sacha chua living an awesome life

C.C. Chapman was in town to share insights from his latest book, Amazing Things Will Happen. Here are my sketchnotes from his talk tonight at Third Tuesday Toronto. =) Click on the image for a larger version, which should also print nicely on 8.5×11” in landscape mode. (Or even 11×17”!)

Feel free to share this! (Creative Commons Attribution License – enjoy! Links are not required, but are welcome.)

For more about C.C. Chapman, check out his blog, podcast, or Twitter feed.

If you like this, you might also want to check out my other sketchnotes and visual book reviews, or download my collection of sketchnotes from 2012 (free/PWYC). It’s always fun helping good ideas spread!

It’s always a pleasure working with Patricia, and yesterday’s workshop on graphic facilitation was a lot of fun. I took digital notes during the 3-hour workshop, and we printed them and distributed them right at the end. =)

Click on the image for a larger version, which should also print nicely on 8.5×11” in landscape mode.

Feel free to share this! =)

What worked well:

• Printing the notes right at the workshop itself – great impact, and it took only a few minutes and the organizer’s help.
• I really like this black ink / yellow highlighter combination. It’s super-simple, lets me add emphasis after the fact, doesn’t require me to switch colours, and prints out better in black-and-white than using coloured text does.
• I played around with a not-quite-columnar layout, using highlights and connectors to link everything together. Someone remarked that the light gray connectors helped lead the eye, so that worked out nicely.
• Shading with light gray worked well, too. I might do that with more of the images to add some depth, and perhaps add a warm gray to my colour palette.

Things to play with next time:

More shading! More depth! =) Maybe fancier titles, too? Using elaborate frames might let me keep the text simple so that Evernote can still search it… Maybe I can start a collection of frames.

I used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on a Lenovo X220i Tablet PC. =)

Click on the image for a larger version. Feel free to share this! (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

I cleaned them up a little and packaged them as a PDF for your viewing convenience:
http://j.mp/emacsconf2013sketches

Here they are individually, too! Click on an image to view the full-sized version, and feel free to share them under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Enjoy!

[Show as slideshow]

XWidgets - Joakim Verona

Emacswiki - Nic Ferrier

Arxana - Joe Corneli

Emacs Live - Sam Aaron

El-get - Dimitri Fontaine

From Marmalade to Emacs - Michael Olson

Emacs Devel - John Wiegley

Package Management - Nic Ferrier, Steve Purcell, Dimitri Fontaine

Slime - Luke Gorrie

Project Grok - Steve Yegge

Lightning Talks

Eva-Lotta Lamm and a great panel of sketchnote artists are running a challenge to sketch a particular talk. I managed to squeeze in a sketchnote just before today’s deadline.

What do I like about this sketchnote?

I captured enough to help me remember, and I had time for little doodles too. The light blue images and dark blue text look calmer than the red-black combination I used in some of my other sketchnotes. The brush size worked out fine in terms of the proportion.

I didn’t switch pen sizes or vary the size much because I wasn’t sure what was going to be important. Instead, I used simple borders to emphasize key points.

I’ve been experimenting with using a light shade to add more depth to my images. It usually takes me five minutes to go through an image. I didn’t do it here because the size and detail of the images felt right already.

Drawing with plenty of whitespace around each element allowed me to easily reposition things when I needed to rebalance the columns and reorganize the information. I’m sometimes tempted to go for more creative, overlapping layouts, but I do like the flexibility of being able to change my mind. I usually publish things shortly after drawing, so I didn’t spend a lot of time tweaking this image.

What would I like to improve?

I’ve been experimenting with different colour schemes. The first colour I drew the images in was too light, so I used GIMP to change the curve to something darker. Depending on what I want people to focus on, I’ve been trying out light text / dark images vs dark text / light images. It would be great to find a quick way of experimenting with the same image. Experimenting would be easier if I drew text and images on separate layers, but the presentation was information-dense, so I didn’t feel comfortable switching back and forth. I’ve tweaked my standard colour palette to include a darker blue like the one I used for the images here. That way, I can keep the light blue for shading, and I don’t have to adjust the colours after drawing. Next: Tweak my colour palette, and find a way to experiment more easily.

