Ironhack Pre-course Work, lab 1 | The Sketchnotes — Visual Note-Taking
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 “How to make choosing easier” by Sheena Inyengar. I wanted to do it as ‘fair’ as possible, so I watched the video once and only paused it once — more to due my low-paced writing skills.
As you may can tell, I got a bit stuck in the beginning. I found it hard to let go of my perfectionism (“It’s called visual note-taking, so it has to look visually perfect”) — but in the end I just tried and it worked out quite well.
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.
For the second act, I watched a webinar on Crowdcast called “The best kept secrets to mastering UX/UI design”. I little research on what I’m about to throw myself into for the next 9 weeks can’t hurt anybody ;-)
This act actually went way better than the first part. I’m not exactly sure wether this is just luck, and that my drawings and positions on the paper just turned out to match with what Elizabeth Alli told in the webinar — but I’m quite happy with the results.
My final conclusion: I love this! It’s a really good way to just stick to the main message and let go of your perfectionism. Will definitely keep on practicing this 👩🏼💻
