sacha chua living an awesome life

Cheryl Lowry wrote about something many sketchnoters struggle with: running out of sketchnoting room during a talk. It got me thinking about the style I lean towards in my notes, and how I deal with too much or too little content.

My sketchnoting style is more information-dense and more linear/column-based than many other sketchnote styles I’ve seen. You can compare my recent sketchnotes with the ones on Sketchnote Army or the Flickr Sketchnotes pool to get a sense of how they’re different. I take information-dense sketchnotes because I want to remember and I don’t trust my memory. If I want to create a summary later on, I can do that from my sketchnotes, but it’s difficult to go the other way around. I’ve learned not to trust that events will have video, that I’ll have the patience to sit through a recording, or that slides will make sense after a quick flip-through. My notes are all I can rely on if I want to make sure that the time I spend listening to a talk doesn’t just evaporate into forgetfulness. =) So even if my hand cramps a little after sketchnoting a full-day conference with few breaks (hooray for quick finger exercises and stretches), it’s worth it because I come away with much more and I can remember a lot.

I paraphrase a lot because I want to make ideas more concise, particularly when it comes to Q&A sessions where people haven’t rehearsed what they want to say.

I’ve thought about writing less and drawing more, but I’m actually pretty happy with where I am. Summarization comes afterwards, when I know what’s important to me. Most presentations do very little sign-posting of what they’re going to cover and how important each part is, and even the ones that do can sometimes go on interesting tangens. When I’m sketchnoting a presentation, I don’t want to prematurely lock into the structure or metaphor I think the speaker has (even if they say they’re going to talk about 7 things, for example). That takes me out of the moment and makes me second-guess myself when the speaker says something interesting that doesn’t fit into the pattern I want to draw. A column-based layout may feel less creative, but it frees me up to listen.

I might go back and move things around a little during the gaps in the talk, but I generally don’t go back and reorganize everything. I want to publish things as quickly as possible. My target is to publish the sketchnotes within 10 minutes after the talk ends, and I usually do. It’s a great way to delight people over social media.

I write simple letters on a plain white background. My images and text tend to be separated by whitespace so that I can move things around as needed. I draw uncomplicated figures. I generally use one or two accent colours and maybe a lighter shade for highlighting or depth. Again, I’m optimizing for speed and attention. I’ve thought about going back and revising some of my sketchnotes to be more visually engaging, but then there’s so much new material that would be interesting to draw instead. Besides, I don’t want to give people the impression that that kind of detail or layout is what they’ll get from me when live sketchnoting. I really like being done with a sketchnote shortly after a talk. This also means I don’t have to worry too much about following up and I don’t have to juggle multiple ongoing projects. I do occasionally revise sketches and help people turn them into proper illustrations for reuse, but that would definitely be a paid gig. =)

I draw over a light dot grid, and that helps me fill a page at a more consistent rate. I know that if there’s an hour-long talk, I can draw letters at my normal size. If it’s a short non-interactive talk like an Ignite presentation or a TED talk, I might put several talks on one page, or I might increase the size and be a little looser with the layout. As I listen, I adjust my writing depending on the rate that people are speaking. If they speak slowly or they repeat themselves a lot, I’ll draw more images. If they speak quickly, I’ll try to capture as much as I can, and then go back and add highlights and some icons afterwards. Because I work digitally, I can remove the grid before publishing the image.

Working digitally makes it easy for me to compensate for different talk densities. If a speaker ended up saying less than I expected, I can rearrange the text and images around to look more balanced or I can crop the image at the appropriate point. If a speaker says more, it’s easy to add another layer and save a separate image. Autodesk Sketchbook Pro isn’t a vector program, so enlarging things doesn’t work particularly well, but I can move around or reduce parts of my image if I need to squeeze in some more information.

