Sketchnoting: Drawing as a Communication Tool

Sketchnoting 101: Drawing as a Communication Tool

“We are at the end of our course! Thanks for getting here with us. We’ve both had a lot of fun putting this course together for you, and completing our final project. We think it’s a pretty good visual summary of the life of Picasso! Now it’s time to consolidate what you’ve learned and tackled a project of your own—and the beauty of this way of working is that it can be applied to almost any content. We recommend that you choose a subject that interests you, but not something you’re so much of an expert in that you’ll find it hard to know what to leave out! Remember that the purpose of your project is to summarise, and the amount of content you include should be enough to be informative but not so much that it’s overwhelming. So to summarise, here are the main steps to completing your final project: • Choose your subject and immerse yourself in it. Note down all the information that you find interesting or important on post-it notes—one per point—and capture anything visual that is relevant or useful in quick, simple sketches. • Now you have your raw material, it’s good to have a rough idea of how many chunks of content you will include. Layout your post-it notes, putting any that are purely sketches to one side for now, and try to define your top 10. If you want a couple more or less that’s ok, but we find somewhere between 8 (a nice amount) and 12 (slightly richer) is about right. • Great! You have your content. Now, bearing in mind you need to allocate some space for your title, arrange those post-its roughly in an area matching the shape of your final project. Pay attention to the order in which you might want them to be read, and whether any points would work particularly well adjacent to each other. • Does a particular layout come to mind? Maybe it’s a grid, maybe the content radiates out from a central title, maybe you follow the content like stepping stones. Or perhaps you can think of a more illustrative approach—is there a more creative structure that could really help bring your content to life and let the viewer know the subject at a glance? Did you make note of any visuals that could be utilised? • Time to sketch it out. Start with your underlying structure, and then gradually populate it with each of your key points. Think about the different ways of representing information we’ve explored and push yourself to give variety and interest. Don’t settle for generic illustrations—really try and make everything reflect and reinforce your subject. Use a variety of lettering styles to differentiate between different levels of information, from bold headlines to smaller, simpler annotations. • Once you’re happy with your sketch, you could ink it in or you could digitise it. To do that, photograph or scan your sketch and open it in Photoshop or in a favourite drawing app on your tablet like Procreate. Make your work look bold and confident, enjoying the fact that working digitally makes it easy to add strong areas of flat colour. Here is how you can present your final project, displaying some of the steps described above: Post-it and simples sketches

Layout Digitised version Final version with text Final version with color Once you’ve completed your final project, we’d love to see it so please post it in the forum. Make sure you check out the work of other students too—we get inspired by seeing how other people approach their sketchnotes and you will too. Ok, you’re done! We can’t wait to see your efforts and are really looking forward to seeing what subjects you’ve chosen and learning something new! Thanks and see you later! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project You've reached the end of this foundation skills for scribing and sketchnoting course, and you've achieved so much. Thank you for coming on this journey with us, and learning a bit of what we love to do. You started this course by learning why visual notes are such a great tool. We explained our 5 commandments for drawing, alongside the hierarchy of information. You learnt how accessible the tools and materials are to help you start. We learnt the simple and effective techniques of the drawing alphabet and turning stick people into brick people. We then got busy with structure...”

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Course summary for: Sketchnoting: Drawing as a Communication Tool

• Level: Beginner
• 98% positive reviews (264)
• 8536 students
• 6 units
• 19 lessons (3h 5m)
• 5 downloads

• Category

  Illustration, Marketing & Business

• Areas

  Communication, Creative Consulting, Creativity, Drawing, Hand Lettering, Lettering, Portfolio Development, Traditional illustration