 My name is Jessica Eldridge. I'm a front-end developer at Shopify and I want to talk to you today about taking notes. More specifically, how to take awesome, very cool notes by practicing something called sketch noting. So what is sketch noting? It's basically visual note-taking. It's the practice of combining hand-drawn elements and text to create visually compelling notes. If you're familiar with something like mind maps, if you've ever used a whiteboard to draw things out while designing software, you've already kind of gotten a head start on sketch noting. Basically, it's the difference between more traditional-looking notes like this and notes like this. I actually did listen to this talk two times to get that example for you. I know nothing about ruby cryptography, but hopefully this looks like I know what I'm talking about. I got into sketch noting because of a man named Mike Rody. I was preparing to go to South by Southwest one year, and I was looking at stuff on the internet trying to get an idea of what I was getting myself into, and I came across this flicker stream, and he had these amazing notes, and I kind of went down this rabbit hole checking out these photos, and I said, I really got to try this. So I started doing it at meetups and at conferences. Mike Rody coined the term sketch noting, by the way. He does a lot of podcasts and really promotes the practice. So I took my hand at trying, at least I dug up my very first sketch notes at that South by Southwest that I went to, and it was kind of funny because I knew nothing about Ruby on Rails at the time, but my first sketch notes were actually a talk by DHH, so I think that is kind of funny. There's a couple of different ways you can do sketch notes. You can do them live or you can do them later. Live sketch noting means taking them at the same time that the content is being presented, and later sketch notes, you might write them down on scratch pads or take bulleted notes or type them up, and then you go back later and put them into a sketchbook. I'm a developer and I like to keep things dry, so I prefer live sketch noting because when the talk is done my notes are done and I don't have to go back and I can concentrate on the next thing. So a lot of the stuff I'm going to talk about today is going to focus on live sketch noting techniques. You can also use different mediums for sketch noting. Veronica Arab is a sketch noter. She uses pen and paper. I really like how she has created sort of this visual concept of using these tags to highlight technical terms. She illustrated the concept of git branching in two different ways to really reinforce that concept. And she always takes time to make her title area and her speaker notes. Very fun to really draw attention to that. Sasha Shua uses a tablet PC and a sketchbook app on her PC. She uses color to highlight important concepts and kind of reinforce this thought bubble by literally drawing a thought bubble. She goes to a lot of technical talks and has a lot of very dense content, but using those colors you can still pick out the high points of the talk. You could also use an iPad like Daniel Kersh. With a smaller device you're going to have to have more concise notes. I love that he used the pops of color and really simplified stick figures to illustrate, you know, there's three concepts on this thing. I can barely read the type, but I think it says, nope, I don't even know. Everyone starts agile and gets stuck. Inspiration often comes from fresh perspectives. That's what it says. And that makes a lot of sense. So why am I talking about sketch noting? Why am I at a Rui conference trying to tell you guys how to take notes? Firstly, I think we can find a lot of inspiration and analog processes. We are all developers, even as people, I mean, we're in San Francisco. We spend a lot of time on electronic devices. It's our comfort zone. But taking the time to get away from the computer and do something different may bring up fresh ideas. As you're doing something new, you might think of new things. Clarifying ideas, just trying something and slowing down a bit. Some famous people that use sketching to enhance and clarify their ideas include Leonardo DaVinci, Sigmund Freud, Darwin, and Kurt Vonnegut. Sketching also helps you to focus. I know a lot of you are probably bringing your laptops to meetings and how many of you guys are actually taking notes when you're in a meeting. You're probably checking IM, you might be checking email. Somebody's pinging you because something's going down in production and you've got to fix it right now. We've got two rows of people here with laptops plugged in and half of you are probably on Twitter right now. But basically, the computer is a rabbit hole of distractions. And using a more traditional, especially if you're doing pen and paper, you really have to focus. You're concentrating on what's happening and you're slowing down. You can reflect on the content that's being presented to you and there's no distractions. Sketching also helps to improve memory. There's a thing called the dual coding theory proposed by Alan Pibio. And basically it says that your brain processes information in two different ways, it uses verbal and visual information to help remember things. And if you use both of those at the same time, you're going to increase your odds of remembering things. So as you're sketchnoting, just the practice of using imagery and text will help you recall information later. But a lot of that stuff is just excuses. You don't really need a reason. This is the main reason why I sketchnote because I really think it's just