Other sketchnoters have great tips, too. Some people write down just the first few letters of a word or phrase, and then go back and fill the rest when there’s time. The Bikablo books encourage you to practise drawing key icons the same way each time, so that you can quickly sketch the first couple of strokes to remind you of what to draw. The Sketchnote Handbook talks about using your audio memory to hold on to thoughts as you draw. These tips work for me, too, and I’m getting the hang of using them. Hope they work for you too!

One of the interesting things about sketchnoting is that now I have a better sense of how much space there is in most presentations and conversations. It’s like seeing key words light up and thinking, “Oh, I want to capture that,” and also seeing the gaps where you can write or draw. You develop a sense of how much you can squeeze into each gap. If you find that you’re picking up more keywords than you have the time to capture, you can increase your thresholds for interestingness or reduce the complexity of your capture.

You can develop this sense of timing by practising with talks of specific lengths. For example, if you go to a lot of 1-hour talks, you’ll get a sense of how much people typically cover in an hour. Every so often, it’s good to practise with something that’s really information-dense: a well-written nonfiction book, an intermediate- or advanced-level talk. Like the way you can improve your speed-reading performance by occasionally reading at a rate faster than you can comprehend, it’s good to scramble in sketchnoting from time to time.

Hope that helps!

Cheryl Lowry: “Drawing is easy. Thinking is hard.”

FITC hired me to sketchnote the FITC Toronto 2013 conference/festival, which finished yesterday. Since the conference focused on art, design, and technology, visual notes made perfect sense. =)

Workflow: Because I do digital sketchnotes using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on a Lenovo X220 tablet PC, I could sit anywhere in the audience, sketch during the presentation, and publish and tweet the finished, highlighted sketchnotes 5-10 minutes after the event ends. This was very convenient, because it meant that I didn’t need any special room setup (so I could go to whichever session seemed the most appropriate) and we could tap into the buzz on social media while the session was top-of-mind. It also meant that the speakers could see (and share!) the summaries right away, as they typically monitored Twitter for feedback.

I spent about five minutes before each session setting up the image: copying the speaker’s picture, spelling the title and the speaker’s name carefully, and so on. I used the colours from the track indicators, although that ended up with this shade of pink for most of the sketches. I drew using my base colour, moving things around as needed. I added highlights on a lower layer in order to make it easier to focus on key points. I didn’t use placeholder filenames this time. I simply switched back to laptop mode and typed in the talk information. Then I used WinSCP to copy the .PNG over to the NextGEN gallery directory I’d previously created, and I rescanned the directory using the web interface. This worked out much better than uploading the files through the web interface because scp-ing it preserved the filenames and allowed me to not worry about timeouts. After the system generated thumbnails for the newly-uploaded image, I copied the talk information into the image description, and I used that in the tweet as well. I used AutoHotkey to expand !f into http://j.mp/fitcto13sketches so that I didn’t have to worry about mistyping the URL. (Although it turns out that I should probably choose shorter custom URLs…)

What would make this even better?

I can advertise the sketchnotes in the real world. A foam-core board on an easel would be a great way to point people to the URL for the sketchnotes. I could either hand-draw an image or print a poster. (Might even pull off a custom poster for a multi-day event!) That way, even people who aren’t monitoring Twitter or checking the blog could come across the sketches. It would probably be good to set up the publishing arrangements beforehand and include it in the program too, again to increase the value that people get from the sketchnotes.

I can try out reverse video. The room was kept very dark during talks to help people see the slides, so the light from laptops stood out. I created an inverse version of my grid, but I wasn’t sure how well I could deal with inverting the drawing colours too while keeping it printable. Maybe developing a set of colours that work well inverted? Might be something to consider for next time. Ex: Lynne Cazaly’s sketchnote of Frank Trindade’s talk

I can increase thumbnail size. In a week or two, once clicks have gone down or once I’ve gotten a proper development environment set up again, I’m thinking of tinkering with the theme on Experivis so that I have three columns of thumbnails that span the whole page. I might also experiment with embedding Flickr galleries, because Flickr might be a decent content-delivery network that takes the load off my server.

