Last night I met a ton of people making innovative things happen, including motion designer and illustrator Erik.*

It turned out we’d both been encouraged by artist-blogger Hugh MacLeod’s Ignore Everybody.  Erik produces some new art everyday for his postitheads stream (I’ve got a couple of these in front of me as I write – a dinosaur wearing 3D glasses and a pirate).  For me MacLeod’s encouragement meant I took on the challenge to blog everyday for a year as long as I can cartoon with this.  (You wondered why there were so many of these things.)

I want to encourage you to doodle, to draw – because you can.

McNair Wilson caught my attention today with his question: ‘Have you ever heard of anyone who dreams in text?’

I know I don’t; do you?

Text follows image.

What particularly caught my attention was the word from which doodle most recently comes:

‘The modern word doodle burst upon the
scene in the 1930s from “dawdle” – meaning
wasting time, being lazy or completing a
task slowly.’**

I connect Wilson’s doodler with Nassim Taleb’s flâneur, who wanders through life in a way which allows for more of the options and possibilities the universe proffers to be noticed.  Drawing not only is our first “literacy,” but also allows us to notice more, remember more, and, I am finding, create more.

McNair Wilson and Erik have just upped the challenge to me to be even more visual.

Warning: if you also take up this challenge, people will think your daft or annoying, a dawdler of idle.

(*You can check out Erik’s great work here.)
(**Apparently, going back to the 17th century doodle was used of a fool or simpleton, from the German dude, meaning “to play.”  This is its sense in the song Yankee Doodle first sung by British troops before the American Revolution.)