Let’s Get Visual: Take Your Note Taking into the Stratosphere!

Making notes is boring, right? It doesn’t have to be! With just a few simple tweaks you can create engaging visual notes that will take your note taking to the next level.

Until a few years ago I was making my notes the only way I know how. By madly scribbling down everything I heard in the hope that some of the stuff I was writing would be important and make sense. At the end I’d have pages of non-sensical sentences, half finished quotes and disjointed references. It didn’t really matter as I rarely went back to look at them any way. I was my target audience, and I found them boring. That wasn’t good.

Then, a few years ago I was introduced to visual note taking in a workshop in Beijing led by Narayan Silva and all that changed. I wish I’d discovered it earlier — what a difference it would have made at school and university.

Learn to Listen Like a Jedi

When people see my sketchnotes (or larger scale graphic recordings for that matter) the first thing they usually say to me is something along the lines of “I wish I could do that, but I can’t draw.” I’ll let you in on a little secret — the drawing isn’t the hard part. Sketchnoting is really about listening. It’s not really about making your notes look pretty, although that is often a happy side effect. When you are madly scribbling down a word for word account of what you are hearing in a note pad or laptop, you are basically in auto mode. With sketchnoting it is impossible to get down absolutely everything. Instead you are forced to listen. You have to stop and process the information and decide whether this is a key point or not. This is no easy task, and it takes practice, but the more you do it the easier it becomes.

Making Connections

Sketchnoting is about making connections in your head. Your drawing of an elephant may not resemble an elephant to anyone else — but luckily for you it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t matter if you can draw like an artist or not, as long as you can recognise the marks you’ve made, you have achieved your goal. You synapses will be popping as connections are forged and the magic inside your head starts to happen.

Benefits

There are loads of benefits to making your notes more visual. Here are just a few of them:

• Visually appealing
• Helps you remember
• Improves you listening skills
• Sharable and a great way to spread ideas
• Activates untapped creativity
• Promotes contiuned dicussion

Practice Makes Progress

Like all things, the more you do it the better you get. You don’t need to strive for perfection — that will hold you back. As Brandy Agerbeck says in her Graphic Facilitator’s Guide ‘practice makes progress’. So rather than going from regular notes to full on illustrated masterpieces over night, start small. Here’s a few handy tips that helped me when I was getting started:

1. The Trusty Starman — This is probably the number one tip i received when I first started. The simple star man. It takes just seconds to draw and is easily recognisable as a person. Over time you can develop it into something more personal to you, but as a quick and simple method of drawing a person, the star man is hard to beat.

2. The basic shapes : If you can master drawing these simple shapes, you can essentially draw a simplified version of anything. Triangle on top of a square — a house. A box with two circles — a car. They may not be winning any art awards, but they get the job done and that’s what we are after.

3. Bullet points : simply by jazzing up your bullet points with different shapes and colours is a simple way to make your lists more engaging and memorable.

4. Speech bubbles: I’m sure these don’t really need much explanation. They may be basic, but they are an amazing way of capturing speech and ideas in a fun and captivating way. With simple variations they can also be used to convey unspoken emotion too.

5: Process arrows : Use arrows to show processes, directions and to link ideas. They are a great way to connect concepts and clearly map out your train of thought.

6. Title Banners : Draw a simple banner around your title to make it really stand out and focus your page.

6. Use blank pages. Allow your creativity to flow in all directions :) Free yourself from the tyranny of lined pages!

Now Go For It

As you start putting these things together and adding your own flourishes you will see a real change. You don’t need any fancy tools — just a blank notepad, a pen and some colours if you want to brighten it up and you’re ready to go. Next time your in a meeting or listening to a discussion try adding a few of the principles from above and I’m sure you’ll notice a difference. You can even practice by making your shopping list pop with some snazzy bullet points.

Stick at it. With practice you’ll get better at listening and capturing the bits that really matter.

Workshops and Beyond

I will be running some sketchnote workshops in Brighton to help you take your notes to the next level. Express your interest here to find out more :)

And finally — If you feel happy to share it — I’d love to see some of the results of some of your sketchnotes. Follow is on twitter @m_i_scribe and tag us in your photos!