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.