fun. It's a great icebreaker at conferences. People ask questions. If you're a little shy, you don't want to go up to people. It's an awesome way to do that. I love doing it and I try to find excuses to do it whenever I can. When I first start encouraging people to take sketchnotes, this is the main argument I hear back. A lot of people say, I don't know how to draw. I can't do that. I'm going to prove you wrong. These simple shapes that you see up on the slide, circle, a square, triangle, cloud, a line, a dot, and an arrow. If you can draw any of these things, then you can sketchnote. If you can't draw any of these things, I am willing to help you practice. Come find me. But basically, you use these shapes in combination to build other shapes and use boxes and lines to connect ideas. So in practice, you can see in my sketchnotes, I'm basically just using these very simple shapes and text. We're all developers. We like sharing our tools and our setup. So this is mine. I like to use a uniball pen because it's really smooth and glides very well on paper. I have a couple of backup pens for bolder notes. And I use a shading marker in a warm gray that adds some depth to my notes. I prefer to go for the pen and paper route. I want a medium heavy paper that won't bleed because I write really heavily. I know a lot of people that also use grid papers. So if you're worried when you're first starting and you can't keep your lines straight and your text is kind of crooked, the grid paper often helps people. So now that we've gotten all set up, how do we do this? And to this, I'm going to turn to one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, who wrote, Instructions for Living Life. Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. And when I was preparing for this talk, I thought, holy shit. That actually makes a lot of sense for sketchnoting. So paying attention. The first thing I tell people is that sketchnoting is not actually about drawing at all. It's about listening. You're required to use active listening techniques to pull information from the presentation. Basically, active listening is the practice of not only hearing what somebody is saying, but confirming that you understand the messaging. In person, usually this is like you're supposed to nod. You say, aha, yes, I understand. And then sketchnoting. You're confirming your understanding by committing those same things that you hear to paper. This requires a lot of focus and you're not worrying as much about how you're doing things as about the things that you're ingesting from the content. Listening is different than thinking. You don't want to let your opinions or your emotions and reactions to the speaker's content cloud your notes. A lot of times you might hear things, especially at technical conferences, and you're asking questions like, why didn't they bring up such and such? What about this? Or I disagree with this implementation. And all of that is distracting you from capturing notes. So the key is to try to capture and then react later. You can always talk with the speaker and engage with them another way. Again, all right. So follow the speaker and not the slides. In this day and age, speakers often post their slides immediately after their talk. There's all these places where you can upload your content. So you can always find that stuff later. You don't want to have to write that down because it's already on the internet. But you've only got one chance to be in the room with the speaker, whether it's at a meeting or at a conference, and capture how they're presenting their work. So the good stuff is not going to be on the slides. It's going to be with the person that's telling you things. And some things to pay attention to are the speaker's body language, their emotions as they're up on stage. A lot of times people will start getting really excited when something's important. Maybe they'll get really angry and start ranting about something. That's when your ears should start perking up and you're thinking, maybe I want to capture this. So I talked a little bit of active listening earlier, and especially with live sketch learning, it's really hard to figure out how to filter information. And it's really tempting when you're first starting to try to summarize everything somebody's saying. And it's virtually impossible to write as fast as somebody can speak. So if anyone in this room can do it, please, like, I'd love to talk to you because I've tried, and it doesn't really work. So you've got to learn how to filter. And the first step to doing that is looking at the title of the talk. Sometimes that'll give you a hint as to what's going to be important. Sometimes speakers are really nice and summarize what they're going to cover at the beginning of the talk. But you can't always count on that because every talk is different. And basically what I like to tell people is if you weren't taking notes right now, what would you tweet about? And those are the things that you should capture in your notes. So the slide's a little prescriptive. It's more of a suggestion. Live coding is challenging. At technical conferences, there's a lot of demos. When I first started sketch noting, I tried to literally draw code, and it's very hard. It also doesn't make your notes all that interesting because, you know, it's code. So instead, if you do want to sketch note while somebody's doing a demo, if they're going to do any live coding, I suggest listening for kind of the gems of advice. A lot of times, you know, we're talking about pros and cons. You know, why would I do this? Oh, this didn't work because. Those are