I can revise the images to remove information. If I write less, I can draw more. Revising old images is a way to prototype that look without having to think about getting to the right balance in real-time.

I like drawing conferences. I’m going to specialize in digital sketchnoting and book reviews with the occasional illustration or presentation design. No analog for me, as there are plenty of other people who can handle that and I don’t like doing post-processing as much!

See http://j.mp/fitcto13sketches for the sketchnotes. Enjoy!

Embarrassing mistakes are excellent ways to find and deal with bugs in your life. A couple of months ago, I wrote about phone problems, and I’m happy to report that the extended battery is working out well for me. On to the next bug!

I occasionally make small errors while sketchnoting. I get some URLs wrong, swap pictures around, or drop or switch letters. In about 200 sketchnotes, I’ve had embarrassing errors turn up in three of them – one I caught myself, and two that clients caught. Those numbers tell me that it’s not actually as bad a problem as I thought it was. Plenty of other people’s sketchnotes have spelling or grammar mistakes. Still, it would still be nice to figure out how I can reduce the risk further.

Here are some likely causes of error and what I can do about them:

• Brain hiccup: A momentary distraction causes me to misspell a word. I usually catch these through visual inspection or by mentally sounding out the words as I draw them, and they’re easy to catch a few seconds after I make them because I’m focused on that area of the screen. However, I rarely do a full review of the sketchnote before I publish it or send it, so I may miss errors that I didn’t detect right away. Possible fix: Slow down and do a full review, possibly guided by a finger so that I make sure I cover the entire sketch instead of missing something because my gaze skips around. I can also review my past sketches to see if I can calibrate myself to a higher level of abstraction (less detail), which will give me more time to focus.
• Forgotten layers: The lack of full review also means I sometimes forget to hide layers I’m no longer using. Same fix as the previous item – slow down and look at everything to see if it makes sense, and view the sketch as a whole as well.
• Spots left over after erasing: These are hard to see when zoomed out, so there might not be a workaround other than reviewing everything zoomed in.
• Working memory failure when rewriting stuff: When I redraw parts of my sketch, I need to make sure that I re-copy information correctly. Possible fix: I can avoid context-switching and reduce working memory load by using my phone or tablet as a second screen. That way, I can refer to e-mail or the previous image while drawing. I can also work with layers, drawing the new thing on top and then erasing it from the previous layer when done.
• Order when copying or writing: This can be tricky in panels and multi-speaker talks. I need to slow down and make sure that I have the speakers in the right order so that I can attribute ideas correctly. Some panels don’t have people sit in the same order as the program, so keeping the panel information on a single layer would make it easier to rearrange. I should also double-check speaker information and make sure I get the complete set before drawing, to reduce the number of edits.

I like having another person doublecheck my sketchnotes before they go out, although it does add a bit more time. Alternatively, I could figure out how to improve my editing workflow so that making changes to published sketchnotes is easy. So far, the ones I’ve needed to tweak were in Dropbox and therefore easy to update, but I might need to update blog posts too someday.

Continuous improvement!

Okay, I’ve figured more stuff out in terms of expanding my visual vocabulary! =) Here’s my current workflow.

Goals:

• Pick up different ways to draw things by analyzing other people’s sketchnotes
• Get faster at drawing things through practice
• Develop a visual dictionary of words and images
• Draw my own versions and organize them for easy reuse

I get a lot of exposure to other people’s sketchnotes in the process of adding material to http://sketchnoteindex.com/, which now indexes 89 artists. I’m slowly working through them in order, clipping rectangular regions that have images that I’d like to file or draw. I started by using the Evernote Clipper, but Greenshot (free and open source) is much better for what I want to do. Greenshot lets me automatically save the results to files in a specified directory, and it adds the title of the page to the file. This is awesome. The next step is to add keywords to each of those files and then move them into another directory. I might import them into Evernote for additional searching, too. The end result is a library of images that I can use to spark my imagination when drawing.

