As the year draws to a close, I like taking time to reflect on the past 12 months. One fun way to encapsulate these memories is through the TopNine website, which curates the most liked posts from your Instagram feed into a visually appealing grid. If you would like to create your own grid for 2023, you can find the TopNine website here.

I recently had my own TopNine grid for 2023 generated, and I’ll use this visual snapshot to take your through some of the highlights of my year.

1: In 2023, I initiated 'Throwback Thursday,' revisiting and sharing older sketchnotes captured at various conferences and events throughout the years. This is one if them taken at a Scotviz meetup in 2021 featuring Dan Roam, who shared insights into his storytelling approach.

2: This is a reflection drawing from the final live session of my Pragmatic Sketching Masterclass. Me students and I use a simple visual structure to reflect on our journey together and to imagine what our future sketching journey might look like. For those intrigued by the reflection template, a detailed guide and downloadable template can be found on my blog.

In 2023, I had the privilege of conducting the masterclass twice, once in German in spring and again in English in fall. Anticipate a repeat in 2024, with the German edition commencing on February 5th. Join the waitlist to be notified as soon as sign-up opens: Waitlist English | Waitlist Deutsch.

3: A sketchnote from a talk by Anna Ginsburg at the Beyond Tellerrand conference in 2019, an event that consistently blends design, coding, and creative themes. I’ve spoken at and attended this conference several times. Marc (who organises the conference) is great at putting together just the right mix and creating a welcoming and inviting vibe throughout the two days. If you can, you should attend one of the BT conferences next year.

4: My prompt list for the Vizthink version of Inktober. By now there are many flavours of this yearly drawing challenge and this year I contributed my own. Lots of you joined in to explore a different emotion each day. It was one the highlights of my year to browse through the posts every day. Oh, and creating a series of drawings featuring my little person-and-bear team was really satisfying as well.

5: All of my Viztober drawings in one grid. If you want to see the drawings in detail, you can either hop over to my Instagram and scroll back through my feed or have a look at this blog post I created about the whole Viztober challenge.

6: A celebratory moment in November 2022 when my Domestika course on Sketchnoting reached 10,000 sign-ups only 4 months after launch. And the course continued to do well and to date over 17.000 of you have bought the course. I can’t quite grasp these kinds of figures but what makes everything tangible for me are the beautiful reviews that keep flowing in and that make me smile on a weekly basis :)

7: Another sketchnote from Beyond Tellerrand Conference 2017, capturing Yuko Shimizu's wisdom on the ten things she learned since art school.

8: A drawing from a feedback session during the Pragmatic Sketching Masterclass, discussing the intricacies of drawing portraits. For me (and for many of my students) this is one of the trickiest topics, just because we are so damn good at looking at faces which makes catching likeness quite difficult. In the class we learn to look at proportions, shapes and angles of the facial features in a structured way and then move to translating them into simplified drawings.

As drawing faces and portraits is such an interesting subject in itself, I am also offering it as a separate course called Pragmatic Portraits Masterclass.

9: Concluding the TopNine journey with a sketchnote from a 2017 talk on AI in design. I sketchnoted quite a few early talks on AI and it is interesting to look back at people’s take on the development from 6 or 7 years ago.. I’ve only been dabbling with AI for a few smaller things but it’s impressive what it can do and it’ll probably just accelerate from here. And in the meantime, we can focus on being humans.

And that’s a wrap. Besides work and social media, there were also loads of beautiful, interesting, joyful, calm, sad, emotional, surprising and exciting moments that I just stored as memories in my head :)

Thank you for looking back on the last 12 months with me. Let’s see what 2024 will have in store.

This was my 2023