What are sketch notes? Some of you may know what these things are. Some may not. I think of them, I call them “Notes Plus” sometimes because it's It's not like you stop writing notes. What you're doing is you're adding to your writing with lettering. So that might be your first step, is to do lettering. The next step could be drawing, and then you're focusing on the big ideas. That was the big understanding and realization for me as I began this work was because I was doing the analysis as I was listening,
as I was writing, as I was drawing, as I was doing lettering, that I started to really make sense of things in the moment. And then all I was doing is capturing what was entering my mind. And the beauty of that was, back in the old way I took notes, I would write all these notes and then I didn't want to look through them anymore. So the benefit of this was, by doing it all in the moment when you're done with the session you're in or the the whatever time you're spending, your notes are ready to go, and then you can, of course, modify them.
But the bulk of the work is done in the moment and you don't have to go back and like parse out what's valuable and what is not. So that's a really important thing to think about. People will say “I've been doing that for years, I never knew what the name was”. So having a name sometimes can be valuable, but really it's this idea of expanding beyond just writing words to adding visuals, whether that's lettering, which is a visualization of letter forms, or if that's drawing the things that are entering your head, drawing things from the PowerPoint deck that maybe someone's presenting, or if it's in a case of an experience or,
you know, ideation, what are the things that are entering your mind that you can then put on the page or on the screen to help you remember that concept. So you might ask, “Well, why should I bother with this extra step of sketch noting?” Well, in my in my experience, I remember a lot more of the of the things that I experience when I sketch note them, whether that's a talk at a conference or if that's an experience of a meal
or traveling or any other experience that I decide to visualize. There's something that's going on in our brains where the hearing and the writing and the drawing cements that idea. And I can look at sketch notes from years and years ago and still remember a lot of details around that moment when I took those notes. So that's a benefit. I think it helps you retain more. So if you take this approach because it's such a high, high detail moment where your brain is processing all this information and you're using your whole body, I believe that there's retention happening
that makes what you remember last longer. So you can call it back into memory in the future when you need it. And of course, the last part is you can have fun doing it like this, that the whole thing that convinced me to continue doing sketch notes way back in 2006 was this idea that, “Hey, this is really fun. I'm enjoying taking notes”. I'm when the talk is done, I don't have to do any more work. And it's short enough and brief enough because you're, you know, looking for the big ideas.
That's maybe four or five pages. It's shareable. You can now share. Not only is it good for you, but if you wish, it can be useful for someone else. And I found that true as well. So there is the fun aspect that should not be overlooked in sketch noting, I think it's really important, the things that you have fun doing, you repeatedly do, right? That's sort of the way we work as humans. So I thought it would be helpful to show some samples. But first, my big statement is: ideas, not art. So this is for those of you who feel like if I asked the question who feels like
they can't draw and you're the person raising your hand, this is for you. “Ideas,not art” is all about this concept of forget about any drawing classes you took in college or any of those kind of things. We're talking about capturing ideas simply, and if you can use simple shapes to do that, it makes it possible for anyone to do sketch, noting it really lowers the bar and it reduces the pressure for people who feel like I can't draw, I don't know how to draw. I don't know where to begin. So first of all, I'm going to just show you some samples
to give you a taste of how I've used this in my professional and personal life. So you can see these are these are sketch notes from meetings. These can be meetings or conferences. These are the one on the top left is an online conference that I attended. I did that with my iPad Pro. The one on the right is with some friends talking about graphic recording which is related to sketch noting. And finally lower right is a section that I attended about Agile learning about Agile and how, you know, Agile works so that I could apply it in my design profession.
So this really helped me understand and have a little fun with those notes. You can see that's an example of what meetings might look like. So another way that might apply, especially to the designers, is this idea of sketch noting your ideation. So when you build these skills, you now feel like you have another power to go on a whiteboard, to go on a piece of paper, to use an iPad pro and a pencil to sketch out the ideas that are in your head so you can get them out, so you can look at them yourself, and then you can share them with your teammates to kind of work through like, is this a good idea or not?
Right? A lot of times we have these discussions where we think we're agreeing when we're talking in words, but we really don't agree. It's this illusion of agreement. So by visualizing, it helps everyone get clear about what it is the idea is, so you can see on the left are these crazy ideas I had for hiding Thin Mints, the Girl Scout cookies, from my kids on the right was an idea, of course, that I took where I explored a storyboard. And then in the bottom right was when I first got a new computer exploring
if I'm using usb-c cables, which cables would I need? Right? So it can be very practical ways to visualize ideas that you have.