Who are visual thinkers?  Anybody who uses any of the visual arts for learning or communication.  Easy said, hard to picture.
So, we’d like to enlist the community to help us out.  How would you picture the community?  Which groups are involved?  What roles are involved?  How are the groups related to each other?  What’s the difference between visualization approaches, applications, and those who apply the methods?  Where do vendors fit in?  Practitioners?  Contractors?  Corporate employees?  …

We’re excited to announce our newest sponsors for VizThink ‘08, Xplane and Digital Asset Deployment (D.A.D.). 
D.A.D. is a business incubator, based in Madrid, Spain.  They focus on community & Internet-based businesses. 

Xplane creates information-driven communications.  They use visualization to convey complex ideas, processes, and services to improve decisions and speed action.
In the next few weeks we’ll be launching our community and event wikis.  You’ll be able to check out these sites for much more detail on …

By popular demand, we’ve extended our early registration discount until October 24th.  Many of you, especially our corporate customers requested an extension in order to allow enough time to get the appropriate approvals.  So, we thought we’d extend it for everybody.
Also, be sure to check the website and blog frequently over the next several days.  Many changes are on their way such as:
- More detailed content information
- More exciting new facilitators
- Information on our opening …

…3D to be specific.  Our goal is to create a community of people from all forms of the visual arts for learning and communication, and 3D is no exception.  There is a lot of research going on in virtual worlds and serious games.  Does 3D matter?  If so, when does it matter?  What can be done with 3D that can’t be done in other mediums.

We’ll have several exciting announcements in the upcoming weeks from this new and growing portion of the visual …

While we’ve certainly been talking a lot about the conference, the goal of VizThink is to create a global, sustainable community of visual thinkers with the conference as a launch. 
However, lots of community work is already been done at a grass roots level, and our next facilitator, Ryan Coleman, is a great example.

In his role as CTO & co-founder of Toronto based Clay Tablet Technologies it would seem Ryan Coleman is far removed from his days in …

We’re really excited about how the content is shaping up for VizThink ‘08.  We’ve got some of the industries greatest thinkers coming together to share what they’ve been working on.  However, it’s not all theory and research.  In fact most of the content will be oriented around small group discussion, practical experience, and, wherever possible, hands on practice.

Daniel Rose is a perfect example of this approach.  He is a consultant and facilitator for Bell Canada in Toronto, …

We can’t tell you how excited we are about this next announcement…Scott McCloud is going to be facilitating at VizThink ‘08!!!  Scott has written several books that are ostensibly about comics, however, in our opinion, have more to do with visualization, communication, and especially storytelling.  His books should be required reading for anybody in learning or communications.

What’s best?  He applies his own theories to his own writing.  The books are written in a graphic novel form …

Christine Martell adds another interesting dimension and approach to visualization and facilitation.  Sometimes, people feel intimidated with creative activities like drawing.  While using photos avoids that stress and allows people to still tap their inner creativity. The photos are compiled and organized by the participants to creatively describe their situation and solve their problems.  We’re excited to have her have her demonstrate this interesting approach using real world problems from the participants.

She is in charge of the creative path and …

We often talk about the use of visual language and the ability of visuals to communicate.  Neil Cohn has taken that to heart.  He believes that like spoken and written languages, there is also a visual language with structure and grammar.  His current research focuses on how this language is depicted in comics.  We’re excited to have him at the conference to lead discussions on this interesting area of research.

Neil has recently been gaining attention …

Probably one of the most maligned yet most used forms of business communication is the presentation.  Since the days of Harvard Graphics 1.0 over 20 years ago, the power to make presentations moved from the professional presentation designer into the hands of users everywhere.  As with all things new (remember the blink tag in HTML?), with lots of new power comes lots of scary implementations.  However, presentations don’t have to be bad, and it’s not …