Imagine if you could connect the ideas in your notes using visuals. That’s the vision of Zsolt Viczian, author of the new book, Sketch Your Mind: Nurture a Playful & Creative Brain. In it, he presents a complete visual system for thinking clearly, capturing insights and building a connected knowledge base.
He is the developer of the Excalidraw plugin for the Obsidian personal knowledge base application and has been conducting visual thinking workshops, which is where he honed his thinking about visuals and knowledge.
I recently interviewed Zsolt to learn more about Sketch Your Mind and how it can help you become a better visual thinker.
Chuck Frey: Linear, text-based note-taking is more popular than ever today. But you believe it’s not enough. Why is that?
Zsolt Viczian: Because it’s not how we’re wired to think.
Our ancestors didn’t survive on the savanna by reading bullet-point lists. They navigated space, spotted patterns, tracked prey, avoided danger. We’re fundamentally spatial-visual creatures. Text came much later—a brilliant cognitive hack, yes, but still a workaround. Using it as our primary thinking tool is like trying to play a graphic-heavy video game on a machine with no GPU. It’ll run—but slowly, clumsily, and with constant overload.
Text became dominant after Gutenberg, not because it was better, but because it was easier to reproduce. Schools doubled down on this—teaching us to read and write, but not to visualize or map ideas. The habit stuck. Even though we now live in a world of screens and dynamic media, our note-taking still mimics the printing press.
Ironically, the next big leap—AI—is again reinforcing this imbalance. Large language models are trained on vast corpuses of text, so tools that lean into language get better results. But that’s a limitation of the machines, not of the mind. Visual thinking isn’t just compatible with how we’re built—it’s optimized for it. It lets us think faster, see clearer, and make connections we’d miss in a wall of words.
We live in the 21st century, but still take notes like it’s the 15th.
Frey: Why is visual thinking more important than ever today?
Viczian: Because the world is more complex—and more visual—than ever before. But here’s the key: it’s also more feasible. Gutenberg’s limitations no longer apply. We have tools that let us blend text and visuals in real-time, in dynamic environments.
Visual thinking helps us not just understand ideas, but see how they connect. It sparks intuition, reveals gaps, and invites play. And in the age of AI, productivity is no longer our competitive edge—machines will win that race. What sets us apart is imagination, playfulness, and human creativity. Visual thinking is the trigger for all of that.
Frey: What types of challenges can visual thinking help people with?
Viczian: The list is long, but three stand out:
Overwhelm: Visual thinking gives you an intuitive way to offload and organize complexity. Instead of burying ideas in lists or folders, you lay them out in space—where structure and meaning become visible. Visuals also compress information, improving the effective bit rate of your notes—the amount of insight your brain can absorb in a second. Most note-taking advice focuses on how to make notes. I care more about how you use them. How do you help your future self find what matters, fast?
Distraction: Visuals keep your hands, eyes, and brain engaged. They anchor your focus—especially when sharing ideas with others. People forget bullet points. They remember pictures. A single sketch can carry more weight than a wall of text.
Creativity and intuition: This is where visuals shine. They help you find connections your logical brain is blind to. Visual thinking gives shape to gut feelings and fuzzy thoughts. It surfaces ideas you didn’t know you had. And it lets you communicate them with surprising clarity.
This isn’t about abandoning text. It’s about thinking ambidextrously—with logic and intuition, with lines and with space. Visual thinking isn’t a shortcut. It’s a more complete way to think.
Frey: What made you decide to write this book?
Viczian: Honestly? It started as a challenge. I wanted to see if I could write and self-publish a book in six weeks. In the end, it took closer to six months—starting in January and releasing June 15—but I learned a lot in the process.
But the real reason runs deeper. This book has been inside me for decades. I spent 25 years waiting for someone to build the visual thinking tools I wanted. Eventually I stopped waiting. That led to developing the Excalidraw and ExcaliBrain plugins for Obsidian.
Sketch Your Mind is my manifesto. I wrote it to make visual thinking approachable and systemizable.
Frey: Is the book an outgrowth of your visual thinking workshops and your visual PKM YouTube channel?
Viczian: Absolutely. The book is a distillation of what I’ve taught, tested, and refined through my workshops and videos. But it’s not a replacement. The book is the why and the tool-agnostic how. The workshop is the practice: community, feedback and hands-on exercises to build fluency.
Think of the book as the compass—and the workshop as the journey.
Frey: Many people, when they hear the word “sketch,” they have a visceral reaction and immediately say, “I can’t do that.” But you make the point that you don’t have to be good at it to be effective with it. Please explain.
Viczian: Few people draw worse than I do. Hand me a whiteboard and I freeze. My stick figures are awkward, my arrows wobbly, and I still hesitate before drawing a simple box.
But here’s what I’ve learned: visual thinking has nothing to do with being “good at drawing.” It’s about structuring ideas in space. That could be a mind map, a concept map, or just moving thoughts around visually. You can do it with icons, shapes, even just words laid out differently. No artistic talent required.
In Excalidraw, I “cheat” constantly—by tracing images, reusing elements, or relying on simple icon libraries. I’ve also built tools to help others do the same. Drawing skill is not a prerequisite for visual thinking. We all started life by scribbling before we learned to write—school just trained that habit out of us.
Most of us never got the chance to develop visual fluency. We were taught that writing was serious, and drawing was play. But when you start exploring visual thinking again, you’ll realize the power you’ve been missing. This isn’t about going back—it’s about moving forward with a new dimension of thought.