I’ve also been drawing my way through the Bikablo® series of books from Neuland. I’m more than halfway through Bikablo Emotions. The books are pricey, but I thought it was a good investment in a) drawing better, and b) learning how to organize things. It’s a lot of fun sketching the images. If I keep drawing them, I might have more ideas when drawing quickly. I’m starting to get the hang of drawing certain postures that show up a lot. This is good.

Here’s a sample:

I’m looking forward to finishing that and the Bikablo v2 book, filing the individual sketches, and then going through my visual library of other people’s sketchnote elements to draw even more of those… Lots of things to draw!

I want to draw more expressively. Some easy ways to improve my visual vocabulary are to look at how other people draw things and practise drawing with those styles. I started by redrawing the images onto index cards, but it was a hassle to keep the index cards sorted. Besides, I wasn’t looking forward to the error-prone process of scanning all the index cards in and making them available on my phone or computer. I didn’t want to fuss about with splitting my screen and trying to draw in a small section, or browsing through pages on my tablet while redrawing things on my tablet PC. I wanted a quick and easy way to build a visual glossary in preparation for drawing things myself.

Skitch turned out to be a great way to quickly capture small sections from other people’s sketchnotes and add them to Evernote. Ctrl-% captures a screenshot. That requires too much hand gymnastics and popped up a dialog, so I used AutoHotkey to map my F5 function key to ^`%{Space}. This meant that I could hit a single key to capture the screenshot and send the previous one to Evernote, so I could keep one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyboard. It was relaxing work, and so easy that I got a little carried away. I captured some 800 images before I sat down and started classifying them.

I wanted to label each image with a keyword that I could use to find it. Another Autohotkey shortcut mapping F6 to !nv{Enter}{Esc}{Tab}^a made it much easier to move the note to my Visual Library notebook and select the next note for editing. I settled into the rhythm of typing in keywords and pressing F6, and after a couple of hours, I’d classified all the images I’d captured so far. I spent a little time merging similar concepts for easier review, ending up with 575 entries in my visual library.

Some things I learned along the way:

• Many sketchnotes have just a handful of images. Some feel very graphical anyway because of lettering flourishes and creative layouts. My style actually involves more mini-images than many of the ones I’ve seen, but I don’t develop them to the level of detail in some people’s sketchnotes.
• A good portrait goes a long way. I should practise drawing people.
• Simple shading has a nice effect. A light gray tone or a subtle shadow colour can really add depth.

There are still plenty of other sketchnotes to harvest drawings from, so I can alternate harvesting images with practising drawing them.

Links: Skitch, Evernote, Autohotkey, the Sketchnote Index

I talked to Mike Rohde about digital sketchnoting and my workflow. You can watch the podcast and check out other episodes!

Slightly edited for clarity

[00:01] Mike Rohde: Hey. this is Mike Rohde for the Sketchnote podcast. Today we have Sacha Chua, but before we get started I’d like to say that this episode of the podcast is sponsored by my son Landon, who is very cute and two months old. But now back to the program.

This is Sacha Chua, she lives in Toronto, Ontario, and she uses something interesting that I wanted to explore because this is something I have talked about before – using a digital setup to do sketch notes.

I do my sketch notes in analog form. I use a notebook and a pen and I’ve played around with the iPad but I found it still challenging. I haven’t found figured out the right stuff for me, like the way to do it right, because I’ve been focused on this book. But Sacha has an advanced system that she uses. She uses a tablet PC and I wanted to bring her on the podcast to talk a little bit about her setup and how she uses it and how it works for her. So welcome Sacha, thank you for coming.

[00:53] Sacha Chua: Of course. I’d be happy to help people learn more.

[00:56] Mike Rohde: Great, so why don’t you start by explaining what the basic tools are that you use to do your digital setup? And then we can get into the benefits of those and maybe some of the things that make it different from paper.

