Sketchnotes: A Practical Course with June Hart

Start with the purpose

Place Sketchnotes inside a small creative brief with a clear audience, mood, or purpose. Name the result a learner is trying to produce and the constraints that make the skill useful.

How Sketchnotes actually works

These are the load-bearing ideas. Everything later in the course is an application of one of them, so it is worth reading slowly and returning to when something stops making sense.

• Ideas, not art. Sketchnoting captures thinking rather than produces drawings. The test of a good sketchnote is whether it helps you or a colleague recall and use the idea later.
• Five shapes draw almost anything. The visual vocabulary reduces to the dot, line, circle, square and triangle. Nearly any object can be approximated from those five, which removes the drawing-skill barrier that stops most people from starting.
• Drawing while listening aids recall. Sketchnoting forces selection and reformulation instead of transcription, the same mechanism behind findings that longhand note-takers beat verbatim typists on conceptual questions. The constraint of limited space is doing the work.

Misconceptions worth clearing early

Each of these is common, understandable, and expensive to leave in place. Recognising them now saves rework later.

• Trying to capture everything. Existing note-taking habits are transcription habits, so the pen never stops and no selection happens. Fix: Set a hard limit of one page per session, since scarcity of space forces the choices that make the notes useful.
• Stopping to perfect a drawing. Perfectionism about one icon costs the next two minutes of the talk. Fix: Keep every icon under about five seconds and accept that a lopsided circle communicates as well as a compass-drawn one.
• Editing while generating. Judgement feels like quality control. Fix: Separate the sessions: make first without evaluating, then critique in a distinct pass.

Build the mental model

Connect the key terms as a process rather than a word list. Use this sequence: collect references, make a rough draft, develop one choice, and revise with focused critique.

Catch the common miss

Compare a surface-level attempt with one that shows intentional choices, craft control, a coherent result, and thoughtful revision. Explain the single difference that matters most.

Watch the whole process

Trace a model from the initial prompt to a finished draft with process notes. Mark each point where the learner must observe, choose, or verify rather than act automatically.

Worked example: Sketchnoting a 30-minute talk

Follow each step and predict the next before you read it. Predicting first is what turns a demonstration into practice.

1. Draw the frame first: title, speaker and date in one corner, leaving the rest of the page open.
2. Listen for about a minute before writing, so the first thing captured is a real point rather than an opening pleasantry.
3. Capture each main point as a short hand-lettered phrase with one simple icon beside it.
4. Use arrows and containers at the end of the talk to connect points and box the two or three conclusions.

Structure added after listening beats a layout chosen in advance, because the shape of a talk is not knowable until it is over.

Where this usually goes wrong

Watch for these while you work through the demonstration rather than afterwards.

• Trying to capture everything. Existing note-taking habits are transcription habits, so the pen never stops and no selection happens. Fix: Set a hard limit of one page per session, since scarcity of space forces the choices that make the notes useful.
• Stopping to perfect a drawing. Perfectionism about one icon costs the next two minutes of the talk. Fix: Keep every icon under about five seconds and accept that a lopsided circle communicates as well as a compass-drawn one.
• Editing while generating. Judgement feels like quality control. Fix: Separate the sessions: make first without evaluating, then critique in a distinct pass.

Practice with scaffolding

Repeat the model with one detail changed. Keep the prompts visible and say or write the reason for each choice before continuing.

Check before feedback

Use intentional choices, craft control, a coherent result, and thoughtful revision as the quality test. Make one self-correction before asking the tutor to review the result.

Read the situation

Translate the scenario into a clear task. Separate facts, assumptions, constraints, and information that is interesting but not relevant to Icons.

Choosing well under real constraints

Applied work is mostly judgement under limits: less time, less information, and more competing goals than a textbook example allows. These are the decision rules that hold up in practice.

