Sketchnotes from La Product Conf 2022

Antoine Visonneau

Published in

Yousign Engineering & Product

6 min readJun 24, 2022

Sketchnotes from La Product Conf 2022

What a day !

La Product Conf 2022 was a fantastic edition, a great opportunity to learn about product and design, but also the perfect day to practice Sketchnotes ! In this article, I present my sketchnotes from the conferences, how I did them and tips on how to improve your sketchnoting skills.

What is Sketchnote ?

Sketchnote is a term coined by Mike ROHDE in his book “the Sketchnote Handbook” defined as “a mix of words, drawings and types to make notes more visual and much more fun”. I also link it to the work of David Gray, a visionary designer who founded Xplane the first visual thinking company back in 1993. He developed a visual vocabulary to represent ideas and thought, in order to build shared understanding and help people make better decisions. As a designer, I am very fond of these ideas, and, once or twice a year, when I attend a conference, I like to practice sketchnoting.

Sketchnotes at LPC2002

With Yousign’s product team, I went to the LaProductConf with an Ipad pro, a stylus and the fantastic procreate App. Drawing on Ipad is much easier than on paper because you can undo, erase, move and rescale stuff around. As I had not drawn for several months, It took a while to warm up… but I really enjoy sketchnoting because it is an efficient active listening technique. Indeed, you have to focus on the essential: what is worth noting ? what is worth a drawing ? will this slide stay long enough to sketch it ? Then, with color, you can highlight keywords and add more depth to graphic items that convey valuable insights and learnings. The interesting thing about digital sketching is that you can optimize the layout in real time. As you can see above, while the speaker unfolds his story, I try to organize the note in a layout that reflects my understanding of the structure of his talk and catch the key messages. Of course, I don’t succeed because it is impossible but I believe it is an efficient way to focus, understand and memorize.

How to improve your sketchnoting skills ?

1 Prepare

While waiting for the first conference to start, sketch the conference logo. Start in the middle of the page and then move it to the upper left part. You can duplicate this page several times and use it as a template for all the conferences. At the beginning of each conference, while waiting for the speaker, draw a nice title in capital letters and the speaker’s name.

2 Play with types

Use mainly capital letters. They have more impact, but are slower to draw, so you should focus on what strikes you: quotes, catchphrases, key figures. Play with hierarchy: title, plain text, key figures. Do not hesitate to rescale these elements. For example, scaling up a number will make it more dramatic but you may need to zoom in to redraw it, make it bold, erase the imperfections. Don’t get lost in details. If the speaker says important things, keep noting and you will come back to them later during the Q&A.

3 Sketch small things

Unless you are an artist or professional illustrator, it is very difficult to draw complex elements with so little time: the speaker moves all the time and you don’t know how long a slide will remain visible. So you need to simplify to the extreme. For example, you can sketch the silhouette of a speaker, their face in an iconic style, this is not so far from designing icons: a simplified version of reality. To improve in this area, there are a lot of fun exercices from david gray’s visual langage vocabulary. Drawing diagrams is easier, often, the speaker spends a longer time on one specific diagram, and those are easy and fast to draw. You can rely on procreate’s drawing assistance tool to draw beautiful straight lines and circles. With copy and paste tools, it is actually very fast to achieve a good result.

4 Use a limited color palette

Color will bring life and depth to your notes. Choose 2–3 colors and stick to them. I like to use pastel colors to avoid directing all the attention on the colored elements in order to keep the page balanced. If you are not confident with colors, a good way to start is to use 2–3 shades of gray. It still adds a lot of depth. Technically, I write the text and the sketch on one layer and the color on a second layer underneath.

5 Optimize the layout

Don’t hesitate to constantly challenge your layout. I usually work on 1, 2 or 3 columns. Header and footer in one column, and the content in 3. This follows the classical structure (both in terms of layout and argumentation). I usually sketch things bigger then scale them down, which makes them look better. Also, it is possible to start with 2 column layouts and scale them down to add a 3rd column. This is the magic of digital sketching.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions on Sketchnoting and by the way, we’re hiring !

Antoine Visonneau