After years of collecting mindmaps from all over the web, I’ve been trying to decide who is my favorite hand mind mapper out there: Foreman, Garcia, Kleon, Nast, Petiford, Sicinski, (the order is alphabetical, so that won’t help) … who have I missed?   None of these contacted me and said “Hey, my work should be on your site!”, though others often do.  Instead they turned up in one place or another as I roamed the websites of people interested in mind and concept mapping.

Here’s a snippet of work from each of them and links to their sites for more.  Please tell me what you think by taking the survey at the end of this post.

Paul Foreman

Click here to open Paul Foreman’s mind mapping site but make sure you have a couple of hours to spare. Paul’s mindmaps cover a wide range of contemplative and self-improvement topics.  I’ve conversed with him by email and find he is a most modest achiever - far too modest about his own abilities and accomplishments.

Luis Garcia

There is a strong mind mapping influence in the first of Luis Garcia’s work above, where he can be seen as someone forging his own rich and unique style.  The second could hardly be called a mind map (no words at all), but it’s such fun, I had to include it.

I found these interesting examples of Luis’ work on the photostream of that well-known mind mapper Philippe Boukobza, of the Paris-based group “French School of Heuristic” (EFH) [updated with info from Philippe].   Even after some deep searching, could not find Luis’ own site or blog. 

Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon is a writer and cartoonist who is active in the visual-mapping community, with a bubble-diagrams style that’s all his own. Austin Kleon’s collection of mindmaps is at this link.  [Updated: Austin sent me a link to all his mind maps: better than the one I posted originally.]

Jamie Nast

Jamie Nast, famous for the picture of her waving a handful of colored pens, is a classic hand-drawn mind mapper, who mainly works on paper and spreads her work through international training sessions.  It’s a little hard to find examples of her own work, because she’s so generous in promoting on her blog the maps of attendees at her courses, but the above two are her own, I believe.

Michael Petiford

Michael Petiford is a prog drummer, artist, art teacher and music teacher.  Oh! and a very inventive mind mapper.

Adam Sicinski

Adam Sicinski has developed a very personal and engaging style of mind mapping that it would not suprise me if even Buzan envies. His site of mind maps at IQmatrix is another one where it is easy to spend a lot of time exploring and reading.

Anonymous

I wish the artist who drew this had put his or her name to it.  Maybe it’s that little squiggle at the bottom left.  And I wish that examples of other work by the same person were findable.  As neither is the case, I include it as an example of a most creative variation on mind mapping.  It came from a site about permaculture.

Now please vote!

These are all creative, imaginative and talented people, so I’m not going to ask “who’s the best?” (yeah, who’s best, Michelangelo or da Vinci?)  But I would like you to tell me who is your favorite.  Please click this link to vote in the

>>  Great Hand-drawn Mind Mappers Face-off survey  <<

[Update: After seeing my post, Jamie Nast pointed out that it would be a good idea to give an end-date.  Ooops.  Two weeks - I'll close the survey and announce the results on October 6th.  Update2< October 8th - I'm occupied with several other activities right now, and will leave this open for a few more days.  Meanwhile, you can add to the comments and please do vote in the survey.]

Argey

[Updated 9/23/2008]

The Mindmaps Directory has just been updated: New items by Austin Kleon and others bring it to 1045 maps including mind maps, concept maps, spidergrams, bubble diagrams and other types, all tagged by topics.

Apologies: My promised “favorite hand-drawn mind mappers” item will be delayed for one post, after all.

Argey

I’ve mentioned Adam Sicinski’s blog with its wonderful hand-drawn mind maps before - more than once.  It used to be at the Studymatrixart Blog but now he has moved his site and renamed it.  His new location is the IQmatrix Blog.

Here’s an extract from one of his delicious creations:

This got me thinking: Who is my favorite hand mind mapper on the web?

Maybe it is Adam, but I just can’t decide.  So I’m now putting together a post with samples of the best, and a survey.  More about this in my next post.

Roy

Special-character handling improved

We had a plea from Enrique in Spain Mexico! (oops … thanks for the correction Enrique) to support his searches for words that included accents and diacritics such as à and  ñ .  Topicscape has been able to display these OK from the beginning, but searching for something like señor only worked when the word or phrase was in quotes - and that was slower and less flexible than the regular Topicscape search.

Now, searching with a wide variety of commonly-used Western European characters is fully supported in 3D Topicscape Pro 1.63.  It can handle searches for words including all the following Latin alphabet characters with diacritics and ligatures:

    ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞß
    àáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ

The search will ignore case, so a search for señor will match a topic called SEÑOR MARQUES.

Easier license installation

When you buy 3D Topicscape, we send you a license file by email.  In the past this file had to be renamed and placed in the correct location manually.  Now we have added an item to the Help menu to do it for you.  Just drag the license file attachment from the email to the Desktop on your computer, select the “Install license . . .” item from the Help menu and the license will be loaded to the right place.  You might well ask “How can I do that if Topicscape has expired and I can’t start it to get to the Help Menu?”  Well, there’s a new item on the main programs menu: Start > All programs > License Installer.  That will do the same thing.

Import from Wkimindmap fixed

Have you tried Wikimindmap?  If not, give it a go, it’s great fun.  It will take a Wikipedia article and turn it into an on-line mindmap that you can browse through.  And it can export the results to a FreeMind mindmap.

We recently found that an unusual structure in the FreeMind files it generates gave incorrect results when imported to Topicscape.  The files do not include some data (a node attribute) that Topicscape expected to be there.  This has been worked around now.

Bug fix

We also found that Topic group coloring* was broken.  If you selected the option to color topics to show how they are grouped, next time you opened Topicscape, the setting had changed to ‘Each topic to have its own color’. 
* Topic group coloring is set as follows: Tools > Options > Skin > Flag and color usage > Free choice of topic colors > Set topic colors according to topic groups

Now it does not forget your wishes.

Roy

Just in time for the start of the school term, a new version of 3D Topicscape SE has just been released.  This is SE v.1.1 and has the following improvements:

1. It now runs with Vista’s Aero Theme if the PC is Aero-capable (and if you use Intel graphics hardware, do be sure to get their latest driver).
2. It starts and runs more quickly, and shows smoother flying (within the limits of the PC and graphics hardware).
3. It has a new way of showing the structure (relationship names of all topics to the Current Topic).  Press Ctrl+A once to see this.  This display times-out after 5 seconds and then goes back to showing your own topic names.  Alternatively press Ctrl+A again to revert immediately.
4. Button icons have been improved.
5. The location for viewing  the Home position (on pressing the Home key) has been improved.

Please download the installer from here: http://www.topicscape.com/student-edition.php and install it on top of the older version (or install it for the first time).