BLOG AND RESOURCES


Bird's eye view photo of Didier Gallon scribing

Graphic Facilitator: Didier Gallon

Where would we (and the world) be without Didier Gallon? Artist, actor, and all-around Visioneer, Didier is Starfish Taylor’s veteran graphic facilitator and unfaltering atmosphere boosting aficionado. He’s our ‘satellite’ mainstay and estimable creative performer, who has built many bridges between the paths he’s walked and the industries he’s traversed. Growing up around Paris, he naturally took the route of the [eclectic] artist, (more on that later): a route that has taken him to several extreme highs, to some contemplative lows, to numerous continents, and more than once, to the core of his intuition. Although Starfish Taylor may only be a fragment of his story, it is an ongoing chapter that is well worth the read.

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Meeting Hack : Meeting Room Essentials

Meeting Hack: Meeting Room Essentials

When you picture a meeting room, you likely envision a colorless, fluorescent-lit space, a large rectangular table with numerous chairs bordering it, and perhaps a projector hanging from the ceiling for that all-too-familiar PowerPoint presentation – your “standard” meeting room, right? So why do we mention “Meeting Room Essentials” if a meeting room usually comprises of the same things?

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Meeting Hack: Pitfalls Poster

Meeting Hack: How to Avoid Workshop Pitfalls

If you’re organizing a workshop or meeting anytime soon, follow these tips to avoid common workshop pitfalls that waste time and energy.

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Stephanie Corne - Scribing in Tokyo

Graphic Facilitator: Stephanie Corne

Everyone meet Stephanie Corne, a French-born multimedia artist who adds a unique eclecticism to the Starfish Taylor family tree. Stephanie’s story paints a captivating and quite unique portrait that crosses many borders and industries, and traverses several mediums of artistic expression. Her artistic influences range from cartoonists to surrealists to other genre-defying painters and writers—Gaston Lagaffe, Max Ernest, Braque and Picasso to name a few. Today, Stephanie Corne is not only influenced by the works of great writers and painters, but perhaps more astutely by the real interactions she experiences as a graphic facilitator among the actors and innovators of the world economy. Although a Parisian at heart, Stephanie calls New York City her home, where she’s been happily living and creating for the past 24 years.

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Graphic Facilitator: Fernanda de Uriarte

A wearer of many creative hats, Fernanda de Uriarte is hard to categorize. Simply calling her an “artist” – and a gifted one at that – would be an understatement. As a child, she was always creating: painting, drawing, building, designing…surefire signs of an artist, yes. But this early penchant for arts and crafts soon developed into a strong fascination of something more than just art. Her creative spirit became enamored by industrial design. It was in this field that she felt she could excel—engaging her visual mind and artistic panache and channeling it into something more ‘practical’, something more experiential.

Profile of Fernanda de Uriarte

Today, Fernanda fuses her diverse expertise and experiences in the world of Design with her seasoned artistic skillset to offer various services as both a designer and graphic scribe/facilitator. She has joined the ranks of an increasing pool of women and men, artists particularly, and works independently. She loves the work she does and so do we.

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Photo of Tikka Hun graphic scribing.

Graphic Facilitator: Tikka Hun

Polyglot, globetrotter, go-getter, Visioneer, these are just some of the ways one could describe Tikka Hun. Outside of being couth and clever and (quite literally*) down-to-earth, Tikka is also a designer, painter, graphic scribe & facilitator, concept thinker, and landscape designer*.

After 14 years of living abroad, with stints in London, Paris, Brussels, and even parts of Asia, she recently returned to her natal home in Malaysia.  Here, she’s opened up a new branch of Tik-Tak Visual Solutions, widening its breadth from Paris to Kuala Lumpur.

Bridging the gap between vision and vernacular, Tikka offers clients – from corporations to conferences to NGOs – unique visual solutions to contextual challenges.  Her team offers everything from graphic recording to whiteboard animation and even training for those who wish to learn or enhance the art of graphic scribing. So yes, Tikka is living her dream, and it’s a dream we’re lucky enough to be a part of.

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Meeting Hacks Music

Meeting Hack: Using Music as a Tool

Life is a song, a dance, every day a new orchestration, full of new harmonies and rhythms and beats and melodies. Music makes life’s fluctuations less painful, and the mundane routines more manageable. Wouldn’t you agree? So what about music in the workplace? Or, dare I say, integrated into a workshop or meeting??

Music as a Tool

Numerous studies have been conducted about the effect of music on mood and health, and it’s safe to say the effects are mostly good, if not great. At Starfish Taylor, we totally agree.  When it comes to music in the workplace, however, it becomes a question of how music affects one’s productivity. If used without careful consideration and placement, there’s no doubt it can become a distraction and nuisance. But we’re here to show you how music, if integrated appropriately and methodically, is an asset and one of the simplest ways to boost (and not bust) your next workshop or meeting. We believe it’s a tiny detail that can make an immeasurable difference.

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Starfish Taylor Graphic - by Lance Bell

Graphic Facilitator: Lance Bell

Lance Bell is a London-based, wickedly-talented graphic illustrator & visual recorder, who swears by (non-photo) blue pencils and Macintosh computers. The son of a Royal Air Force officer, he saw most of the world before the age of 15 – his nose stuffed in Astérix le Gaulois and Johnny’s Hart’s B.C. Comics, whose composite styles would ultimately influence his own.  

Lance Bell- profile shot

 

Cartoons and comic strips are Lance’s bread and butter. Despite his precocious world travels, he believes “he got more inspiration and direction from the things he read.”  After endless hours reproducing his favorite comics out of books, contributing his own “gag cartoons” to magazines during college, and creating graphics for computer games on home computers (we’re talking pre-Macintosh, folks, circa-Commodore ’64), Lance eventually landed a position at Reuters (now Thomson Reuters), where he helped develop their News Graphics Service, which would be a wholly digital platform – a pioneering operation of its time. 

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Free-Prize-Inside-Icebreaker

Free Prize Inside Icebreaker: Focused Performance Improvement

At the start of any LEAN or training-style workshop, it’s very important to open up the floor to participants and ask them some key questions before launching into the “learning” phase. As a facilitator, doing this allows you to gauge the knowledge levels of participants and ascertain where emphasis should be placed during the course. Read More

Rock Paper Scissors Icebreaker Starfish Taylor

Rock Paper Scissors Icebreaker: Energizing the Masses

Despite the somewhat blurred history of what many see as a juvenile hand game, Rock Paper Scissors has been used for millennia all across the globe. When all other means of reason and rationale fail, Rock Paper Scissors has often proved to be the deus ex machina of bar none decision-making. The truth is, while many think of Rock Paper Scissors as a game of randomness and sheer luck there actually exists quite an index of sophisticated strategy. Unlike a flip of the coin, which relies almost entirely on chance. Read More