In July of 2023, at the historic Hotel Del Coronado, Angela and I did a San Diego graphic recording event with NLGI, a non-for-profit trade association composed of companies who manufacture grease.
It was a half-day event, with the session we recorded being about 1.5 hours of live content presentation. We were on location about 4 hours total, getting the board ready for the talk and after the content was created, working on tying up some of the imagery to give a more complete final image.
The session-titled ‘A Walk Through The Decades’-was a big-picture recap of the history of lubricating grease as it lined up with the world and it’s many happenings spanning the course of 90 years.
The graphic was created in a straightforward, ‘up/down, down/up, left to right’ fashion to symbolize a timeline graphic (but with more spontanaiety)!
One of the more enjoyable aspects of working with NLGI was that they were very open to us taking the lead on the graphic and how we wanted to present and create it.
In our talks, Angela and I agreed that we wanted a fun title and fun footer to ‘ground’ the image and establish some good anchors in the midst of what we knew was going to be a lot of ‘rapid fire’ timeline-style content! Here is a zoomed in look at the title.
For the footer, we wanted to make little ‘snapshots’ of grease being used in a few scenarios while also showing that grease is something that is used worldwide, and NLGI is connected to that effort.
The content of the talk was both general and highly specific. The presenters did a good job themselves of keeping their presentations playful by sharing very grease-specific highlights but referenced the cultural trends of the times for each decade.
The best way for recording this type of talk is establishing a simple visual hierarchy (in this, the decades) and then bullet-pointing the points as they came. Because of the variance in happenings in the grease industry and in the world, this approach kept things manageable while listening to a lot of information we were unfamiliar with at a rapid pace!
The event with NLGI went very smoothly and we enjoyed learning new information about something Angela and I don’t think too much about-grease! Tt was a good experience for us to hear that the grease industry is doing it’s best to roll with the times and has it’s eyes on innovation while still staying as practical and useful as always.
Greasing up and out!
Nick and Angela