JESSICA ELDREDGE: Hello everyone.
Thank you so much for coming.
My name is Jessica Eldredge.
I'm a front-end developer at Shopify,
and today I want to talk to you about taking notes.
More specifically, I want to talk about taking
awesome notes by practicing sketchnoting.
How many of you guys have heard of sketchnotes
before? Oh, great. So exciting.
Is anyone sketchnoting right
now? I love you guys. Please share afterwards. We're
gonna Tweet all the photos.
So if you haven't heard of sketchnoting, let me
explain. I like to describe it as visual notetaking.
It's the practice of combining hand-drawn elements and text
to create visually-compelling notes. Are you familiar with mind
maps? Show of hands? Anybody done that before? Yes?
Who's used a whiteboard when designing software before? All
right. See? You guys got this. You're already familiar
with the concept of sketchnoting.
Basically, it's the difference between notes like this and
notes like this. I first started sketchnoting because of
a man named Mike Rohde. He's a designer who
lives in the midwest, and he coined the term
sketchnoting. I was preparing to go to South by
Southwest one year, and I was searching the internet
for photos, trying to get an idea of what
I was getting myself into, and I stumbled across
his notes.
And he's been doing this for a long time.
At least since 2008. And, you know, he does
it when travels, when he goes to conferences, meetings.
And I just went into this rabbithole of looking
at his wonderful notes and I thought, you know,
I think I can do this. Or I at
least want to give it a try. And so
I started practicing. I did it at that South
by that I attended and local meetups and, and
meetings at work and I totally fell in love.
So I was going back through the archives, preparing
for this talk, trying to find some of my
first sketchnotes, and these are my very first sketchnotes.
And it's probably kind of hard to read, but
the first speaker I saw was actually DHH. I
had no idea who he was back then. I
was like, what is this? Thirty-seven signals? I don't
know.
My sketchnotes have changed a lot since then. Get
ready for some eye candy.
These are some notes by Paul Soupiset. He's one
of my favorites. I really love his handwriting. Veronica
Erb likes to incorporate illustrations into her notes. She's
got a really playful style. Sacha Chua. She's from
Toronto. She goes to a lot of technical talks.
Captures a lot of content in her notes. And
she actually uses a tablet PC and a stylus.
I like that there's a lot of dense content
here, but you can still kind of tell what's
going on, cause she's highlighted the key points.
You can also use an iPad. There's various apps
on the iPad. You use a stylus to take
notes, like Daniel Kirsch. Super condensed, simplified. I love
the pops of color. You can still get the
point across.
So there's a couple different ways that you can
take notes. There's live and there's later. Live sketchnoting
involves taking the notes at the same time that
the presentation is happening. You're doing it in the
moment. Later sketchnoting is kind of where you might
be able to jot down some bullet points, maybe
using your computer, maybe on another piece of paper,
and you go back to your sketchbook later and
draw them out.
I prefer to do live sketchnoting, because I'm a
developer. I like to keep things DRY. I don't
want to repeat myself. When the talk is done,
my notes are done. I can immediately share them
and I can move on and enjoy the next
talk. So for the rest of this talk, the
techniques I'm gonna talk about mostly refer to live
sketchnoting.
So why do we want to sketchnote? Firstly, I
think there's inspiration in analog processes. Taking yourselves out
of your computer. We're all developers, we spend a
lot of time on our gadgets and our devices.
But spending some time with just good old pen
and paper allows for a change of perspective. You
get outside of your comfort zone and you start
seeing things in a different way.
Hopefully, while slowing down, you can clarify some ideas
that you already have and maybe come up with
some new ones. Some famous sketchers that didn't do
it for a living include DaVinci, Kurt Vonnegut, Darwin,
and Freud. All of those people are amazing. We
know what they've done. They used sketching to help
clarify their ideas.
Sketchnoting also allows you to focus. How many of
you guys have been in a meeting with your
computer and you just check email real quick or
maybe somebody IMs you cause there's a bug on
production and you gotta fix it like right now?
Basically, the computer is a rabbit hole of distractions.
So, when I sketchnote, I try to put things
away. I keep my phone out in case I
need to look up words that I'm not familiar
with, but all I have is my sketchbook and
my pen and I'm listening to the content. You
know, once you're on the computer, there's just way
too much stuff that can come up and I
really like stepping away from that.
