Have you ever noticed how easy it is for our brains to overlook the familiar?

A speech bubble remains a speech bubble, until you unlock its hidden potential through a simple yet powerful technique. In our daily lives, we encounter symbols that have become almost second nature to us.

Cliché symbols serve their purpose, but over time, they become background noise in our visual landscape.

Our brains have a remarkable ability to filter out the commonplace.

Imagine for a moment, though, that you have the power to disrupt this pattern. That you can give a new life to the most ordinary symbol.


It all begins with a single question:

"Can I use it in other ways?"

This simple question holds the potential to be a game-changer in how we perceive and utilize symbols. It invites us to step beyond the boundaries of convention, prompting a fresh exploration of possibilities.

Suddenly, that speech bubble is no longer limited to its traditional role. It becomes a canvas for c...

 One of the most common mistakes in visual thinking is making visual maps or sketchnotes in which everything we draw has the same size.

A couple of years ago, a video by Dave Gray reminded me of the way the Egyptians represented their gods, and this is a great tip because most visual maps fail due to the lack of hierarchical levels. This means that when you apply visual thinking through a map or a sketchnote and all the drawings have the same size; we communicate that everything has the same importance. If everything has the same visual importance, it will be difficult to attract attention to those important parts of your map.

That's why the Egyptian perspective could help with hierarchy in your visual thinking.

The main characteristic is that Egyptian figures were depicted of sizes based on importance and not on their distance from the sculptor's perspective. For instance, the Pharaoh would be depicted as the largest figure in a wall no matter where he was situated, and a greater G...