My first time Sketchnoting

María Romero
3 min readSep 26, 2019

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In this post I will tell you my experience doing some sketchnoting for the first time and the result.

First of all, what is sketchnoting? It is a technique that consists of capturing ideas through drawings and texts, and is also known as Visual Note Taking. We have all taken notes sometime, however, that does not prevent us from not keeping focused, nor not understanding what we wanted to express in the first moment (especially for people with terrible calligraphy, like me).

Sketchnoting creates a flow of thought that makes necessary to stay tuned and to process the ideas quickly to create a visual scheme of information in which the ideas are connected in a coherent and understandable way. In addition, if you revisit it, the task of recognizing the ideas you wanted to be reflected at first is much easier.

For this exercise I chose a TED talk in the Interface Design section entitled “Could future devices read images from our brains?” By Mary Lou Jepsen.

Source: Youtube

While listening to the talk for the first time, I started taking visual notes with a pencil, trying to follow a logical path that covered all the paper. I quickly realized that the talk progresses faster than my brain while it is trying to listen, process the content, filter the relevant stuff, visualize the idea as an image, draw it and connect it with the above. So I decided to allow myself to pause it and rewind at certain times, especially at the beginning. The initial result has been the following:

#1 Try

After seeing many results of sketchnoting on the internet, I have to say that I felt a little bit disappointed with my result. At first, it seemed a relatively easy task, but in the end it took me to do it twice as long as the TED Talk lasted and the result did not fit much to its purpose: to express the main ideas of the talk in an understandable way (and I’m no even talking about its absolute lack of aesthetics).

I reviewed my notes and removed some aspects that, after listening to the whole talk, were not really relevant, and I also reordered some elements to make them more understandable. With these modifications in mind, I tried again and redid the scheme on a new sheet, this time with a pen.

#2 Try

I still wasn’t satisfied with the result. I did not love some details of its structure, nor the aesthetics. So I did it again to improve that second attempt, and this is the final result of my sketchnoting exercise.

#3 Try

From this exercise I have drawn the following conclusions:

  • It’s not as easy as it seems, and there are really talented people out there.
  • It has been hard for me to distinguish the relevant content from what is not in the talk, especially at the beginning.
  • Although at the beginning it was difficult for me to follow the talk, understand the content and turn it into drawings, I experienced some fluency as I progressed in the exercise. Since a little inertia is created, more ideas emerge progressively.
  • Performing the exercise has helped me structure my thinking and focus on the content of the talk. Also, frustrations aside, it has been fun!
  • It has been difficult for me to calculate the visual space that each figure or idea should cover, and to give greater prominence to the main ideas. I consider that I have visually highlighted ideas that were not as relevant as others that, however, remain proportionally discrete on paper.

Thank you very much for reading this post!
What do you think? Did you like the final result? Have you ever tried sketchnoting?

See you in the comments section! :D

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María Romero

Interaction Designer @ BBVA | Data protection & IT Legal Advisor