👋 Hi all!
This is the first supplementary edition of Unpacked, Six Sides, where we ask some of our favourite creators six questions about how they make content on the internet.
They’ll be in your inbox every other month, and first up we have Jono Hey, the author of Big Ideas Little Pictures, and the mind behind Sketchplanations.
Read on if you want to know what he learnt from Leonardo Da Vinci, how he measures creative success beyond the algorithm, and the one piece of content from last year he wishes he’d made himself.
1. Hi Jono! Thanks for joining us. You have used the analogy of clarifying a concept as 'cutting cubes out of fog', taking something blurry and giving it structure. Which specific sketch felt like your most difficult 'cut', where the concept was so intangible that finally finding the right visual felt like a breakthrough?
The one I worked on for some time, and am most happy with the result, is the sketch of the story of the three bricklayers. The challenge wasn’t that the story itself was abstract. It was finding a way to represent it that did everything I wanted and, I hope, felt leaps and bounds better than other visuals, which took a lot of pondering and experimenting.
I’m not the first to visualise this story, but most existing visuals use three separate clip-art illustrations for the three parts. That felt boring, linear, and cheesy rather than expansive and inspiring. The three stages of the story effectively zoom out: one person is laying bricks, (zoom out) another is building a wall, (zoom out) and the third is building a cathedral. Drawing each equally so you can see all three means a tiny cathedral. What I finally figured out was using insets for the first two scenes, allowing the third, inspiring scene to take up the full picture and do it justice.
Another that felt like an aha moment is the sketch for Hanlon’s Razor. It’s a single visual that tells a linear story and a rather abstract point, through two perspectives. The corner of a building separates the two characters and invites misinterpretation. I think that one worked well, too, and took a fair bit of head-scratching to find the right example and layout to do it justice and keep it simple.
Building a good framework is like cutting cubes out of fog — Larry Keeley
2. There's lots of talk about 2026 being the year of analogue. You've worked in both mediums. In what ways has moving from analogue notebooks to digital tools changed your creative process?
I often look back at my physical notebooks wistfully. And there are elements of the results that I still prefer. But going digital has led to a higher-quality product for me.
I use a physical notebook at times in my current process—usually for the roughest of drafts of a sketch. For quickly testing several directions, it’s still the best method. And I also don’t get distracted by messages.
Being digital probably reduces overall variation, as it takes me a little longer to sketch variations, and they’re not as good. But once I have a direction I’m happy with, being able to duplicate, edit and vary designs is a massive benefit for turning a good concept into a great drawing.
It takes me a lot longer in digital. When I worked in my notebooks, I’d draw it, and that was it—done. With digital, I can keep tweaking and tidying and adjusting endlessly. I think it makes it better, but it sometimes makes me enjoy it less. The permanent nature of pens and paper is a blessing at times.
3. You admired Leonardo da Vinci for his polymath approach to creativity. Beyond those who use visuals, are there creators whose work exists in a completely different medium (like music or data) but whose underlying system has inspired you or influenced your own creative process?
I enjoy making music, and I love deconstructing a piece of music, just as you might think about how someone approached a drawing. Music is so different, but when I find music I like, I often try to identify the layers in the track and the ways the artist added them to create the emotion I feel as a listener.
Hans Zimmer is an example of someone who creates tremendous emotion in different ways. Just as you can keep a music track or a drawing sparse and simple, you can also apply layers and colour and get across something different. I also find music notation and software fascinating. How to capture, in an enduring way, a vision of an idea you see in your head is, in some ways, comparable to how to capture and refine a musical thought I might find myself humming or whistling. That’s something Da Vinci thought about, too.
4. In a world obsessed with growth and the pressure to 'feed the machine', how has your relationship with your worst-performing sketches (from a metric perspective) evolved?
I don’t use terms like worst-performing—because I’m not typically doing the sketches so they perform. I’m more likely to think about them as ‘under-appreciated’ or ‘not yet recognised’. I know not all my work is of the same quality, but I’ve found over and over that the ‘reception’ to a sketch is dependent on so many factors. Often, a sketch that nobody seemed to notice, when reposted years later, can be really popular. Other times, when I post a sketch, nothing happens, but when someone else posts it, it can get a lot of attention. So I try not to look too hard at performance in a traditional content marketing sense, as so much of it is random and unrelated to the quality of the work.
This helps me keep making what I think is worthwhile, and maybe, someday, others will see what I see in it.
5. As you approached 1,000 sketches, you noted that sometimes 'the teacher learns more than the student'. What is the most surprising thing you have learned about yourself by becoming a 'teacher' through your sketches?
I’ve done many different things in my career: engineering, product design, software management, product management, marketing, leadership, entrepreneurship, consulting and others. Recently, I realised that, in some ways, what I’m doing now I have been doing over and over all through my career. I never picked it out as a particular skill, and I didn’t always notice I was good at it, but both explaining and explaining using visuals have come up again and again.
As a simple example, I’ve always been quite good at explaining how to play board games or card games. I’ve got a decent sense for where people are starting from, what they don’t know, and what order is best to share information. I did this in secondary school as part of my Design and Technology project. I did this at University explaining concepts to others while studying, and I did it in my job as a UX designer and later as a product leader. And I do it with Sketchplanations. Learn–explain. Learn–explain. I definitely didn’t realise this pattern until recently.
6. We do an annual jealousy list, the latest example here. What is a recent piece of content you wish you'd made and why?
Last year, the New York Times published an article about Trump and Mt Rushmore: Room for One More on Mount Rushmore? (The President Wants to Know.). The piece includes an incredible mix of animated 3D visuals, storytelling, interviews and factual detail. I grew up when ‘multimedia’ was a term as encyclopedias moved on to the internet. This is an incredible expression of that. One you couldn’t experience the same as a video on YouTube or an article in a paper.
Aside from that, I’m always jealous of the videos by CGP Grey, the visuals from the Pudding, and the way Randall Munroe manages to explain the crux of complex topics while making me laugh at the same time, such as with correlation-causation or significance.
☑️ Thank you for reading!
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