Sketchnoting also helps to improve your memory. There's this
concept called the Duel Coding Theory which is proposed
by Allen Pyvo. It's saying that we process information
in two different ways. Using verbal and visual information.
And if you utilize both of them, you have
a better chance of remembering the content later.
So, sketchnoting, you can use visual elements and you're
using your handwriting and later you'll hopefully have an
even better chance of remembering the content that you're
trying to capture.
So all of that stuff I just told you
is what you're gonna tell your boss to prove
that you're not doodling in the meetings. The real
reason to sketchnote is that it's just fun. I
love talking about it. People love looking at notes.
I like looking at my notes. I think it's
a really great practice, and really I just don't
need an excuse. I try to find out a
way that I can do it whenever I can.
So let's get to the good stuff. Like you're,
maybe you're thinking, Jess, I can't draw. I hear
this all the time, and it's the reason why
I'm giving my talk today. And I'm gonna debunk
this in one slide. So what do you see
up here? We've got some shapes. If you can
draw any of these shapes, then you can sketchnote.
If you can't draw these shapes, please come find
me. We will pair. I am willing to take
the time to practice with you and we can
get this done.
Using these shapes, and practicing, is how you're gonna
sketchnote. You use lines, arrows, to connect ideas. Use
the boxes and the clouds to add emphasis. Those
shapes also form the basis, if you want to
like, go and do some illustrations or icons, these
are all the fundamental building blocks that you need.
You're also gonna need some other tools. This is
what I like to call my sketchnoting config file.
I prefer to use a plain sketchbook. I use
moleskin. Something with heavy paper. I'm a very hamfisted
drawer and, you know, I write really heavy, so
I don't want it to bleed.
I use a uniball pen for most of the
writing. It's very smooth. Something like a roller ball.
I know people that like gel pens. There's a
couple of other art pens in there that I
use for bolder notes. And I've been using a
FaverCastle artist's pen for shading.
So, kind of pick what works for you. A
lot of people like to start out with grid
paper, too, because if you feel like you can't
write in straight line, then the grid lines kind
of help you keep everything in place.
And, obviously, like I talked earlier about some of
the electronic devices that you can use. So if,
you know, it makes you feel better to use
an iPad, then, you know, absolutely go for it.
So here are some sketchnotes of mine where you
can see some of those building blocks being used.
We've got a cloud and some arrows and lines
and boxes. That's pretty much all you need.
So here's the good part, right. How do you
actually do this? And for this I'm gonna turn
to one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, who
wrote in "Sometimes," "Instructions for living a life: Pay
attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."
When I was reading this poem again really recently,
I thought, these are really good advice for sketchnoting,
as well. So how do we pay attention?
The very first thing I want to tell people
about sketchnoting is that it's not about drawing, it's
about listening. It requires active listening to really focus
on what the speaker's talking about. Sketchnoting helps you
focus on the important parts of a presentation.
Listening is different than thinking. Sometimes a speaker might
be talking about something controversial, maybe other ideas come
up in your head while they're, while they're speaking.
You don't want to let your emotional reactions get
in the way of capturing content.
So if you disagree or maybe, I mean, you
might think of something else, or, you know, oh
I wish he'd said this, like. Eh. You don't
want to let that get in the way. You
really want to focus on what the speaker is
saying, and then let the emotion come later.
I also advise to follow the speaker and not
the slides. We live in an age where most
speakers are gracious enough to share their slides on
the internet with us later, so you can kind
of get that content if you need to later,
most of the time. The good stuff's not gonna
be on the slides, though. The good stuff is
gonna be with the speaker. You have one moment
to be in the presentation with them and to
really hear what they're saying.
If you know a speakers' style, it's a little
bit easier to plan your notes. I've been going
to enough tech conferences that I kind of get
an idea ahead of time. DHH is gonna be
super colorful and crazy and controversial. Aaron Patterson loves
to tell a story, there's like, cool jokes in
there. Glenn Vanderberg. Great storyteller. Very linear format. So,
as you practice, you'll kind of get an idea
for that.
I would follow the speaker's body language. Their speech
patterns. Maybe they like to take dramatic pauses. It's
a time for you to slow down, also, and
pay attention to what they're saying.
So how do you listen for key points? This
is pretty hard. It's, you know, requires some multi-tasking.
Firstly, I would avoid summarizing everything. I think when
you first start sketching, it's really tempting to try
to get everything on paper. You don't want to
miss stuff. But you kinda gotta let that go.
