The Sketchnotes — Visual Note-Taking

Exercise 1 of prework as a UX/UI student at Ironhack Berlin

Sketchnote is the technique of creating rich visual notes from a mixture of typography, calligraphy, geometric shapes, arrows, boxes and lines. Sketchnotes do not require special drawing skills, but they do require you to listen, visually synthesize and summarize ideas through writing, drawing and icons.

In this exercise, we had to perform two acts.

Act one

Select a TED Talk tagged in the category Interface Design and make visual notes while watching the video.

I chose the TED talk “Everything around you can become a computer” by Ivan Poupyrev. I watched the video twice to finish the Sketchnote. The first time I made some notes to organize the content of the video. Then I watched it again, I started filling the spaces with drawings and icons and adding details that went unnoticed the first time.

Act two

Select a Meetup or webinar where you want to attend, make quick notes with a pencil or pen during the lecture, and then finalize your ideas with drawings and icons.

This Act two was more challenging than the first because I chose the Meetup “UX Crunch at Home: Research with Complex User Groups” with four speakers (Constantine Konstantakis, Sara Darbi, Christie Lau and Tim Daines). Before attending the Meetup I did research on each of the speakers and on the subject of their presentations. In this way, it became a little easier for me to pay more attention to the details.

I found the practice of the exercise of synthesizing spoken information with writing and drawing very interesting. My drawings are not summarized, but I believe that with practice the notes will be more visually organized.