[01:10] Sacha Chua: So when a lot of people think about digital sketchnoting–actually when people think about sketchnoting, they think pen and paper. And when they think about digital sketch noting, they might think of a tablet, like an iPad or an Android tablet. But if you start working with a tablet PC for digital sketchnoting–and I’ll show you that in a bit–you can take advantage of a lot more power: applications that work together, you have the processing power, and there are all sorts of interesting tools and workflows that you can use.

[01:35] Mike Rohde: Cool, very good. Well, why don’t you tell us about the tools you use, specifically, and the tablet PC and the styluses and software that you like to use for your setup.

[01:45] Sacha Chua: Alright, I use Lenovo X 220 tablet PC. I’ll zoom a little bit down to show you this. So this converts into a tablet by simply swiveling the screen and then you can either have it automatically rotate the screen for you or you can rotate it into your preferred orientation. Then I use Autodesk SketchBook Pro to draw on the screen itself. So as you can see I have that straight on there and in a short while I’ll switch over to sharing my screen so you can see that screen directly. So I use a Lenovo X220 tablet PC–they are fantastic—and I use Autodesk SketchBook Pro as the main drawing program. Then for publishing I’ll use Dropbox, Twitter, and WordPress for getting the sketch notes out there.

[02:33] Mike Rohde: Pretty cool. Now the stylus I see in your hand, I assume that came with the Lenovo?

[02:37] Sacha Chua: Yes, in fact it slots into a space for it, right in the case. And they have put in an alarm, so if you are walking off without your stylus, you actually get this little icon showing up on your screen.

[02:54] Mike Rohde: Oh, the proximity alarm. That is very cool.

[02:57] Sacha Chua: Yeah, and you can actually use pen and touch to interact with your screen. Because I do so many sketches notes, I’ve set it up to only recognize the pen. As you can see, even if I touch it, I can use my palm, it doesn’t trigger. If I use the pen, then things happen.

[03:14] Mike Rohde: So now Sacha has gone ahead and switched over to screen view so we can actually see her how she works and she can explain a little more of her process. So go ahead, Sacha.

[03:21] Sacha Chua: Okay, so you’re asking about whether I zoom in. I really like Autodesk SketchBook Pro because it has such a pen-based interface. I can zoom in and scroll around fairly easily–not as easily as you can with a multi-touch display, but easily enough so I can go in here, write a few things more eligibly, and then I can zoom out and see how that fits into the whole space or move things around as needed.

[03:56] Mike Rohde: I think I have seen Dave Gray do this work and I assume if you felt you needed to center under those two columns you could easily grab it and move it over, if you like, so that is one of the advantages to that software.

[04:10] Sacha Chua: Absolutely, and that makes me totally spoiled when it comes to working digitally. You know that challenge when sometimes speakers have too much content or too little content and you are scrambling for space in your sketchnote… When you are working on a computer, it’s easy to lasso an item, move it around and make space. For example, if it turns out that people didn’t give as much content as you expected, you can move things around and it looks like an excellent use of white space.

[04:43] Mike Rohde: Wonderful. Now in the middle of that drawing I see you got your work flow. Can you zoom that up and maybe take us through your work flow?

[04:49] Sacha Chua: Sure. So I do a lot of sketchnotes of books and presentations, and as I mentioned, I do most of that in Autodesk SketchBook Pro. A couple of things make it much easier for me to get this out very quickly: I usually work with a drawing template. Let me show you what that looks like with it. I say Add image, I pick one of my templates (for example, "grid and credits") and what that does is it allows me to add a very faint grid that I can draw on. Sometimes I leave this grid in, sometimes I take it out, but it means I don’t have to worry about my lines wandering elsewhere. I do all this drawing in Autodesk SketchBook Pro with lots of layers, and then if I want to include any logos or pictures, I can draw that into Sketchbook directly. If I want to trace the logo, I can use Artrage Studio Pro which automatically picks up the colors as I am drawing on something. It’s much easier to color match without having to pick up those little colors in multicolor logos.

[05:46] Mike Rohde: So it looks like down there you also have Camtasia running as well.

