1-day in-person training workshop
Advanced Visual Storytelling

Upgrade your business drawing skills and make a greater impact with your clients

Register now

When
11 October 2025

Location
Johannesburg, South Africa 🇿🇦

Price
R3,190 (Earlybird 20% off, 153 days left)

Your clients won’t want to meet without you!

Extract and distill more clarity, meaning and connection from any business content, and boost your value to your team and clients.

A hand-drawn picture of some common elements illustrated in strategy

Drawing skills

Upgrade your drawing from icons to mini-stories

A hand-drawn picture showing insight being extracted from a conversation

Listening skills

Prompts and methods to sort the signal from the noise

A hand-drawn picture of two people showing a visual story on the wall

Storytelling skills

Learn how to communicate in visual narratives

Turn this...

A drawing of a big group of slides

Slides slides slides (text ‘fact-telling’)

  • Too much text - hard to read, let alone connect with and remember
  • Template-driven - optimised for making lots of slides quickly, not driving action effectively
  • Aimed at everyone, not someone - hard for different audiences to relate to

Into this...

A strategy poster, emphasising how succinct and engaging it is

Strategy poster (visual storytelling)

  • Attractive and informative - showing the essence of your message, with just enough detail in text and pictures
  • Outcome-driven - optimised for memorability, shareability, and action, to get business results
  • Audience-specific - whether it’s for the boardroom or the lunchroom, it’s geared to be read and used by specific audiences
A drawing of someone riding a rocket, zooming around a speech balloon saying INSPO!

Looking for INSPIRATION? You’ll find BAGS of it in this training workshop, both from our creative activities AND from your fellow participants.

Here’s what you will learn

  • Draw even the trickiest concepts more confidently and creatively with a range of simple but effective prompts
  • Increase your powers of listening and synthesis to add more strategic value to any meeting or business communication
  • Level-up your lettering skills for more engagement, clarity and meaning
  • Gain valuable feedback on your drawing and visual storytelling from your peers

A group of training workshop participants discussing some drawings they made

Stand out from other consultants

We get what it’s like to be self-employed, wearing all the hats, and doing our best to give value to clients day-in day-out! This immersive 1-day in-person training is scheduled on a Saturday (so you don’t lose business hours), and tailored for soloists:

  • Self-employed consultants
    who want to differentiate their offering and increase their value
  • Trainers and Coaches
    who want to be more of a strategic thought partner to their clients and teams
  • Graphic Recorders and Illustrators
    who want to add more tools and methods to their toolkit

Register now

Draw your way out of these common problems

You and your team don’t have to suffer these problems anymore:

  • Unproductive offsites and other high-stakes meetings, with nothing to show for all the talk
  • Spending way too long making slide decks that are hard to understand and remember
  • Not enough alignment with decision-makers and stakeholders

Weaving the various elements of your business content into a visual narrative makes it much clearer, as well as far more attractive, memorable, and actionable.

Hand-drawn image of problems to do with with badly-done strategy

What others like you say about this training

This was absolutely perfect. Well balanced and a great combination of instructors. Being a Graphic Recorder, the training entroduced me to new techniques I can apply to create more emotional visuals, as well as how to develop visual metaphors from complex concepts or business jargon.

Elsabe

Elsabé Ebersőhn
Illustrations by Elsabé

A big thank you to both of you! The workshop stretched some of my hardwired paradigms and ways of working – I will go back over my notes and sift, assimilate, internalise and apply.

James

James Durno

Axelle and Ben are pros! Each section of the workshop delivered something that I can apply to my work.

Robert

Robert

Meet your instructors

Axelle Vanquaillie in action, graphic recording at a conference

Axelle Vanquaillie

Axelle is a highly-renowned graphic recorder at Visual Harvesting, who has transformed hundreds of speakers’ words into attractive thoughtful visual summaries at conferences and gatherings all over the world, for over 10 years. She is also an in-demand trainer, leadership coach and speaker.

Her mission is to enable anyone in the world to convey a message with a drawing, and to help those drawings gain power in every organization, to do business and innovate more successfully. This passion fuels incredible amounts of creativity. Axelle is founder of Drawify (an AI-enhanced app that lets you make visual summaries of your content) as well as author of Start to Draw.

Ben Crothers

Ben is from Sydney, Australia, and is renowned for his strategic facilitation, business illustration, training, and graphic recording. As a designer for over 25 years, he learned the importance of always sketching his ideas, as well as helping others to bring their ideas to life visually, to create products and services that are more usable, useful and enjoyable.

This background has made him an in-demand facilitator for over 15 years. As an independent consultant at Bright Pilots, he enjoys helping teams of all kinds find and solve problems better, think and communicate together better, and ship faster. Ben has been invested in better ways of working since 2010, and was one of the original creators of the much-loved Atlassian Team Playbook. He is also the author of Presto Sketching, as well as Draw in 4 and 50 Remote-Friendly Icebreakers.

Ben Crothers in action, graphic recording at a conference

Join us in Johanneseburg!

Location coming soon...

A photo of the Johannesburg skyline

Register now

R3,190

Earlybird 20% off (153 days left)

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The Advanced Visual Storytelling training course gives you access to:

  • Hands-on activities to keep learning fun, interactive and interesting
  • 12 visual template PDFs to use with your team after the training
  • Time to work on your own challenge to apply what you learn straight away

Plus, get the trainers’ books!

The covers of two books: Start to Draw and Presto Sketching

Valued at R1,150, for only R800 extra.
That’s 30% off!

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More praise for this training

Ben Crothers  workshop was a real eye-opener for me. I’ve been in the strategic illustration business for over 20 years and have covered more than 30 graphic recording sessions during this time. But within just the first 20 minutes of Ben s workshop, I could already see how valuable his approach and methods were. Looking back, I honestly think if I had known even half of what I learned in Ben s class when I first started graphic recording, my work would ve had a much bigger impact in terms of engagement.

Ken Hope

Ken Hope
Strategic Illustrator

My colleague and I attended the Start to Draw training by Axelle Vanquaillie! Easily one of the best and most valuable courses I ve ever taken! Now it s time to further practice the basic techniques, apply them to my own work context, and finally transfer them to the broader educational world (incredible potential!!).

Avatar of a Visual Thinker

Vic, Visual Thinker

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