This blog post is a brief summary of the book titled “A Simple Guide to Sketchnoting” written by Alessio Bresciani

The book is organized in to byte sized chapters

Summary

The Power of Sketchnoting

The author gives a few examples from his own life to demonstrate the attitude that he developed towards sketchnoting. If you are beginning to sketchnote, you might feel overwhelmed by looking at some of the beautiful sketchnotes that others have created and in the process you might get de-motivated. It is important that you are measuring your progress based on your previous self. In that sense, you are be more willing to experiment bird by bird

The author gives a few reasons why one should sketchnote

  • It helps you to make sense of complex and sometimes chaotic deluge of information
  • It helps one to clarify thinking
  • It helps to look at problems in a different way that might trigger a different way to solve the problem
  • If you want to communicate your ideas, it is far better to use visuals as they are the best way to communicate stuff
  • Also if have a deluge of info, a visual or a sketchnote can organize the info in a way that makes it easier to distill the idea for future reuse
  • improves our brain’s ability to think, learn, remember and process information

The chapter also gives the 10,000 ft view picture of how drawing, visual thinking and sketchnoting are connected.

Visual Thinking

Visual thinking is a practice to represent ideas graphically. How you choose to represent these ideas - by mind maps, sketches, or concepts - there is plenty of evidence that visual thinking methods assist memory, the organization of ideas, and general planning.

Sketchnoting

‘Sketchnoting’ is a specific method within the category of visual thinking. I define it as the process of creating meaningful sketches while listening, reading or thinking about something of relevance. When sketchnoting, people use a variety of visual techniques (clouds, connectors, text, icons) to visually synthesize and summarize the subject under enquiry.

There are three key characteristics of a sketchnote

  • Purposeful: They are useful to illustrate a concept, idea etc
  • Referential : They are helpful in distilling a larger ideas in to representative illustrations
  • Creative: They are interesting to look at. They portray a sense of creative expression of the person creating them

The Sketchnoter’s Toolkit

This chapter talks about six essential techniques that any sketchnoter would need to learn

  • Arrows & Connectors: Join related ideas to create a sense of flow and meaning.
  • Clouds & Borders: Frame ideas and naturally separate themes.
  • Text Empathy: Let your writing speak volumes beyond what is written in the text.
  • People: Use simple shapes to connect ideas with people and actions.
  • Icons: Boost meaning by simplifying objects into sketched icons.
  • Shading: Add depth and lift your sketches off the page with this simple technique.

For each of the six components, the author provides sample images

Arrows and Connectors

Clouds and Borders

Text Empathy

People

Icons

Shading

Principles & Additional Techniques

The author gives a list of principles and additional techniques that one can use in sketchnoting

  • 2 to 3 colors
  • Leave space so your ideas have room
  • Blend large and small for added effect
  • Just go with it
  • Use Reflection technique
  • Add Horizons
  • Add Surroundings
  • Blend Icons and Borders

Patterns for Sketchnoting

This chapter gives a few layout ideas that one can experiment with

Columns

Mindmap

Slide

Wave

Quadrants

Diagonal

Paragraphs

Flow

Freeform

This has no specific pattern. You can explore and figure out whether this pattern resonates

Tools for your toolkit

I think there are many things mentioned in this chapter but for a beginner, may be a simple Pentel 0.5 pen and TowBow black pen set, along with the usual pencil and paper is more than enough. The main reason for reading this book was to that I could start sketchnoting. Found that this chapter was useful where I could just buy a few things and get started with sketchnoting.

Now where to apply the skill

Of course, you can’t get better if you don’t practice. You could practice for hours but there needs to be some sort of feedback mechanism for the work you do. In my case, I joined a community of sketchnoters where I could present my preliminary attempts to get feedback. Of course my objective of learning sketchnoting is to better capture, organize and distill and express information. But the other motivating part is that I have been writing book summaries for more than 15 years. It is only recently that I have incorporated visual thinking in to summaries where I tend to create mind maps. This additional element of sketchnoting is something that I am trying to learn and apply for a few books and see how it turns out

Takeaway

I love this short book where the author provides pretty much everything to get started on a sketchnoting journey - the principles, components, sample visuals and tools needed - all in one short book that can easily be read in a few hours. All that will be left is to start experimenting on sketchnoting. For someone who has never done sketchnoting of a concept or an idea or a book, this short book can be the perfect start on that journey.