[05:48] Sacha Chua: Yes I do. So I’ve sketched it out in Autodesk Sketch Book Pro. If I think I am going to want to put together a speed drawing video, I’ll use Camtasia Studio to record this in the background, like I am doing now. When I am done with the image, I’ll save it in Dropbox. This automatically synchronizes the file with my phone, and then I can use my phone or my computer to post that to Twitter. If I’m sketchnoting a conference with lots and lots of talks, I don’t want to be switching back and forth between Autodesk SketchBook Pro and Dropbox and Twitter and my blog and all those other things. I can use my phone to tweet the links immediately and then I can save the laptop for drawing.

[06:38] Mike Rohde: Gotcha. So you sort of offload some of those tasks to other devices and then keep the devices focused for the things they are really good at.

[06:47] Sacha Chua: Right. And that means I don’t have to be switching back and forth between applications, so if people are saying interesting things, I can keep drawing. I usually post recap blog posts. If it is just one talk, then I’ll blog it right away. If it’s a conference, I’ll wait until the end of the conference to post a blog post with thumbnails and links to the full size images, so people can share this with other people later on. In addition to posting it to my blog, I also upload my sketchnotes in Evernote, so then it is much easier to search through my notes.

[07:23] Mike Rohde: Great. So tell me a little bit about this: I’ve been exploring every now and then and I have been thinking of going back because of some of the new features. Do you tag your work? Can Evernote scan your sketch notes since you have really beautiful handwriting? Can it scan the sketch notes to pick up words or do you have to manually enter that meta-information?

[07:44] Sacha Chua: This is amazing. It can actually understand most of what I write and then I help it a little bit with some key words. So for example, you can see how I can put most of the sketch notes into this "Sketchnotes by Sacha Chua" notebook, which I have actually shared publicly so anyone can find this notebook and subscribe to it. If I search in here… Say, for example, I’m looking for “visual library” which you mentioned in your book. So "visual library"–you can see how it is looking inside the image and it it’s highlighting where it sees those words. Here are my sketch notes, you can see here how "visual library" [shows up] even inside all caps – a small box has been found and highlighted. In addition to being able to search text, I also occasionally fill in some more information so that I can easily find the visual metaphors that I use. For example, in this digital sketchnoting workflow, I’ve also added some words that I might not have written down or might not easily be recognized by Evernote. You can see here how I’ve got this keyword for magnifying glass, and that allows me to find all the sketch notes where I have drawn a magnifying glass in case I feel like challenging myself to use different visual metaphors.

[09:06] Mike Rohde: That is interesting. That is really fascinating.

[09:09] Sacha Chua: It is amazing. I strongly recommend checking Evernote. You can set it up so that it will import all the files into a folder. I set up a shortcut so after I publish the sketchnote using Dropbox, I can just right click on the file and have that be imported to my Evernote.

[09:25] Mike Rohde: Wow. I notice you have got a little spot in the lower left, some of the caveats of using this system. What are some of those at a high level?

[09:31] Sacha Chua: Well, let me switch to those so we can zoom in on that. A lot of times people get hung up on the expense. Certainly, if you already have a computer, buying a new tablet PC can be a significant cost. Because this is my main computer, I find that it is pretty much worth the investment. I’ve upgraded it with lots of memory and lots of hard disk space so I can use it for all the things that I do.

Apple tends not to believe in tablet computers that have pens in them. I really don’t know why, but if you want to work with a Lenovo X220 tablet PC like I do, then it probably means getting yourself set up on Microsoft Windows, because that is where most of the applications are. That can take a little bit of a learning curve for people.

The weight of this is a bit of a concern as well. I can’t remember the exact weight, but because I have the tablet as well as an extended battery pack, I can go for an entire conference without having to worry about plugging into a power outlet. But this also means I carry a fairly heavy backpack for these things.

And let’s mention battery life: if you don’t get an extended battery pack, your battery life will be much shorter than a regular tablet. But if you do get the extended battery, which I consider to be well worth it, then at least you don’t have to fight so much over a power outlet at conferences.

