Buro BRAND 2021 reflections
Leestijd 6 minuten
Door Mahana Tuimaka |
Where we look back on a hectic, inspirational, creative and bold year!
New Year means time for ‘oliebollen’, champagne, looking back but also looking forward! And that’s what we’ve done. Even if 2021 has been a year with a lot of challenges and required patience, we’ve accomplished a lot together here at Buro BRAND. When the pandemic offered challenges, we faced those challenges and gobbled them up, grabbed opportunities, adjusted our strategies and perhaps even ourselves. In the end, things have only became more fun. And that’s the good thing of change: it’s difficult, but after doing it, you feel better, you’ve improved and had a lot of fun doing it! And to show everyone what we’ve accomplished the past year we made a visual report!
Behold! Our annual visual report!✏️
Click here for an enlarged version of the report.
The visual speaks for itself, but we still would like to shine some light on the different illustrations!
Masters in virtual facilitation
We’ve been playing with the idea of working on a more international scale. We’ve already translated our books into a lot of languages, make visuals for international companies. And we had been playing with the idea of becoming a better at virtual facilitation for a long time. Then the pandemic came along and gave us that last push! In a world where everyone has to work virtually, and has the need for virtual facilitation, we’ve mastered our own quirky, fun and impactful way of doing it! Staying true to our colours, we’ve learned to bring playfulness and visual facilitation into your virtual meetings and collaborations!
Visual Thinking Event 
Visual thinking is an amazing and effective tool at work. It cuts to the chase, involves partners and colleagues, brings in creativity and many, many more things. But as soon as you start working and thinking visually you’ll notice that the possibilities are nearly endless. You untangle one piece and before you know it you’re launched into a galaxy of choices and opportunities. And this is where we wanted to help out!
We’ve hosted Visual Thinking events before, but never virtual and on a scale this large! From the 4th till October 15th we hosted our first virtual Buro BRAND’s Visual Thinking Event to help everyone around the world, who’s trying to figure out what they can and want to do with Visual Thinking, beginners and experienced people. For two whole weeks participants joined our daily virtual workshops. A team of international experts and team members guided them through the different uses of Visual Thinking and let them explore the visual thinking universe. And now that we crave more of this, we’ll surely be back with more events in the future? To be continued…
Read more about it here
New Modules Added to our online academy
We’ve increased our online opportunities! We offer online courses via the platform Teachable. And we’ve added 2 new online courses, in Dutch, and we plan to increase our online offer the coming years. So stay tuned, this year we also plan to upload the English versions and new trainings!
Check our online courses on teachable
New courses
We kept listening to the needs and desires of our customers and the market, and this year we also launched 3 new courses to follow at our Academy, it has been very exciting to develop and start giving new trainings for us. Which one would you like to follow this year?
We plan to be the most rounded provider, so tell us when you have a desire for a specific new training!
Check all our trainings here
Framework 5 Visual Thinking Types
We’ve seen thousands of people be inspired by the power of Visual Thinking time and time again over the last 15 years. But we also saw a disconcerting trend: Though people are excited about the opportunities Visual Thinking creates, only a few know how to apply its value in a practical sense and were left with a lot of questions. We racked our brains on this for quite a while. Talking to people in the Visual Thinking field and in the corporate world. Having lots of talks with our training participants and eventually locking ourselves up for a while (a positive side effect of a global pandemic) and we came up with a direction in which to find some more answers!
We have created a model that covers all the possible usages of Visual Thinking. The Buro BRAND’s Five Visual Thinking Types Framework. This powerful framework will help you choose which way you want your visual thinking journey to go. We think this is a comprehensive theory on how Visual Thinking can and should be used.
The main idea is that we wanted to provide guidelines to educate ourselves and everybody else on how to become a Visual Thinking master (nothing new for you here). We had to develop some sort of framework of what Visual Thinking means in a business context. Presenting our philosophy in this way can really help to get our message across. What message you ask? We haven’t made that clear enough yet? Ok, one more time:
EVERYBODY SHOULD BE ABLE TO THINK, WORK, COLLABORATE AND COMMUNICATE VISUALLY!
The Buro BRAND Five Visual Thinking Types are not meant to put you in a box. It is a way to give you a sense of direction in your visual journey. It is also not meant as a framework where you are either this or that. Look at it as different types of hats, where you can switch between hats, depending on the type of skills or knowledge of Visual Thinking you want to apply.
Craving to know more about the Five Visual Thinking Types?
Read about the Five Visual Thinking Types here
Co-creative intake process
Don’t freak out when we suddenly ask you to start drawing 😉
Innovated our project approach
Co-creation and the process is just as important as the endresult. This year we worked on innovating, strengthening and finetuning our creative processes and collaboration with our clients and partners. Helping our expectant client, standing in front of this black box which is called the ‘creative process’, and taking them along an enriching experience and way of working, to create their ‘praatplaat’, animation or other visual expression.
In the end, we’ve had a pretty good year. And many of these milestones act as the steppingstones to our new ambitions and goals of 2022. So we’ve started on our new years resolution with a bang.
What are your (visual) resolutions for 2022?
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