Don’t aim for beautiful. Aim for useful. Because in visual thinking, usefulness is beautiful.
Frey: I saw your video about writing this book in just 6 weeks using Obsidian and Excalidraw. How did you use those tools to organize your thinking, outline and write the book?
Viczian: Let me be honest—I didn’t start from a blank page.
I had a rich base to build on:
- A 200-page transcript from my 12.5-hour self-paced course
- Blog posts and transcripts from over 200 YouTube videos
- Years of accumulated sketches and visual frameworks
I used AI tools heavily—not to automatically write the book, but to structure it. I had AI summarize transcripts, cluster themes, and even generate concept maps I could rearrange visually. That gave me a fast way to map the landscape of what I already knew.
From there, Obsidian became my thinking engine—I crosslinked ideas, layered drafts, and surfaced past insights. Excalidraw gave me the canvas to see the big picture. I rewrote and re-sketched nearly everything, over and over, following a visual-first, feedback-driven loop.
One of my favorite tools was an AI-generated audiobook of my chapters. I’d listen during commutes, experiencing the book from a different angle. It helped me spot awkward phrasing, unclear logic, or missing flow—then I’d tweak it one layer at a time.
It was fast, but not rushed. Iterative, not linear. And visual at every step.
Frey: Who is your ideal audience for Sketch Your Mind and how will they benefit from reading it?
Viczian: This is not a book about Obsidian or Excalidraw. It’s tool-agnostic.
It’s for anyone who wants to think more clearly, spark deeper connections, and tap into their creativity. If you care about slow productivity—the kind that leads to insight, not just output—this is for you.
I had three reader personas in mind:
- Text-first thinkers who want more than digital notebooks full of disconnected thoughts
- Would-be visual thinkers who feel blocked by “I can’t draw” (You can—and it’s not about art.)
- Visual creatives who sketch but don’t yet link or reuse their sketches. I want to show them the compounding power of modular, reusable visual notes.
They’ll all find practical ways to turn ideas into structured, visual knowledge.
Frey: How can visuals spark creativity, reveal connections and grow with you?
Viczian: Visuals are like an extra dimension of thought.
Talking to others, writing, feeling—those are all valid modes. But spatial-visual thinking taps something different. It connects to ideas you sense but can’t yet say. It reveals what’s missing. It sparks questions. It lets you feel structure.
And it creates a powerful feedback loop. When you look at your own sketches later, you don’t just recall content—you recall how you were thinking. That kind of reflective loop is hard to replicate in text.
Frey: One of the concepts you talk about in your work is to treat ideas like Lego blocks. What do you mean by that?
Viczian: LEGO is about modularity and reuse. That’s exactly how I approach visual thinking.
When I create visual notes, I don’t redraw everything from scratch—I reuse icons, layouts, and building blocks I’ve used before. This speeds up the process, yes, but more importantly, it enables serendipity. In Obsidian-Excalidraw, visuals are linked rather than embedded. So when I reuse an icon, I’m not just reusing a shape—I’m reusing an idea. That visual block becomes a navigable connection. I can follow it and suddenly find myself in another part of my system where the same concept came up. That’s where unexpected connections start to emerge—something you rarely get from plain text or tags.
I tell a story in the book about a time when I participated in a simple LEGO exercise. Each of us was handed a bag with the exact same seven LEGO bricks. The instruction was: “Build a duck.” We all started building, and within minutes, the room filled with dozens of ducks—each one completely different. Some were tall and skinny, some wide and flat, one even had teeth. Same constraint, same pieces, radically different interpretations.
That moment stayed with me. It revealed how modular building blocks invite creativity—and how every person brings a unique lens to assembling meaning. That’s the essence of LEGO-style visual thinking: treat your ideas as modular, reusable parts. Build fast, remix freely, and let new meaning emerge from what you’ve already created.
Frey: The Sketch Your Mind website makes a distinction between using visual thinking as a tool and as a system. What are the differences?
Viczian: Visuals as a tool means you sketch when you’re stuck. That’s already helpful—it can unlock clarity in moments of confusion.
But visuals as a system means you structure, reuse, and evolve your ideas visually—across time. It becomes how you think, not just something you reach for in a pinch. That shift—from drawing isolated diagrams to building a visual Zettelkasten—is transformative.
A Zettelkasten, or “slip-box,” is a method for linking small, atomic notes into a growing web of ideas. Traditionally it’s text-based, but when applied visually, it turns each sketch or concept into a reusable, connectable node in a living network of thought. You don’t just draw to understand the now—you build a system that helps future-you think better.
Frey: What are the key elements of the visual thinking system that you describe in the book?
Viczian: The book walks you through:
- Hybrid Notes – Flip the page: sketch first, then explain.
- LEGO Thinking – Modularize and reuse visual ideas.
- Idea Integration Board – A single canvas for big, messy thinking.
- Visual Zettelkasten – Turn sketches into a connected web.
- Visual Storytelling – Make your thinking memorable by turning it into narrative.
The Serendipity Machine – Tools to surface unexpected links.
These aren’t just techniques. Together, they form a system that grows with your ideas.
Frey: Where can my readers learn more about your Sketch Your Mind book?
Viczian: Here’s where to start:
- Book website – Sketch Your Mind
- Behind-the-scenes Vlog – Sketch Your Mind Playlist
- PDF overview – The Sketch Your Mind Promise
- Workshop & community – Visual Thinking Workshop
The book launches June 15. You can pre-order now—and join us for the Zoom launch party!
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