I have wanted to try visual note-taking for a while and have given it a couple of tries, but find that I drift to using mostly words.  I bought Mike Rohde’s The Sketchnote Handbook last fall as inspiration.  This week I attended a symposium on MOOCs and Libraries so decided to try visual note-taking in one of the sessions.  I ran into quite a few problems.  I didn’t allocate an appropriate amount of space for each of the three speakers.  I rambled with the first speaker who ended up with 75% of the page real estate.  My next problem was that I had ideas for things I wanted to draw but blanked out when trying to actually draw them.  Luckily we had WiFi in the room so I could quickly Google for a couple of ideas.  I used a black liquid gel pen and made a couple of mistakes that were hard to disguise as something else.

Next time I try this I think will follow a couple of Mike Rohde’s suggestions – prepare more ahead of time by doing a bit of background research, complete the title of the presentation before it starts  and build up a stock of logos and frequently used images that can be trotted out when required.