• You feel stuck mid-piece: Reduce the scope rather than abandoning it; a finished small version teaches more than an abandoned large one.
• Feedback conflicts: Weight it by whether the person is your intended audience, and look for the note repeated by several people.
• A piece is nearly done but not exciting: Ask what single element you would defend, and strengthen that instead of smoothing everything.

Reading the situation before acting

Before choosing an approach, state three things explicitly: what result the situation actually requires, which constraints are fixed rather than preferences, and what evidence would tell you the approach is working. Skipping this step is the most common reason competent work solves the wrong problem.

• Ideas, not art. Sketchnoting captures thinking rather than produces drawings. The test of a good sketchnote is whether it helps you or a colleague recall and use the idea later.

Practitioner notes

Small pieces of working knowledge that rarely appear in introductory material.

• Build a personal library of twenty icons you can draw without thinking: person, gear, lightbulb, clock, arrow, money, warning. Fluency comes from repetition rather than range.
• Use one accent colour and add it after the session. Colour applied live becomes decoration, whereas colour applied afterwards becomes hierarchy.

Compare real options

Generate two workable approaches and test both against the purpose. Do not hide the tradeoff; name what each option improves and what it gives up.

Make the reasoning visible

Produce a finished draft with process notes and attach a short decision note. The note should make the result auditable, not merely confident.

Use the rubric, not a feeling

Review the work for intentional choices, craft control, a coherent result, and thoughtful revision. Record evidence for each judgment so feedback points to something observable.

Diagnostic checklist

Run this before you revise anything. Diagnosing first prevents the common failure of polishing the parts that were already fine.

• Check: Trying to capture everything — is this present in your work?
• Check: Stopping to perfect a drawing — is this present in your work?
• Check: Editing while generating — is this present in your work?
• Check: Chasing a vague sense that it is not good enough — is this present in your work?

The quality bar

This is what finished work looks like in this field. Use it as the standard for your revision rather than a general sense of improvement.

• The work is finished to a shareable state, not left at draft
• Choices are deliberate enough that you can explain two of them
• A specific improvement has been identified for the next piece

Diagnose before editing

Name the symptom, then ask what decision or missing step produced it. Choose the cause you can address rather than changing everything at once.

Revise and compare

Make one purposeful revision and compare the two versions. Keep the change only if it improves the intended result without creating a larger problem.

Define a finishable brief

Choose a specific audience, result, and boundary for the Lettering basics capstone. Reduce scope until the project can be finished and reviewed in one focused cycle.

Bringing the parts together

A capstone is judged on coherence, not on the number of techniques it includes. Return to the core ideas and make sure the work demonstrates them rather than decorating them.

• Ideas, not art. Sketchnoting captures thinking rather than produces drawings. The test of a good sketchnote is whether it helps you or a colleague recall and use the idea later.
• Five shapes draw almost anything. The visual vocabulary reduces to the dot, line, circle, square and triangle. Nearly any object can be approximated from those five, which removes the drawing-skill barrier that stops most people from starting.
• Drawing while listening aids recall. Sketchnoting forces selection and reformulation instead of transcription, the same mechanism behind findings that longhand note-takers beat verbatim typists on conceptual questions. The constraint of limited space is doing the work.

Standards that make the work credible

These are the marks of work that would be taken seriously by someone who does this professionally.

• The work is finished to a shareable state, not left at draft
• Choices are deliberate enough that you can explain two of them
• A specific improvement has been identified for the next piece

Practitioner notes

Small pieces of working knowledge that rarely appear in introductory material.

• Build a personal library of twenty icons you can draw without thinking: person, gear, lightbulb, clock, arrow, money, warning. Fluency comes from repetition rather than range.
• Use one accent colour and add it after the session. Colour applied live becomes decoration, whereas colour applied afterwards becomes hierarchy.

Build with checkpoints

Plan foundation, first draft, verification, and revision milestones. At each checkpoint, save evidence instead of relying on memory.

Present and continue

Present a finished draft with process notes with a concise rationale. Use the final rubric to choose one strength to retain and one next practice target.