sketchnotes

I recently came across Mike Rohde’s fantastic sketchnotes from South by Southwest in Austin. Instead of typing notes on a laptop or hen-scratching on a notepad like typical conference-goers, Rohde makes brilliantly illustrated notes in his Moleskine sketchbook and conveniently makes them available on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

A pair of “visual cartographers” captured the TED2008 conference in a similar manner:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about visual representations of artifacts and events in a software project history. I think sketchnotes like these are an interesting way of capturing and conveying information, even outside the realm of conferences. As Rohde says, sketchnotes add a bit of human touch that makes them really attractive to the readers.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could have sketchnotes to represent a software project history? They’d be like high-level bookmarks in exploring a software project. More detailed artifacts like emails, meeting notes, tickets, change sets, and technical documentation could hang off of these sketchnotes for project stakeholders to explore in more detail. Neat. And what a fabulous way to orient a newcomer to a software project.

The tricky thing is that you’d need to have someone on your team with drawing abilities, which certainly isn’t me. Stick men, hearts, and arrows are about the limits of my current abilities. This would also require a lot of manual effort to link the sketchnotes to the related artifacts so I’m not sure the benefits would cover the costs. Anyway, maybe if I ever run my own company I’ll make sure to have sketchnoters at all important project meetings!