The talk title is the first clue to what
the important content is gonna be. But it's not
always, you know, accurate. Sometimes the speaker's gonna be
really cool and nice and tell you ahead of
time what they're gonna cover. You know, the opening
slide, and say, I've got three things that I'm
gonna go over today. But you're not always gonna
be able to rely on that.
So one thing I like to tell people is,
if you had your phone out and you weren't
taking sketchnotes right now, what would you Tweet about?
So anything that you listen to that you're like,
man, that's really awesome, that's what you want to
get down in your sketchnotes.
So we're in a technical conference. I'm talking to
developers who want to do this. There's gonna be
a lot of demos and live coding, and my
advice to you is don't sketch it. I tried
to do it once. It's really hard. I tried
to actually, you know, sketch code samples. It's, it's
really hard. It's also gonna look kind of boring
cause it's code.
If you do want to sketchnote during a demo,
though, I think there's still some tips you can,
you can follow. You want to listen for gems
of advice. Usually there's a reason why somebody's demoing.
They want to show you that something's better than
something else or, you know, kind of go through
a problem-solving exercise. Maybe there's code libraries, gems, plugins,
that are mentioned during a talk that you've never
heard of before. I usually like to jot those
down to go look up later.
A lot of times, pros and cons. You know,
obviously, if somebody's showing off something that they did,
they might say this is better than this other
way. Those are things that you might want to
capture as well.
It's virtually impossible to write as fast as somebody
can speak. So sometimes you need a back-up plan.
I like to carry around some scratch paper. I
advise using post-its to just kind of like jot
down ideas real quick, in case you can't keep
up with the speaker's speech. There's usually also lulls
between the main ideas. People pausing between all of
their main points. That's also a good time to
kind of go back and fill in, if you
missed something earlier.
You can also use post-its to hold on to
a note or an idea while you're waiting for
the connection. Sometimes they'll bring up the problem and
talk about the solution later, and you want to
just, like, hold onto that thought.
Also, sometimes, I mean, you might not want to
commit an idea right away. Like, maybe something better
is gonna come up next, so you can use
the post-it to sort of be a placeholder and
a backup plan in case that following idea doesn't
pan out for you.
It's also important to be astonished. You might want
to share your notes with the world and show
them to other people, but ultimately your notes are
for you. You want to capture what stands out
to you in the moment and not worry about
what anybody else thinks.
Also feel free to fill-in gaps and add your
own sort of notes on the side. I used
to be really worried about capturing what a speaker
said extremely accurately and I didn't want to misrepresent
what they said in a talk, and I learned
to sort of let that go, because I need
to remember what they were saying. I need to
interpret what they were saying. So sometimes, you know,
I'll write something off to the side just to,
you know, add in and enhance what they're saying
so I can remember later.
It's, it's all about listening to what's being said
and interpreting it in your own way, cause you
want to remember what happened in the presentation. It's
really interesting to see that a bunch of people
can attend the same talk and come out of
it with different things.
These are some sketchnotes by Carolyn Sewell at Brooklyn
Beta. She went to a talk by Tim O'Reilly.
I went to that same talk and these are
my notes. So vastly different styles.
Other fun things to capture include jokes and quotes
and f-bombs. If the speaker's funny, capturing a joke
is a great way to enhance your notes. Like,
I mean, it's what everybody remembers. It's gonna make
you laugh when you go back and look at
your notes later. Cuss words usually used for emphasis,
which means that it's something important. If you want
great colorful notes, I advise going back and looking
all of DHH's talks in the past.
I also listen for quotable moments. Any time a
speaker makes a dramatic pause. Maybe they've repeated a
phrase over and over again. Listening for metaphors and
similes - that's a great chance for you to
kind of visualize something. The speaker's doing it for
you. They're giving you a hint. This is like
this. And if you can come up with an
image that captures that, that's a good way to
enhance your notes as well.
So, speaking of f-bombs, these are some notes by
Erin Hawkins. This talk looks like it was really
fun to go to.
Another thing you can do is create your own
visual language. And that means kind of coming up
with a style or some sort of cue that
helps you remember certain things in, in a talk.
So what's an example of a visual language? Maybe
if you're trying to take direct quotes from a
speaker you can use quote marks. Speech bubbles for
direct quotes. Question bubbles for maybe something, a question
you asked yourself and you want to look up
later. Like, an eye in a circle for info
or tips. I read on a blog somewhere that
this girl likes to put titles of books inside
a picture of a book, so she knows when
she scans through her notes if she wants to
go buy a book later, she can find it
very quickly.