some of the things I capture. Anytime somebody mentions a library or a plugin or a Ruby gem that I'm not familiar with, I'll take a note of that and kind of, like, make a mental note to go back and look it up. But sometimes it's also just okay to not sketch note and sit back and watch the cool stuff happen live, right? You can also use post-it notes to help you retain information. A lot of this, again, people are speaking very quickly and you're trying to take notes. I like to keep a little scratch pad off to the side to help me, like, sort of cache information for a second until I can get back to it. Usually in talks, there are lulls between main points, and that's a really good opportunity to go back and fill in your notes. You can hold onto a thought and use that time to use your arrows and your boxes to make connections. So you also need to be astonished, and what does that mean? And that means spending the time to capture what stands out to you. You may share these notes with people, share them with the speaker afterwards, but ultimately what's important is what you're going to remember and how you're going to remember it. So you don't have to capture everything. I really got anxious at first about being super accurate, you know, my interpretations of the notes, you know, if the speaker didn't intend for me to do that, but I've learned to let that go because I need to focus on remembering what was important to me. So I listened to what's being said in my own way. Sometimes I add little notes of my own to help me remember, and I skip the parts that don't interest me. So Carolyn Soule did some sketch notes at Brooklyn Beta last year. I was also there, and she went to this talk by Tim O'Reilly. She's a wonderful illustrator. Lots of content here. I went to the exact same talk, and these are my sketch notes. So it's really fascinating how you can compare, you know, two different experiences. Well, we were at the same talk, but we came away with two different things. One thing to pay attention to, jokes, quotes, and F-bombs. You know, anytime a speaker starts cursing on stage, I don't know, I think it adds some flavor. It gets the audience laughing. It's something that you remember. You know, maybe it's 10 a.m., and somebody's talking about poop, you know? It's a good thing to capture in your notes. I often listen to quotable moments. Again, like, if a speaker's taking a dramatic pause, if they start getting really excited or angry about something, anytime they mention metaphors or similes, those are great opportunities to try to visualize information. So this talk looked like it was a lot of fun. You can really get the energy in these notes. Another thing that will help you is to create your own visual language to kind of jog your memory later. So maybe you always want to pull out quotes into boxes or use quotation marks to call them out. Maybe you use a question mark to indicate when you have questions that you want to look up later during your talk. I listened to a podcast where one woman used to always draw an icon of a book next to titles that were mentioned in talks so that she remembered what to go and, like, download onto her candle later, which I thought was very cool. So Eva Lotta-Lam is an illustrator, and she uses quote marks in different ways. All of these are kind of indications that there are direct quotes happening during the talk. And sometimes you'll be in a talk and everything's over your head and you'll get it, and that's okay, too, because there's always a backup plan for that. So the third step is to tell about it. And I really encourage people to share their notes. It can be a little nerve-wracking at first, but my preferred medium is Twitter. I always use the appropriate hashtag for the Meetup or the Conference, and Ayat mentioned the speaker. There's a blog called Sketch Note Army, which takes user submissions but also looks on the internet for certain hashtags like Sketch Notes, so it's a great way to broadcast. It's a really good way to keep the conversation going after a talk. People like to engage and respond, a lot of retweeting and that kind of thing. It's really nice, you know, instead of just leaving the talk and forgetting about it, you know, you can keep it going. Speakers would be grateful if you share your notes. This is one of the main reasons why I'm giving this talk right now, because I did not realize how much people love seeing Sketch Notes of their talk. I started getting a lot of thank yous on Twitter. And basically, all of that active listening stuff that I was talking about earlier, you're proving it. When you share your notes with people, you're saying, I spent the time to really focus. I didn't get on my computer. I came and listened to your talk and I wrote it down. And it's a really great way to engage with the speaker. It's super thoughtful. And a lot of times, you'll end up capturing things in your notes that the speaker didn't even intend, which is really cool. So it's a way to say thank you, and it's another way to keep the artifacts and people will be wowed. I have zero data to back this up. So somewhere, Aja Hammerly is probably frowning at me. But your notes are going to be more interesting. And, you know, odds are, if you're in a meeting, there's probably not anybody else taking Sketch Notes. So, you know, doing this adds to the diversity and the types of information that you're processing. You know, you could have a whiteboard session going and somebody else is taking pen and paper notes and then you've got the typed notes. The entire pool of notes will help people recall information. So I've talked a lot