[10:58] Mike Rohde: Interesting. And I know I mentioned Dave Gray uses this tablet PC. I think a couple of years back we did a conference: I was up in front and he got to draw on his PC. I actually kind of liked the screen and it felt a lot like pencil and paper to me, oddly enough. I don’t know, but he might have had a different brand but it was the same thing. And I thought, "This is kind of interesting." I haven’t explored that yet because I have other machines I have already invested in and it wouldn’t be an investment for me, but I’m really curious about it. I think people are thinking about it and it is a really interesting option that you should consider.

[11: 31] Sacha Chua: It is actually very smooth and I prefer it over drawing on paper or a tablet. On paper, it is sometimes scratchy and your lines don’t go where you want them to go. The texture is nice, but I’ve found that when I’m drawing on a tablet PC, my lines look a lot more confident because they are digital and because I am not relying on friction and all those other things. A tablet is a much more consistent experience for me.

[12:01] Mike Rohde: This is really fascinating. I love that you have done that. I am really excited to be sharing this with people, because I think a lot of people still use paper. Thank you for being on the show. What we are going to do is include some links to all these references so people can check you out, they can read your blog, they can look at this image more closely and see your sketch notes and we will share that with people. Thank you so much for coming on, Sacha.

[12: 28] Sacha Chua: My pleasure. You know, digital drawing has been the key thing. It has made it much more fun for me and I think it would be lovely if more people gave it a try.

[12:36] Mike Rohde: Great. And maybe, as a way to end this show, can you verbally give us some places where people can find you: Twitter, blog and so forth?

[12:45] Sacha Chua: You can find me at Twitter as @sachac . You can check out my sketch notes and other things I have posted at my blog. You don’t have to remember my name for that one, you can go directly to livinganawesomelife.com. Which it is.

[13:06] Mike Rohde: I can see that you are passionate about it and I just loved talking with you today. Thank you for taking the time and hope you get lots of interest from people that are curious and asking questions. Thank you.

[13:15] Sacha Chua: My pleasure. Have fun.

[13:16] Mike Rohde: Okay. Thanks a lot.

[13:19] Mike Rohde: And that wraps up this episode of The Sketchnote Handbook Podcast. We are going to do more stuff like this and bring other people and see how their workflows work, so tune in for the next episodes as they come out. Thanks.

Related:

• My digital sketchnoting workflow
• Evernote notebook of sketchnotes
• Sketchnote collection

I sketchnoted TEDxOCADU live, and my new workflow is working out well. I’ve been moving more of my sketchnotes over to experivis.com – do folks still want to see them here? Might be handy. Anyway, I like reflecting on what worked well and what I can do even better, so this blog is still the best place for that.

For TEDxOCADU, here were my experiments:

Set up all the layers and saved them as placeholder PNGs beforehand so that I didn’t have to type in filenames or look up speaker names.

• Sketched during the dress rehearsal, and reused many of my images during the actual conference: great for knowing where people are going, although I still stuck with fairly regular layout.
• Used Dropbox to get the Twitter links, copied the URLs, and set up my list of hashtagged and linked tweets using ClipMate: great for tweeting things on the fly with just my laptop
• Set up a gallery page for updating throughout the day
• Set up a bit.ly link to track clicks for my gallery page
• Double-checked WiFi access: so much better than tethering through my phone
• Followed up with social media / web person in case they needed help getting the images up on the official site
• Eventually remembered to set up Google Analytics on experivis.com – added this to the checklist of things to do when spinning up a website…

Here are some things I can tweak next:

• Add more images to my ClipMate library
• Have a smoother delegation workflow so that I can get my sketchnotes typed in
• Figure out how to integrate text into the gallery view; maybe project-sketchnote relationship?
• More graphics! More! More!
• Don’t forget to have Archivist or some other Twitter archiver running in the background
• Consider Tweetreach or some other Twitter analytics report?
• Set up tracking links for each image, too, or always send people to the gallery page