Well, according to Keith Haring, who was a bit good at drawing:

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

I wrote a post a couple of years back singing the praises of good old fashioned pen and paper. And it seems the more advanced our technology the more we still continue to crave the lo-fi. We’re drowning under an onslaught of words, pixels and bytes, torrents of bits of digital information cascading through our lifestream every day. And so it seems we seek solace in the comfort of the old-fashioned, always reliable, analogue drawing lovingly crafted with paper and pen.

One of my favourite sessions at last year’s SXSWi was Visual Notetaking where such luminaries as Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, Dave Gray and Austin Kleon shared their tips on the whys and hows of sketchnotes to capture and visualise information:

I’m seething with envy and bursting with admiration for those talented individuals who can put this into practice. You’ve got professional outfits like Scriberia, who did a phenomenal job capturing everything at Good for Nothing:

And it’s an utter delight to see beautiful sketchnotes appear which capture events you’ve been to, like Eva Lottchen’s notes from The Story 2011:

The charm of hand-drawings is everywhere. Of course it never went away, but the more we embrace screens and gestural interfaces the more stark the contrast with good old pen and paper.

Also from The Story were some of my favouritest slides EVER, from Mary Hamilton on Zombie LARPs. If there’s ever a way to un-PowerPoint PowerPoint it’s hand drawn cartoons of zombies, surely?

xkcd is one of the most successful webcomics around mainly because it’s fucking funny. But there’s no denying the stick figure drawings add no small degree of charm to the whole shebang.

Music videos too. I’m biased because it’s a video from one of my absolute most-loved musicians, and one of my favourite tracks from 2010, but I find the video for From Above (a collaboration, like the rest of the brilliant album Lonely Avenue, with Nick Hornby, who wrote the lyrics)

It might be bordering on twee, in fact, a lot of this might be unequivocally slap bang in the midst of twee, but I find it utterly charming and a really refreshing antidote to the rest of my highly rendered and pixellated life. They feel genuine, personal and real. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but more often than not I’d take a scribbled, lovingly crafted hand-drawing over a relentlessly over-optimised Photoshopped picture…