Tag Archives: sketch notes

Visual summaries as a gateway for exploration

One of the growing uses of hand-drawn visuals is ‘1 Page Visual Summaries’. These visual summaries, bespoke graphics, derive their source materials from all sorts of topics and for a diversity purposes. The visual summary distils key information into engaging and appealing visual formats. Information turned into a visual summary, intended to highlight and share connections, stories, data, and all serving as a gateway for further exploration.

Hand drawn. Why? Is this different to graphic design, or using AI? It seems simple to me, though I respect differing views on this, I think the literally uniquesness of every person and their many undefined, complex and beautiful differences is ‘why’. When a human is processing and creating a visual summary they are bringing so many different finely tuned knowlegde and skills into these moments to absorb, process and produce a unique visual summary.

The rise in the popularity of 1 page visual summaries may be in part due needng to condense messages and knowledge to reach people as the information is in competition with other technologies saturating our time and attention. Whether for personal or other reasons tech overload, information interrupting our attentions is a phenomena in a way it has never been before.

Their is so much potential to convey simple or complex information in a condensed and accessible visual way.

If you would like to explore Visual Summaries please do get in contact, it would be great to hear from

New calendar entry for Friday afternoons

New calendar entry for Friday afternoons, and in all seriousness, ‘Creative Playtime’ 🥰

On a Friday afternoon for two years I have had in my diary to protect time for Creative downtime and I have rarely achieved this. However, this year I intend to give this a whole new priority as I believe it is an essential part of keeping that balance and being able to provide the energy in the work. Whilst I recognise it wont always be possible, this year, it will be a priority. And to kick it off a little playful look around the desk I spend so many hours at 🙂 I hope you enjoy it. PS the idea inspired by others and namely of recent Raquel Benmergui

A sketch note is good for the soul and mind

So the virtues of visual methods to engage people meaningfully and creatively are being endorsed more and more. This includes graphic facilitation, graphic recording, visual notes, scribing to name a few. All of which is great for the revolution of visual thinking and engaging people effectively. But where did and does it all begin? For me, quite simply, like for many, it began in many meetings where for my own sake I was trying to make sense of what I was hearing and aiming to capture key points to help my memory process and retain the nuggets of information.

I soon found the notes were becoming not only purposeful and useful but a great freedom and creativity within what was often an otherwise constrained environment. Many years on I still find myself totally absorbed by the content and fully connected with the pen when I sketch note purely. This sketch note was a response to a short animation from Matt Greenwood’s 50sec animation-24 design elements

 

Making more use and sense of our notes

How often have you spent hours of your life in meetings or training and written reams of notes that you have never referred to again? I used to. But then as doodling had always been a tool to help me focus and concentrate my notes gradually transformed into more purposeful notes with doodles i.e. ‘sketch notes’. In time this has led to an entire professional way of life which I’m not suggesting is everyone’s cup of tea, however, this article is nice illumination of how we can all transform a page of endless writing into a quick visual evocation of the main points and bring us back to the content in moments. Read the full article here Making more sense of our notes