The Day Our Artist Drew an Entire Sustainability Summit in Real Time (And Why People Wouldn't Stop Watching)

We had a sustainability summit in Dubai back in March. Government officials, a few oil and gas execs trying to talk green energy, the usual mix of panels and PowerPoint. Our artist set up his easel near the side of the stage, and honestly, we almost didn't notice when the room shifted.

It happened slowly. First it was just one woman in the second row who kept turning around to look. Then a guy near the back stood up to get a better angle. By the second panel, there were people standing behind the canvas instead of sitting in their seats.

Nobody told them to do that.

We get asked the same question a lot

"So you just draw what people say?" Kind of, but not really. What actually happens is closer to someone doing simultaneous translation, except instead of converting Arabic to English, they're converting a fifteen-minute panel discussion into something you can take in at a glance.

Our artist for that event, he's been doing this for years now, told us afterward that the hardest part wasn't the drawing. It was a moderator who kept interrupting speakers mid-sentence, which meant he had to keep erasing and reshaping half-finished thoughts on the page. You don't see that struggle from the audience. You just see a clean picture by the end.

Why this works (and why we were skeptical at first)

A few years ago we weren't fully sold on graphic recording as more than a nice visual gimmick. Then we started noticing the same thing happen at almost every event: people remembered the sessions with live illustration far better than the ones without it. Not because we asked them to. They'd just mention it, weeks later, in emails. "Hey, do you still have that drawing from the panel on water scarcity?"

That stuck with us.

There's something about watching ideas take shape on a canvas, instead of just hearing them, that makes a room pay attention differently. Maybe it's curiosity about what comes next. Maybe people are just tired of staring at slides. Either way, in Dubai's conference circuit, where everyone's schedule is packed wall to wall, that kind of attention is rare.

The brainstorm sessions are where it gets interesting

Presentations are one thing. Brainstorms are messier, and honestly more fun to watch. We had a corporate retreat last year where a group of department heads were arguing, in a friendly way, about three completely different strategies. Our artist sat there sketching all three as separate threads, and at some point he just... connected them. Drew a line between ideas nobody in the room had verbally linked yet.

One of the directors stopped talking and said, "wait, is that what we've been trying to say this whole time?"

That's the job, really. Not just recording what's said, but catching what's almost said.

It's not flawless, and we don't pretend it is

Sometimes the canvas gets messy. Sometimes a speaker goes on a tangent and the visual ends up a little crowded, or an idea gets cut for space. We've had artists tell us a bad acoustics setup is honestly worse than a fast-talking speaker, because at least you can keep up with someone talking quickly. Mumbling through a bad mic is its own nightmare.

But even an imperfect graphic recording usually beats a perfect set of typed notes nobody reopens.

What's left after the event ends

By the time the Abu Dhabi summit wrapped up, the canvas was full, water scarcity stats, a tiny solar panel doodle, arrows connecting three different government initiatives, and in the corner, almost as a joke, a small camel wearing a hard hat. (One of the speakers made a joke about desert infrastructure. It stuck.)

People took photos of it before they even grabbed their coats.

At Marker, this is the part we never get tired of, watching a room full of strangers end up gathered around the same drawing, talking about the same ideas, long after the actual talking part of the event is over.

We're based in Dubai, working across the UAE and the wider region, mixing creative direction with real-time illustration and a bit of bilingual flexibility when the room calls for it.