In this first episode of season 15, Maggie Appleton shares her career journey from art and anthropology into web design, illustration, and product design for AI research tools that help researchers make sense of information.

Maggie and Mike discuss the interesting challenge of living in the era of AI and large language models — how visual thinkers might look at it now — as a new opportunity rather than something to fear.

Sponsored by Concepts

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Maggie Appleton?
• Maggie's Origin Story
• Maggie's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Maggie
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Maggie's Website
• Maggie on Twitter
• Maggie on LinkedIn
• Maggie on GitHub
• Maggie on Dribble
• Maggie's Mastodon
• Elicit
• Indie Web

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• A5 Clipboard
• A5 looseleaf paper
• Uni-ball Signo Pen
• iPad
• Procreate
• Super Whisper

Tips

1. Explore GIFs.
2. Play with Midjourney or DALL E.
3. Explore interactive essays or long-term visual essays.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey, everyone. It's Mike and I'm here with Maggie Appleton. Maggie, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you.

Maggie Appleton: Hello. Thank you for having me.

MR: Yeah, it's quite an honor. Been a big fan of your work, following your gardening site. It's not about gardening, but it's about information gardening. I heard you on my friend Jorge's podcast and really became fascinated and thought you might be a really good candidate for the Sketchnote Army podcast because you operate visually. And, you know, part of what I'm trying to do is continuing to push the boundaries of who we speak with that is more visual oriented and not so much sketchnoting.

In that, I have the sense that as we stretch ourselves, we might see ideas in other people's work that's outside of our normal work that could influence our work and take us in new directions. So that's my drive to continually expand the footprint of who we speak with and bringing interesting people to listen to. So with all that tell us who you are and what you do, Maggie.

MA: Sure. Well, I'll say I do have a history of sketchnoting, but I currently work as a product designer for a company called Elicit, spelled with an "E", like to elicit something not to be elicit which confuse me. But we are using language models, the new kind of things like ChatGPT and other models similar to that to help scientists and researchers speed up the literature review process, which is usually a very manual kind of a text, reading 10,000 papers to synthesize what science currently says about a particular topic.

And so, my current work, I feel like is a little different to my historical work that I think probably relates more to what listeners of this podcast are interested in. But I was an illustrator and a sketchnoter at conferences, and for years have been making visual essays online, which I still do, which are filled with animations and illustrations and handdrawn stuff. And I traditionally trained as an illustrator. So maybe that side of things would be more interesting. I definitely think that all ties into my current work more as an interface and product designer, but it's definitely slightly different to what I used to do.

MR: And especially too with all the discussion and, you know, top of mind of ChatGPT and these AI tools that are integrating every place, right. If you see it in Microsoft Word, you know it has arrived, right. I think that intersection is really fascinating. And probably there's concerns, you know, from sketchnoters or illustrators, like, "When will I be replaced by some AI?" I mean, right now, I think it's limited, but I think that that could change. So it might be interesting to talk a little bit about that.

MA: Yeah. Yeah. I think that that whole issue of like, "Well, how does this affect working illustrators and designers?" I'm certainly concerned about, and also yeah, just how we relate to them, I think it's a sort of controversial topic in a certain way because it's so loaded with people's livelihoods and emotions around what it means for humans to create versus machines. But it's worth getting into that stuff because it's fascinating as someone who used to make visuals and now is playing with these tools to make visuals. I mean, you can't ignore it, you know?

MR: Yeah, yeah. It has to be discussed to some degree. That would be fun to get into if you'd like to.

MA: Mm-hmm.

MR: I'm really fascinated about your origin story. We of course, always kick off the show with this so that we have a sense of where you came from and how you ended up where you are as both informational and also aspirational for us to say, you know, "If she can do it, I can do it too." Right. That's the kind of sense that I get a lot of times from these. Why don't you let us know how you got—you can go all the way back to when you were a little girl drawing with crayons or whatever you did. If you wanna go that far back, you certainly can.

MA: Sure. I suppose it does go that far back in that I was always obsessed with drawing and art and visuals as a child. It first turned to just, you know, art class being my favorite thing and winning terrible art competitions as a child. Although I did once win one by tracing drawings out of books. Won the award and felt like no guilt, but I didn't understand that that was maybe not something you should do.

So I was encouraged very young to be like, "Oh, you are visual design kind of arty person." But I was also interested in other things. I didn't go to art school in the end, although I maybe regretted that a bit later. I retrained later on in more visual stuff. But I was also really into politics and I found cultural anthropology in high school and loved that. So I ended up studying that for my undergraduate degree, but always was doing design stuff on the side and I would say web tech stuff.

I learned HTML and CSS on Neo pet at age 13, and was very lucky to have parents who were programmers. So they gave me laptops and let me roll free on them. I had a lot of liberty to grow up in the 90s on the web. You know, just immersed in the early web culture. But up to now, I'm able to be both a designer and a developer as a hybrid, and it goes back to just getting into that stuff very early.

So I think I had a lot of support across lots of visual domains growing up. Then after I graduated from university, I'd also been, again, building websites on the side, designing logos for people, getting into photography. I was still doing all this in side hustle, you know, how you make money in high school and college.

This will sound weird, I didn't know that was a profession, like a serious one. I didn't know you could be an illustrator or a graphic designer. I had never heard of that as a discipline. I didn't have any designers I knew. Nobody at my school really knew anything about design as a career. So I graduated knowing well, I have no idea how to make money. I waitress for a bit and I had this anthropology degree and was just a bit lost. But then was like, "Well, I'll make websites for people because they'll pay me for that until I figure out how to get a real job." I never got a real job. I just did freelance web design—

MR: That's great.

MA: - from my early 20s onwards. Then started working for digital agencies and creative agencies and realized there was something called interface design, and realized people got paid to do illustration and design full time. Was l