Visual Notes

Why can't I paint you if a picture paints a thousand words? The words will never show you what I've come to know. Where am I to go if a face could launch a thousand ships?

-If by Bread

A picture paints a thousand words. It is fascinating to think a visual image can launch a thousand ships. The song is about the real story of Helen of Troy, who, according to legend, was the most beautiful woman of her time that started the war of Troy. They can impulse a nation to wage war if we notice how visually solid images are.

I want to introduce a tool that can wage war peacefully and quietly. These are visual notes. What are visual notes? Visual notes are also called sketch notes; this is a visual, creative, and vivid process in which a person can record his thoughts using illustrations, symbols, structure, and text. We can combine the traditional text and artistically represent them with a visual cue that can lead to a satisfying, insightful, and creative process.

Visual notes are in various events such as a class at school, work meetings, conferences, sporting events, and more. We may wonder why we never learn this from school. The possible reason is that the educational academe is more traditional and doesn't encourage outside-the-box processes. As far as I remember, when I was at school, teachers discouraged me not to write bizarre, cartoonish, and odd shapes but instead wrote neatly and legibly, which now, as an adult, is very logical in preparation for the real world. However, it suppressed my artistic abilities it prevented me from exploring the possibilities of working outside the traditional approaches.

Ironically nowadays, most people at school and work are visual learners. As visual learners, it will be challenging to learn or remember things during a meeting or conference just using the traditional note-taking approach. In addition to this, due to the invention of gadgets, according to recent studies, Pew Research Centre in Washington D.C. surveyed almost 2,500 teachers and found that 77% thought the internet had a "mostly positive" impact on students' research work. In contrast, 87% felt modern technologies created an "easily distracted generation with short attention spans" (The Guardian). As we notice in this data, many students are possibly young adults and professionals with short attention spans.

Boredom while at school or during a lengthy meeting can only be remedied by the engagement of the mind creatively. We can take notes actively and creatively by exploiting the use of pictures or making the forum alive with the help of pen and paper. Recent studies show that our minds surprisingly alter their perception between images and pictures of pictures. This phenomenon is what we called as the "medusa effect."

To start sketch notes or visual notes, we need a notebook, preferably one with only white pages. I use a Moleskine classic notebook. This notebook is perfect for journaling, daily dairy, or visual note-taking. In addition, we also need a set of black pens and colored pens to spice up our notes.

As we recall the idea, a picture paints a thousand words. We can start from there. What we mean by that is we begin to draw or paint the image of an idea in our notebook that makes sense to us. The representation of the ideas may vary from one person to the next, depending on his perception of an idea. For instance, when we say the word idea, we may have an image of a "light bulb," which is a familiar image for an idea. Another example is the word happy, a straightforward "happy face." We already got the picture.

Next, as we learn to sketch notes, we need to keep a visual diary to draw some of the most familiar images we use every time we make visual notes. I need to be more artistic in making sketch notes and learning how to draw a circle. Well, that is alright; we can master anything under the sun with practice. It's time-consuming, and I don't have the time for this Well, good thing we can practice at least 5 minutes daily. If we keep doing that in a week, we have 35 minutes; in a month, that's 2 hours and 20 minutes of solid practice.

Enough talking; we need to start as soon we are done reading this lengthy expository. You will have fun with your new skill of making sketch notes.

"In the drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt."

-Pablo Picasso