So here's some examples of Eva-Lotta Lamm's notes, and
she's using little highlighted quotes everywhere. It's an easy
way to pick out the speaker's direct, direct quotations.
And sometimes, you're gonna listen to a talk, and
the content's still not gonna stick, is not gonna
stick. And there's always a backup plan for that
too. I went to this keynote. It was way
over my head. You know. Sometimes you just gotta
be in the moment and you can't get it
on paper.
So, the last step is to tell people about
it. I really think it's important to share your
notes. I think it's a great way to continue
the dialogue after a conversation. I use Twitter as
the, as the main avenue for my notes. I
always use the conference hash tag and at mention
the speaker.
You can also upload to places like Flicker or
Instagram or Dribble. There's a blog called sketchnote army
which is run by Mike Rhody. He takes submissions.
You can just Tweet at him. You can email
him. But he's also got a comittee of people
that go around the internet looking for sketchnotes, whether
it's on Flicker or Twitter, and then he features
them on his blog. And, and it's really a
nice way to, you know, share with people, but
also, like, thank the speaker.
Speaking of thanking the speaker, they're gonna be really
grateful if you share your notes. I didn't actually
realize that this was a thing until about last
year when I was, like, really getting going with
this. And people were Tweeting back at me, like,
thank you so much, this is amazing. And it's,
it's kind of weird that I didn't think that
it was something that other people would care about.
But it's nice to have an artifact of your
talk when you leave. It's also nice that people
are talking about your talk after you leave. You
kind of want that, so sketchnotes are a good
way to, I think, thank the speaker and prove
that you were there and you really listened and,
like, captured the information.
A lot of times in your sketchnotes, you'll realize
that you capture information that the speaker didn't even
intend. They didn't think it was that important and
then, you know, here you're getting feedback from people
saying, no, this was really cool.
Your boss will also be impressed. I think. No
one else in your meeting is probably gonna be
taking sketchnotes. You know, you're gonna capture different ideas,
and it's a good way to enhance, like, team
dialogue, when you're like, sketching out ideas or thinking
about, like, really hard problems. Sketchnotes will add, like,
a diversity to the conversation.
So this isn't all. There are some actual practical
tips that I can pass on to you. The
first one is to get comfortable. I always go
to a meeting or a talk early to find
a good seat. The aisle is great for elbow
room. It's not so great for people flowing into
the room and you constantly have to get up
and interrupted. So I actually recommend a middle seat.
I also try to tell people to find a
good light source. They'll dim the lights in a
lot of conferences, so you want to try to
find some way that you can look at your
sketch book.
I'm also that jerk that will put my purse
on the seat next to me so I have
some room. I'm sorry Marty. I mean. You know,
it's really hard when you're squished in and people
are sitting next to you and typing on their
laptops. You know, sometimes it's nice to have a
little bit of elbow room.
I think also getting to a talk early means
that you can write down the speaker's name, their
Twitter handle, the title. Get that stuff out of
the way so that you're ready to go when
they start.
It's also important to slow down. When I did
a practice run of this talk at Shopify, some
people came up to me and said, well my
hand handwriting's really bad. So what do I do
about that? And I advised this person to slow
down and write your letters as if you're drawing
them. When you slow down, you have to be
deliberate about it.
Also, trying to draw larger letters will force you
to slow down, and I think make you really
pay attention to your writing. When, if you're doing
your normal handwriting it's easy to just go really
fast and it, you know, turns out a little
bit sloppy. So if you slow down, I think
it really helps.
Also, try to play with layouts. You know, normally
when we're writing just regular notes on pen and
paper, we're going top down. I think, kind of
stepping outside of your comfort zone and trying something
different will really help. There's different ways to do
that. I tend to do sort of a popcorn
style, where I just fill in notes anywhere there's
space on my page.
People can also do columns. It's really great for
panels. You can do a radial style, where maybe
you start in the middle and sort of map
out, kind of like mind maps. There's also sort
of the winding story lane sort of style. You
can go left to right, left to right.
But, basically it's important to try to challenge yourself
and do something different. So these are some examples
from Veronica Erb, again, doing sort of a radial
style. You can see like the title up at
the top and she's sort of going out.
