·1· Pre-Work: “Visual note-taking”

For the first exercise of the pre-work at Ironhack we had to practise the “visual note-taking” technique. The methodology is to take notes in real time in a meeting or conference in a visual way (sketching) focusing in the big ideas. This technique engaged your mind to understand the ideas you are hearing while your hand turn those ideas into visual notes.

We could use as a reference “The Sketchnote Handbook” by Mike Rohde, where you can find a lot of tips to have a good visual note-taking experience like:

• Research before arriving to the conference, find-out who are the speakers, what are they talking about, and create a title with all this information.
• Arrive early to find the best seating underneath lights and close to the front.
• Bring materials like your smartphone, pens and notebooks to follow the conference.
• Use different typographies, diagrams and drawings.
• The dividers help you to separate ideas from each other.
• Write short descriptions in handwriting.
• Design arrows, bullets, icons or containers to highlight the ideas.
• Photograph or scan your sketchnoting and share it in your social media.

It is the very first time I use the sketching like this but I was used to draw in a similar way. In the architecture school I usually took ideas in talks or workshops drawing little things and writing the most important words to have later an idea of what it was everything about.

I have made the design only one time meanwhile I was listening to the “Ted Talk” but I had to stop the video many times to design. I think you need to practise a lot to make this easier. I could reorganise the design to see more hierarchy in the ideas but in my point of view you can easily understand the most important ideas of the talk and the first design is closer to the design I could make in a real Ted Talk with a little bit of practise.

I think it is a very interesting technique that helps you to follow the sense of the talk because you can be focus at the same time you are enjoying drawing and writing. It is funny to see how you think you are taking different ideas of different things but at the end you can see how everything work together.

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