Visualize your thoughts with sketchnoting

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? At the very least, sprinkling a few visual cues into your notes can add a new dimension to how you capture and communicate ideas. Icons, doodles, color, and the intentional use of text can help you express more complex thoughts, tell more impactful stories, and create emotional connections with more oomph than words alone.

What is sketchnoting?

Sketchnoting, or visual note-taking, is a method that combines handwritten text with visual elements. Put simply, it’s about adding drawings to your notes to better express what you’re thinking. Sketching helps make ideas stick. And it helps communicate them better to others.

Visual note-taking for creative thinking

Visualizing helps make complex ideas easier to understand, it boosts memory and retention, and helps tie ideas together. This, in turn, boosts pattern recognition, switching your brain into the higher gears needed for critical thinking and problem-solving.

We often think in pictures. And by engaging both parts of the brain — the right hemisphere processes images, the left is responsible for numbers and text — it connects the mind with the message in ways that offer advantages over traditional, pure-text note-taking methods.

How to get started with sketchnoting

A few key visual elements work together to make your notes really come alive. These include text and lettering, containers, lines and arrows, visual metaphor such as icons, and colors.

• Text and lettering Simple handwritten words will likely form the backbone of your notes. To add emphasis and structure, consider trying out more creative lettering styles, such as all-caps block lettering, cursive, or calligraphy.
• Containers Simple shapes, like boxes or circles, can be used to enclose text to create emphasis or group information. This is particularly useful for making headers and subheadings that stand out. You might want to keep these shapes simple, in their purest form, or flesh them out with additional flourishes.
• Lines and arrows These are versatile and great for highlighting direction, separating sections, and for connecting ideas, especially when creating mind maps.
• Icons and people Visual metaphors are useful when you want to convey intangible ideas. Icons and drawings of people, for example, serve as useful visual shortcuts for abstract concepts such as emotions, goals, or harder-to-explain concepts.

Icons could include a lightbulb for “bright ideas” or a clock for “time”. A sketched medal, for example, could represent “a job well done”. Humans can function as a great stand-in for emotions. Think of a person pushing a boulder up a mountain, expressing “overcoming obstacles”, or a stick figure waving its arms in the air, conveying “triumph”.

• Colors Use colors to organize your notes thematically and to add depth and contrast. These are best used sparingly, so consider limiting yourself to three main colors to prevent your notes from becoming too cluttered.

For inspiration, or help to get started, make sure to take a peek at the video above.

Sketchnoting on reMarkable

All the tools you need to get started with sketchnoting are available on your paper tablet. That includes straight lines and shapes, a wide selection of writing tools, and a range of grayscale or color options depending on whether you’re using reMarkable 2 or reMarkable Paper Pro.