And the decoration last. This is gonna be really
tempting, too, when you're sketchnoting. You want to make
it look really pretty and you're trying to capture
everything. But I said before, you know, there's always
these moments in the talk where people are pausing
or maybe transitioning or maybe the speaker's kind of
boring for a little while. And you can use
that time to sort of add all those boxes
and arrows and shading that you weren't able to
capture earlier.
And you can also use your post-its, again, to
keep that backlog and sort of, you know, help
you pace yourself if you can't fill up the
space. I like to go back after the talk,
as well, just really quickly, before I share, just
to sort of add some more detail and boldness
if I'm, like, reflecting on the talk and sort
of realizing that something was extra important, I'll try
to go back and, and add some embellishment.
It's also important to embrace mistakes. Especially if you're
live sketchnoting, it's gonna happen. There's no way to
get around it. It can be really scary to,
to use a pen and paper. You might want
to use pencil but I really encourage you to
just go ahead and use pen. I bring a
bold marker just in case I need to fix
something really crazy. But be OK with scratching out
a word. If you didn't spell it right the
first time or if it was wrong, it's, it's
totally OK.
So here are some notes that I took and
there's like smudges and this word right here, that
was the first time I spelled entrepreneurs wrong. I
tried again. I still spelled it wrong. Like, so
it's gonna happen. Like.
As with anything, practice makes better. There's some ways
you can do that. I advice people to start
out with already recorded conference talks, like TED talks.
Do it in your meetings at work. Even reality
TV. I have sketchnoted Real Housewives before. It's really
fun.
Watching videos at home on your own takes the
pressure off of live sketchnoting a little bit. You've
got a pause button. You can sort of figure
out your pace. As you practice, you'll also get
a really good sense of how much information you
can capture in a given amount of time.
I used to take up two pages for every
single talk no matter how long the content was.
I have no gotten everything down to a page,
like, whether it's an hour and a half talk
or a thirty minute talk. And so as you
practice you'll sort of find, you know, your own
style.
Here are some of my notes. Name the movie.
So some notes by MJ Valente. She was sketchnoting
a BBC episode.
Get inspired. When we all started out developing, what
did we do? We just copied other peoples' code
and then we tried to make it better. And
I advise doing the same thing for sketchnoting. I,
when I first started, just went on the internet,
just through Flicker everyday looking for other peoples' styles
that I liked, and I tried to just copy
it.
As you become more comfortable, you'll find your own
style. But it's OK, because even if you're trying
to copy somebody else's style, it's never gonna look
exactly like theirs. So it's always gonna be your
own.
Some good resources for that include Sketchnote Army, like
I said before. There is a hash tag on
flicker and there's various user groups on Flicker devoted
just to sketchnoting. I actually found a bunch of
boards on Pinterest, so that's another great resource.
So experimentation is how you're gonna find your own
style. And what I advise doing is start with
the copying, and then copy another persons' style and
then copy another persons' style and start mixing and
matching, and you'll sort of find your happy place.
I mean, I spent a lot of time trying
to, to match Paul Soupiset's handwriting. I've never gotten
it quite right.
But I've taken elements of what all of my
favorite sketchnoters do and tried to add them to
my own.
Mike Rohde wrote a book that covers a lot
more than what I was able to tell you
today. This book is amazing. It's actually got some
really great hands on exercises that you can do.
I highly recommend it.
So at the end of this talk, I've sat
here and I've told you all about how to
do this, and you're like, Jess, I still can't
draw. You haven't told me how to draw. But
that's OK. Cause you can sketchnote. So please go
do that.
OK. So the question was this talk focused on
sketchnoting for yourself, and is there any advice for
communicating with other people?
Yeah. I mean, I think, like, I, I mentioned
different ways or, different places that you can sketchnote.
I sketchnote in my meetings at work. I don't
do a great job of sharing them with everyone.
Nick, I'll do that next week. It is, I
think that is a good way. Sharing them actually
helps other people, too.
You'll find, in meetings, there's not actually a lot
of people that take notes. I mean, it's kind
of surprising sometimes. We all think we're gonna remember
when we walk away. So if you're the one
that sketchnotes and you know you find it fun
and other people find it fun, sharing it right
afterwards is actually really, really helpful.
We've done a lot of whiteboarding sessions, you know,
people take pictures with their cameras to capture that.
Your sketchnotes add another layer to that conversation. And
so I think just bringing all of that together
helps, you know, sort of document what happened so
people can remember.
Does that answer your question?
Thank you very much.