Sketchnoting journey - Personal Journaling - Issue #11
Hello visual learners.
How are you?
With year end near I have started reflecting on how 2022 has gone past. It went pretty fast for me. I made lots of new friends on Twitter who helped me in many different ways.
One of the things that I have been doing diligently is to journal everyday. And it helped me grow in different areas of my life. When I look back to 2022 through those pages, am able to understand myself better. So for this issue I thought of sharing my experiments and experience on journaling.
Today’s issue covers
Sketchnoting Daily Journals
Journal Prompts
Introducing 2 new sections
Dissecting a sketchnote
Activity of the week
So let’s jump in.
Sketchnoting Daily Journals
What’s Journaling?
Journaling our thoughts and experiences daily helps us to know ourselves better. It’s a way to apply brakes to our rocket speed thinking and allow our brain to reconcile. This activity breeds subconscious mind and helps us to make better decisions in future.
Why Sketchnote?
So why sketchnote to journal and not just write?
Pictures are worth 1000 words isn’t the answer to this. Power of visualization is.
When you draw your thoughts you are giving them a form and meaning which is easier to understand. Oh and am not asking to draw portraits or landscapes or pixel perfect objects. Simple line drawings or illustrations enough to communicate the essence.
Some examples
Sharing few examples from my personal journal. Some of the portions are blurred for privacy reasons.
Snapshot of my personal journal with sketchnotes
Snapshot of my personal journal with sketchnotes
The outcome
Keep a daily journal and spend 5-10 minutes spending time with your thoughts and reflections. I find journaling early and first thing in the morning the best. You can find a time that allows you to journal without distraction.
I bet 5 years down the line you’ll be looking at an illustrated journal of your life, nothing less than a movie Hero.
Journal prompts
Next the question that might be brimming in your mind is what to sketchnote in journal?
You can write/sketch anything, it’s your journal. But here are some simple prompts to help you get started
How are you feeling today? You can use simple emojis for this
Whom do you want to help today? Either write the name of person in fancy type or draw a rough sketch. I’ll show you how in upcoming newsletters.
What are you thankful for today?
What do you wish for/Secret Desire. Write this in bold and you can repeat this everyday.
Quote of the day. You can either google it or have an app for that. I use Insights Timer app
What’s one thing that will make you happy today? Object, work, person, experience. Put it in a box/frame
Given below is a template that you can follow to get started.
It’s totally upto you to either follow all or just 1-2 prompts to kickstart your journaling journey.
Dissecting my sketchnote of the week
Starting this week am going to pick one of my sketchnotes and dissect it to show the elements and my thought process while making it.
This is a sketchnote I did while reading a chapter from the book Creativity Inc.
The chapter talked about key elements to consider to create an environment of creativity in the team.
In this sketchnote you’ll find 2 sections. Each one’s explained below
Header - I have placed the title of the sketchnote with an illustration to visualise it, the source of the note (book) and my signature.
Body - In this section you’ll see there are around 9-10 visual blocks. Each one formed by a title, sub text and a visual. The title stands out due to bold and large text compared to sub text. All the visuals have same color - blue. This visual styling makes each block consistent and brings in simplicity, while clearly giving the right information.
The sketchnote follows principle of visual hierarchy, which allows our eyes to move from top to bottom and then from one visual block to another.
The color of my signature is kept intentionally different to draw visual attention.
Let's do this week
Create first page of your journal in your own way and share on social media. You may choose to tag me (@letsketchin) or just totally ignore.
Announcements
Coming up soon is an update to my Sketchbook - Sketchnotes of Conversations. It’s going to have sketchnotes of some of the celebrities talking about their life, journey, learnings, etc. Indra Nooyi, Kevin Carroll, Geoffrey Moore and others are sketchnoted.
Low res Snippets of the Cisco illuminate sessions
If you want to learn Sketchnoting, reach out to me on twitter (twitter.com/letsketchin) or drop me an email at letsketchin@gmail.com
That’s all for today.
Have a great week until next newsletter.