In September 2017 I attended Ian Johnson's visual note-taking workshop at DDD East Anglia. For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg's talk on exploratory testing for developers (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis.
Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said.
Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves.
I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evolved for different situations: how are they similar? why aren't they more similar? what could I change to give me more benefit from them?
In mid-2017, I'd analysed some of my notes from talks I'd attended and pulled out common characteristics like these: whole sentences or at least phrases; quotation marks around actual quotes; questions annotated; stars, boxes, circles for emphasis; arrows to link thoughts; structure diagrams; occasional mind maps; plenty of doodles.
Predominantly though, I knew that I was writing a lot and I wondered whether I might be missing interesting content because I was spending time writing, and whether I might be taking down material I didn't need to. I was aware of sketchnotes but I didn't really know much about how they were created. I did know that the examples I'd seen tended to be pretty, perhaps discouragingly so.
Tanmay Vora |
Sketchnote Army says this:
- Sketchnotes are purposeful doodling while listening to something interesting.
- Sketchnotes are as much a method of note taking as they are a form of creative expression.
I find that interesting, but I think I started with a very different slant on them:
- Sketchnotes are a way of forcing me to listen and note-take differently.
The basics that I got at DDD East Anglia helped with that. Ian Johnson has blogged in detail about them so I'll just summarise what I took from him:
- Use a consistent layout.
- Practice neat writing.
- Learn to draw a handful of common icons, e.g. book, tick, cross, etc.
- People add emotional impact ... and stick people are easier to draw than you think.
- Fill in decoration during the "boring bits".
I'd add a few more things, based on my own experience over the last few months:
- Landscape not portrait: I find this so much more natural.
- Any paper and pen will do: don't fetishise the materials, just draw!
- Date, title, person at the top: usually top-right; consistency helps with later reviewing.
- Start drawing in the middle of the page ...with the key concept.
- Work around the page from top right, clockwise: perhaps even mentally divide the page into quadrants and use a quarter of the talk time per quadrant
- Do it in one pass, in the moment: important for me; these pictures are my notes. I'm not going back to make them pretty afterwards.
Here's a few examples, in rough time order:
I think there's an evolution in style here, mostly in terms of trying to get less down on the page in less busy ways. Some other reflections:
- I wait longer before writing something down.
- I look for groups of points.
- If I don’t get the structure right my notes go wrong.
- If the talk is short I am more likely to end up with rubbish.
- I can’t use sketchnotes for meetings, 1-1, etc.
- I am more motivated/find it easier to review a sketchnote than notes.
- I don't yet know whether I generally preserve enough information in sketchnotes.
If you're thinking of starting I'd offer these pieces of advice, again based on my own experience and needs:
- Don’t worry if you can’t draw much very well.
- Get over the feeling of self-consciousness ... by doing it more!
- Don’t worry if you end up with words not pictures.
- Practice. For me, if you want to do something, do it as much as you can so that you
- ... learn how to do it
- ... learn when it applies
- ... learn when it doesn’t apply
- I use internal events like our user conferences, Team Eating, and even staff meetings as practice opportunities.
- Don’t worry when your notes turn out bad: THEY WILL TURN OUT BAD.
Title image: Ebay
Thanks, again, James, for this post. I am going to give it a try. I also shared them with my two boys (age 14 and soon to be 11). They are both sketchers so I am hoping that they will take a liking to this and help stay focus during these long, long hours on the computer for school.
ReplyDeleteA challenge for me is to start at the right place. Starting in the middle of the page is often not the right thing to do when a talk is more of a journey than a top down discussion. Some talks are bits of techniques that go in the tool box. Enjoying trying this.
ReplyDeleteYep. I practiced through January this year with a bunch of different talks and found I wanted to start in the middle less often than I used to: Top Draw.
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