I’m a big believer in the power of making things visual. Whenever I take notes I make them a mix of words and images, because that’s how things stick in my brain. I’ve written a little bit about my note taking style in past posts. It’s a technique I wish more people felt confident in embracing. But whenever I bring it up, the, almost choral, refrain I hear is “I can’t draw”.
Everyone can draw. I mean we’re not all DaVinci, but we can all draw, and we can certainly all draw well enough to augment our own notes.
So I thought I’d show you some of the ways you can make your own notes more visual in the hopes that it gives you a confidence boost if you need one (everything here is really easy) or gives you a little bit of inspiration if you’re already feeling fly.
Simple layouts
Here’s a few ideas for how you can structure your pages to get the most out of them and give your notes an easy to follow layout.
Simple accents
One of the things I find the most useful in my visual notes is accenting and linking my written ideas. Here are a few of the ways you can add visual pops to make key ideas stand out or link up concepts.
Simple drawings
This is the bit you’ve all been waiting for, here are a few of my most drawn icons. I’ve tried to break them down so they’re easy to replicate and make part of your own work. These simple drawings should help you visualise your ideas and start to make you feel a little more confident with your drawing.
Challenge
I thought I’d leave this mini guide with a little bit of a challenge. I’ve given you a few starters, but this post doesn’t even scratch the surface of all of the things you may want to say or draw. The only way to do that is to start to develop your own visual vocabulary. Inspired by Krisztina Szerovay’s UX sketching challenge: 100 days of visual library building I’m leaving you with a worksheet to start to fill with your own drawings, as you need to. I’ve included some prompts, but also left you space to develop your own concepts where you want to. Krisztina suggests trying to do one of these little sketches every day to get you thinking more visually and to help you, slowly but surely, develop a full visual vocabulary.
