How to write beautiful Sketch Notes

The second Grok talk at Developer Developer Developer 12 was “Sketch Notes” by Ian Johnson.

Ian is not an artist, but he gets decent results by following a few simple rules:

1. Practise your handwriting: all caps, mixed, cursive.
2. Structure: consistency improves discoverability
3. Arrows guide the reader’s eye
4. Add borders, colours, icons, decoration — Not as important as CONTENT. Can tidy-up later
5. Sketch notes are meant as an aide-memoir — not a full listing
6. Drawing people is easy — draw stick men. use arms to be expressive
7. Mistakes are OK. Make a feature from an initial mistake

For inspiration check out Ian’s own sketches:

Basia Fusinkso’s talk Machine Learning and Chatbots

Andy Pike’s talk Introducing Elixir

Some further tips on Ian’s blog

@IJohnson_TNF