Back to: Lesson 10 – Structuring Your Visual Notes (Clone)
It is Lesson 10 and we are now down to the final stretch of this course. The purpose of this lesson is to help give your visual notes some structure and form. I am going to share with you five ways of structuring your visual notes. Afterward I am going to give you a look at the doodles I came up with for the two tasks I set for you yesterday.
Structuring Your Visual Notes
Just like people come in all shapes and sizes, so do visual notes. What this means is that there are a variety of ways you can structure your visual notes depending on your personal style and preferences. For the purpose of this discussion, we will take a look at five ways to structure your visual notes. These methods have been taken from Mike Rohde’s excellent and highly recommended book: The Sketchnote Handbook – The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking.
As we move through each of these methods for structuring your visual notes, it’s important to keep in mind that there is no right or wrong way to structure them. It just basically depends on the information you are capturing or based on your personal style and preferences. In fact, all these methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. Familiarizing yourself with each one will help you to get a better understanding of how to potentially structure your visual notes.
The Linear Method
The linear method basically follows the pattern of a printed book moving from top left to bottom right diagonally moving from one page to another. You might therefore place a title on the top left corner of the page and then move down the page in a linear fashion. It’s a wonderful storytelling format to use for your visual notes. However, Mike states that the linear format can be quite rigid and can therefore limit your layout options.
The Radial Method
The radial method is very much like a mind map style of structure. Mike says that it’s like a bicycle wheel with the hub at the center and the spokes radiating outward. Within the center, you might jot down the title or doodle an image that represents your topic. Then from there, you would radiate outward from the middle with supporting ideas and concepts.
Mike notes down that the advantages of the radial method is that it gives you the freedom to add information wherever you like around the central image or title. However, a disadvantage is that your notes may be difficult to follow because the information isn’t structured in an orderly way.
The Popcorn Method
The popcorn method gives you the flexibility to structure your visual notes any way you wish. It provides you with a process of capturing information and slotting it in anywhere randomly on the page. Mike notes that this method is great for those times when you want to capture information and ideas quickly, however the random arrangement of all your notes can make them very difficult to make sense of or follow.
The Pathway Method
The pathway method creates a path of information across the page vertically, horizontally or diagonally. This path pattern can come in a variety of shapes that best suits the topic you are IQ doodling. Mike notes that this method is fantastic for telling about an event or thought process using a series of steps. However, he cautions that this method does require a little planning beforehand or otherwise it becomes very easy to run out of space.
The Modular Method
The modular method divides a page into very specific parts that then can be used to structure your notes into various themes or topics. Mike notes that this method works well when you want to organize your information in a grid-like pattern, however this will also limit the amount of information you can fit into each section.
I have listed five of the visual note taking methods here within this lesson. Mike discusses two additional methods within his book. He also provides actual examples of visual notes he calls sketchnotes for each of these methods. It’s well worth checking out. You can purchase The Sketchnote Handbook – The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking from Amazon.
My Visual Notes
As promised yesterday, here are the IQ doodles/Sketchnotes I came up with for How to Set Goals and for Facts About the Earth. Please do keep in mind that my visual notes will probably not look like your visual notes. But there is no right or wrong here. It’s all about getting your intended message/ideas across in the simplest possible way. And there are certainly many ways this can be done. I share with you just one of them.
As you view my visual notes, can you tell what structure I used to create them? I would say that for the Goal Setting IQ doodle I used a pathway method, and for the Facts About Earth IQ doodle I used a radial method. I didn’t necessarily plan ahead of time the structure I was going to use. It rather just made sense given the information I was working with that one structure was the better choice over another. But of course, this doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have structured these visual notes in a different way. It could have worked just as well, and just maybe your visual notes read very well using an alternate structure.
To finish off, here is a fantastic article about How to Create Awesome Visual Notes.
Your Turn
Today I would like to encourage you to create a few more IQ Doodles/Sketchnotes on topics of your own choice using one or two of the structures discussed within this lesson. So for instance you might read a chapter of a book and create visual notes using a radial structure. Then you might watch a documentary on television and use the linear structure for your visual notes. It really doesn’t matter. The more practice you get the better you’ll be at creating visual notes.
When you’re done, I would love to see your visual notes and the methods you used to capture them.
Check out how other Doodlers went about today’s task
Below you will find examples of how other doodlers of all ages have gone about today’s task. I invite you to join in and share your doodles by emailing them through to info@iqdoodle.com. It would be an absolute pleasure to post your doodles on this page to help inspire others along this journey.
Please click on images to enlarge.
What’s Coming Up Next?
On Lesson 11 of the program, we will conclude things with some tips and guidelines to help you get the most from your visual notes. We will also discuss the next steps and the things I will share with you moving forward. Just in case you thought this program ended after 40 days, well it doesn’t. You are no doubt a competent doodler by now, but there is still much more to learn. I will give you more information shortly