Rediscovered this video on my hard drive, realised I’ve never watched it. It’s been 10 months since I last played with sketchnoting.
The part that interests me the most is about layouts (20 minutes in). Deciding where to start sketching and not knowing how large it will end up is the part where I feel I’m most lost about and want to get better at.
Some takeaways:
- Three basics: shapes, containers, connectors.
- Learn basic shapes and objects. Seven building blocks for drawing:
- dot
- straight line
- crooked line
- curvy line
- circle
- triangle
- square
- Basic connectors: dotted lines, trails, arrows, numbering
- Basic containers: boxes, frames
- Guide their attention.
- Top to bottom, left to right is most intuitive.
- People will follow your connectors if you make it visible/obvious (e.g. to make people follow the sketch from bottom left side to bottom right side instead of going intuitively to the top right side)
- Grouping things: use whitespace, containers, and consistency (of form, sizes)
- Hierarchy makes it easy to interpret importance
- Use guiding shapes: frames, containers, trails, breadcrumbs
- Play with contrasts (even monochrome; fifty shades of grey)
- Colors as highlights, not fillers
To summarise:
1. Start small
2. Start simple
3. Do it for yourself first
4. Keep it high level
5. Practice
I’m going to check out her book too https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PGQY9L4/
Three more videos I find useful, by Doug from Verbal to Visual:
