Visual Notetaking: Wish We Had This in School

Or maybe we do, depending on how you define school...Some of you may remember a couple weeks back, where I showed my joy at learning how to draw cartoon people with actual personalities, which I learned from cartoonist, author, and visual notetaking guru Austin Kleon as part of VizThink U's webinar. I'm telling you, dekeTopians, this visual notetaking thing is something to pay attention to, especially for a visually wired set of folk like the denizens of dekeTopia. One of my favorite "Viznotes" from the seminar was Austin Kleon's recording of what graphic recorder/facilitator Sunni Brown was saying about listening. You gotta a) love meta commentary, and b) love any piece that graphically depicts "draw the meat" with a raw steak worthy of Alex the Lion from Madacascar:

The aforementioned Sunni actually employs these skills on a very large scale in front of live audiences (no pressure, girl)...

Here's a picture of her graphically recording the keynote by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com at SXSW:

On a smaller scale, one of the other delights of the seminar was watching Mike Rohde do live sketchnotes-in-a-moleskine-style notetaking (he set up a camera so we could actually watch his pen take to paper.) Here is one of Mike's observations:

Visual notes are everywhere these days, for good reason. In fact, just today, O'Reilly's Chief O'Reilly, Tim, tweeted about some notes taken at his 140 Characters Conference session Johnny Goldstien (who also happened to have been in this seminar when I attended live).

In fact, that's kind of the fun part for a work-mostly-at-home kinda girl, these webinars actually bring a vibe of community and idea-exchanginess to my othewise solitary little world. And the VizThink community is really open and friendly, not to mention creative and colorful. Kinda like you people.

To see an amazing collection of these notes that started with the webinar but soon moved out into the world, search for #viznotes on Flickr (and ignore the guy who inexplicably tagged his mangos).

Meanwhile the webinar featuring Austin, Sunni, and Mike is now available for purchase at VizThink.com. There's also a more in-depth webinar coming up this Friday--"Drawing out your ideas: Techniques for visual thinking, note-taking, and presentation" with Nancy Margulies. Note that when you buy either seminar, you also get access to re-watch online for 60 days. So if your notes, visual or otherwise, make you wish you could see it again, you'll get your wish. Wish all of life had that rewind button.