about, conceptually, how to Sketch Note, but there are some practical tips that I can share with you. And one of them is to get comfortable. I always get to a talk or a meeting early so I can prepare with the speaker's name and the title and kind of just get my setup going, find a good light source. A lot of times conference rooms will be kind of dimmed down, so I try to find something where I can, you know, at least see what's on my lap. And you want to sit where you won't be interrupted. I used to sit on the aisle because I liked the extra elbow room. The problem with the aisle seats is that you have to get up and sit down and get up and sit down. Every time somebody needs to come in. So now I sort of stick to the middle. But I'm still a jerk and I leave my bag on the seat next to me so I can have some elbow room and I feel really bad conference organizers, I'm sorry, but I need my space. So, the other thing I can tell you to slow down. I gave this talk to my colleagues at work and someone mentioned that they have really crappy handwriting. So it's like, how am I going to make beautiful notes if I have really shitty handwriting? And my advice is to slow down and to really write your letters as if you're drawing them. This might mean that you're not going to capture as much information, but that's okay. Also drawing larger letters, it may seem counterintuitive, but writing bigger will force you to slow down and so therefore your handwriting will end up looking a lot nicer. Also play with layouts. It's really easy to kind of just go top down if you've got a vertical page in front of you, but switching it up and trying different things. You can go vertical or you can try to do columns or sort of a winding left to right path, or maybe you start in the middle and mind map out and just start bubbling this information. So a good way to experiment and try something different and get out of your comfort zone again. So some examples of different layouts. You know, this is sort of more of a radial thing with the title in the middle and all the concepts around. And column notes are actually really good for panels, so it's like an opportunity to sort of list that each speaker on a panel at the top and then capture the key points that each person spoke about. Adding the decoration last is also really important. You know, your first goal is to capture information. So writing down as much as you can and then using the lulls or maybe immediately after the talk to connect two ideas together and add boxes and shading and whatever you might need to do. It's also a nice way to sort of reflect on the talk. I will scan over my notes and say, oh, that was really nice. I liked when they talked about that. So then I'll spend a little bit more time embellishing that area and making sure like that stands out for me. And also it's important, especially with live sketch noting, to embrace mistakes because you're going to make them. There are some things you can do to, you know, kind of bring your own backup plan like a bold marker to cover things up. But, you know, in the end, I really advise just being okay with scratching out notes and leaving them, you know, warts and all in my notes. You know, I take sketch notes and often I'll get smudges when I'm, you know, using it and sometimes I spell words wrong so I try to spell entrepreneurs and it didn't work so I blocked it out and I tried to spell it again. It still didn't work. So it took me three tries and I just, you know, you've got to live with it. And as with anything, practice makes better. One good way to practice sketch noting is to use things like conflicts, TED talks, using meetings at work, podcasts. The nice thing about watching videos or listening to podcasts is that it takes the pressure off of live sketch noting so you can pause and make sure you're capturing things. It also will give you an idea of how fast you can capture information and how much. I used to take two pages in my sketchbook for every talk no matter the length and now I've got it down to one and I sort of, you know, any talk about an hour long and you can get in one page and that's all that process of sort of filtering and just practicing and seeing, you know, what's really important. Also, it's just kind of fun. I watch movies and taking notes. Crate and Berman did some beautiful sketch notes of Glenn Gary Kalan Ross and, you know, when you're first learning anything, one of the best ways to learn is to literally copy somebody's style, right? So go do that. You know, get inspired. Look on the internet and find somebody that draws in a way that you like and steal their style and then go look some more and steal somebody else's style and layer it into your sketches and at the end, as you experiment, you've created something that's totally unique to you which is basically an amalgamation of other people's styles. Some places to find inspiration are Flickr, Pinterest, Sketch Note Army was the blog that I mentioned before. Scott Torrance recently released this e-book. It's free on iTunes and it's literally what it says it is. It's 140 sketch notes by various people and it's just nothing but sketch notes. There's no words. It's just pictures. Mike Rody wrote this sketchbook handbook. He actually just released a second version which is more of a workbook and more advanced techniques. It covers a lot more actual exercises and goes into more depth than the tips that I gave you here today but I highly recommend it. It's super good. So at the end of this talk, you might be telling me, just I still can't draw and you are right but you can't sketch note and I hope you will. Thank you.