2021 a Year in Review!
As I wind down for the year and force myself to take a much needed break I wanted to put together a 2021 Year in Review to see how I spent my time this year! Having a graphic recording business is amazing and I love drawing for all of you at conferences and events as well as supporting in other creative ways! Here's a breakdown of how I spent my year!
total graphic chart count 2021
Drum roll please! Um, well, I guess you already know from my giant graphic above. When I started this blog post I was under 700 but then a few last minute things came up and the total for 2021 is 711 graphics. The majority of those were digitally created. Most of the presentations that I capture are between 20 - 45 mins long with some of them being 60 mins or longer. My estimate is that I spent approximately 500 hours live (or working from pre/post videos) graphic recording.
an overview:
Here's a breakdown of how I spent all my creative work time in 2021! As you can see the majority of that is spent graphic recording or live illustrating. 85% of my time I was either graphic recording live OR from pre or post recordings that events or conferences would send me before or after their event.
14% of my time was spent on what I call "studio work". This includes things like animation videos, creating graphics for course material, presentations and blog posts. This also includes a little bit of training I did this year.
Not surprising that only 2% is live in-person graphic recording which was all located close to where I live.
And finally the last 2% is made up of things that I have sold like e-books and my Sketchnote All The Things course I launched this year.
In 2020 - 48% of all my work was live graphic recording and 22% of it was from pre or post recordings. It's pretty close, but I'm wondering if more people did pre-recordings in 2020 to adapt to the learning curve of moving everything online.
Graphic Recording Topics!
As you can see I tend to do a TON of graphic recording in the tech space. In 2021 it made up a whopping 85% of all the graphic recording I did this year. In case you are curious the other 15% was made up these various industries:
- Medical (FASD in particular)
- Transportation
- Independent Living
- Entrepreneurship
- Non-Profit Leadership
- Food Security
- Seniors Issues
- Sustainable Oceans
- Youth Homelessness
- University groups
- Student Research
- Substance Use Health
- Municipal Government
- Therapeutics
Tech Topics Breakdown:
wow! That's a lot of graphic recordings in the tech space! In past years, DevOps would have been the biggest part of the pie but this year Cyber Security won by a long shot with a gigantic 38%! Devops was next at 12% and you can see the other 50% was made up a variety of areas. The third highest was in house, which means that I graphic recorded an event that was hosted by a specific company, so the majority of the time the presentations were about the particular software of that company.
Growth throughout the years
I've been keeping track of how many graphic recordings I have completed since 2013. This graph shows my growth from 2016 which is really interesting to see. I doubled or almost doubled for many of those years and you can see the jump from 2019 to 2020/2021. Going the digital route and having the opportunity to graphic record from home allowed me to complete so many more (once I got over the shock of covid and buckled down to try and get online clients). There's no way that I would be able to complete as much as I have last year and this year if I had to travel for every single job. This was the silver lining in the covid mess for me.
Whew! What a year! I'm in the process of booking in live illustration/graphic recording work in 2022 now. If you have an event that you want jazzed up with drawings to help my attendees connect more deeply and to stand out from the crowd, don't hesitate to reach out!