Learning things from other visual arts is always essential to enrich our visual thinking. So that's why today we will learn from movies, specifically from a tremendous director, Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock pioneered visual rules in cinema, which I will show you today.

There are some specific techniques he invented that we can apply to our visual thinking to make our messages more visually compelling.

RELY ON VISUALS, NOT TEXT

Very few people know that Hitchcock, in his beginnings, made some silent films.  Because, in that period, there was no voice track, these films showed dialogue with printed words on the screen that interrupted the sequence flow.

That's where Hitchcock learned to tell the stories with the camera to minimize the number of titles that would interrupt the scene.

He used to say this

We should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise.

How do you apply that to your visual thinking?

Add text to your sketchnotes only when it's...