about the car. But if you do a bad job, people will sure notice. Performance these benefits are appreciated the more you deliver on them. For a car this may be acceleration or fuel efficiency. The better you make them the happier people will be, and the worse they are the least satisfied they’ll be. Delighters these are the fun benefits that get people to love a product, but if you only had delighters you wouldn’t have a product. For instance, if you car is slow, not fuel efficient and the brakes don’t work, it doesn’t matter if it has the best stereo on the planet, for almost everyone it just won’t help. But if your car has serviceable brakes, reasonable acceleration and fuel efficiency, and the best stereo on the planet then it could really delight.
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Adjust your daily caffeine intake

I regularly make half-caf coffee. I think there’s a gap in the market. Why is coffee so binary?
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Childhood is not a race

4 Insights from Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn. Childhood is not a race. Punishments and rewards are 2 sides of the same coin — and both are unproductive. Love is not a scarce commodity that must be rationed. Move from "doing to" to "working with".
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Solve the 9-dot problem

Seth Godin did a recent post about the 9-dot problem that explains more about it, albeit not in as interesting a way.
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Cut an onion into teeny pieces

Various informants have since told me that cutting horizontally first helps keep it together better as you’re cutting, and that cutting this way first helps keep the tears away longer. I’d probably vote ease of cutting and reverse the order here.
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