The presentation was only 30 minutes long. It turns out that the usual size I draw things at results in a one-page-per-hour sort of density, so I used only half the page. (Hooray for consistency!) It might be good to develop a dot grid that’s calibrated for half-hour talks so that I’m encouraged to draw at a larger size while preserving my usual landscape aspect ratio. Still, these columns worked out fine. Next: Try a different-sized dot grid for short talks, or get used to drawing larger.

It was pretty fast-paced, too. I don’t feel like I’ve fully captured the overall logic of the presentation. It would be nice to make this understandable for someone who hasn’t seen the presentation yet, which I think I can do with a little post-work (adding headings, explaining things in sentences instead of keywords). It feels a little disjointed at the moment, and I think I missed potentially interesting points like the one about the monoculture. The individual components are enough to remind me of what I want to remember about the talk, though. Next: Add more time for post-processing so that I can draw anything I missed the first time around.

—

Check out the other submissions! First set, second set: Kevin Mears (second set) has a good printout image. I like Andy Fisher’s (second set) puppeteer image, the cute robot, and the whitespace balance of the page.

With sketchnotes gaining in popularity, I’m often curious about how other people drew a talk. TED talks are popular for sketchnoting practice, and sketchnoters are beginning to bump into each other at conferences as well.

There are many avenues to share or discover sketchnotes, such as The Sketchnote Handbook Flickr Pool and the wonderful graphic recordings at Ogilvy Notes. Sketchnote Army is a blog that features lots of sketchnotes, and Twitter searches turn up even more. But there isn’t really something that’ll help you bump into other sketchnotes of the same talk, or even sketchnotes of the same conference.

Are we at the point yet where multiple people might be sketchnoting something? For popular TED talks, yes, and many conferences might have sketchnoters in the crowd. I think it would be interesting to make it easier for people to find each other and compare notes.

So I registered sketchnoteindex.com and created a quick spreadsheet to get a feel for the data that would be good to capture and how we might want to organize it. (Prototype with the lowest-effort thing first!) In addition to indexing topics, I’d like to eventually build an image and visual metaphor index too, so we can see how different people have represented time. Text search would rock someday. In the meantime, I put together a quick text prototype as an excuse to learn more about the Ember.js framework, although I’m thiiiis close to chucking it all and using Emacs or a Ruby script to generate static HTML.

Some things to consider:

• We want to avoid spam and build good data for navigation. I can start off manually indexing sketchnotes, and then open it up for submission (possibly with an assistant).
• Many sketchnotes don’t indicate their licensing, so technically, they’d be all rights reserved. We can link to things, and include thumbnails if we have permission.
• I can coordinate with Sketchnote Army (Mike / Binaebi) for submissions, and I can set up notifications for other sources.
• Revenue model: Advertising? Flesh this out into a system where conferences can pay a small fee to have branding on their page? Do this as a volunteer because I want to learn more about sketchnotes along the way? Hmm…

Right now, Ember.js pulls the data off the CSV I exported from my Google Docs spreadsheet. That way, I don’t have to create an admin interface or anything else. I’m not actually using Ember.js’ features (aside from a little templating and a few models), so I may swap it for something else.

So this was about eight hours including data entry (300+ sketchnotes; I did it myself instead of delegating because I wanted to sketch the idea out quickly), going through the Ember.js tutorials, and fighting with Javascript.

Learn more about mindmapping in this sketchnote of Chuck Frey’s Jan 14, 2013 webinar on Rock the Monkey: Visual Facilitation Skills and Brain-based Learning. Click on the image for a larger version.

Feel free to share this! © 2013 Sacha Chua, http://sachachua.com (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

Learn more about mindmapping on Chuck Frey’s blog, The Mindmapping Software Blog. You can also follow him on Twitter (@chuckfrey).

For more sketchnotes, see http://experivis.com/ and http://sachachua.com/blog/category/sketchnotes . Enjoy!

This post originally appeared on Experivis, the company I’m building around the idea of turning experiences into visuals.