Sketchnotes
I’ve always been a visual note taker, combining different fonts and graphics and lately have been intrigued by the idea that this is an actual marketable skill (and a job!?). I never thought of my notes and doodles being valuable for anyone other than myself.
When I was at SxSW this past year (2014), I found myself at times being more interested in the graphic recording going on then the actual speakers. I was always wondering how did they know what to draw and what was important? Do they ever miss details because they are so caught up in creating an illustration? How do they not misjudge spacing and wind up with the bulk of the imagery in a small area?
I did my own sketchnoting with various degrees of success and found that I was much better at recording those talks with specific points, details and ideas as opposed to the more free-form conversations (like Neil Young’s talk on Pono).
Here are a couple of my more successful sketchnotes. It’s certainly a technique that I am going to work on. It forces you to commit to an idea quickly and to keep moving – there’s no time to second guess a decision. This is both free-ing and scary at the same time. It’s made me think about things in a more high-level manner and to think critically about the most important messages being delivered. Anecdotally, I also have a better recollection of those talks that I did visually record.
For now, I’m practicing and like anything else, the more often I do this, the better I’ll get:)
A few resources:
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