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iOS dev • sketchnoting • accessibility • pineapple on pizza • sports • she/her

May 20, 2020 ⋅ 4 min read

Sketchnoting on online conferences

I recently took part in my first two online conferences. Last week was AppBuilders and this week was UIKonf! The organizers of both conferences did an awesome job! Kudos to them! 👏

I love visiting conferences! But two days full of conference talks are hard! It’s hard for your brain to stay focused and to process the things you’ve heard. It’s hard for your back when you sit on your chair all the time, not only during the talks but also during the little breaks when you join sessions to meet others. It’s hard for your fingers when you make sketchnotes two days long.

But to be honest, conferences are also exhausting when they are not online but you have to be on site (maybe even more). I always need some rest after a conference to process all the things I’ve experienced. Pro tip: take a day after the conference off if possible! Having a remote conference, a big advantage for sketchnoters is, that you have your own space for your pens, sketchbooks and stuff and you don’t have to make sketchnotes on your knees. This was really nice! 🙃

A collage of me with an UIKonf shirt, the setup of my macbook with the conference stream and in front my sketch book, pens and my sketchbook
A small behind the scenes with me and my new UIKonf shirt.

Sketchnote all the talks! Why would I do that?

Watching talks from home, makes it easier to get distracted – at least for me! Nobody will see (and blaim) you, when you open a tab in your browser and scroll through twitter... or when you grab your phone and answer some messages.

Sketchnoting helps to stay focused on the talk. The brain is busy. Busy listening to the speaker and filtering things out if they are important or not so much. The hand is busy. Busy drawing some little sketches or writing down an important quote of the speaker.

After around 10 talks, it will be hard to stay focused even when you make sketchnotes. But it’s ok. Everybody feels like this (I think 😅). After the first day, one of my fingers started to hurt so much while holding a pen, I actually had to tape it (this is #veryHardWork 😜).

You honor the speakers. All speakers have invested a lot of work into their preparation of the talk and their presentation. None of my sketchnotes would exist without them! Always tag and reference the speaker in your posts, so they get notified and others can easily find more content of the speaker.

It’s a great summary. I use my sketchnotes as a summary for what happened in the talk. On conferences, other participants often want to know what your favorite talk was. It may happen that you don’t even know what to answer because it happened so much during the day, that you forgot everything. A small look into my book helps me quickly and every talk is present again in front of my inner eye and I’m a bit more able to answer the question. Also, people who didn’t take part in the conference can get an impression what happened in the talk and can decide if they want to watch the video or not.

It’s a lot of fun. I love sketchnoting! I use pen and paper for it and since I’ve started with sketchnoting in November 2018, I’ve already finished two sketchbooks which are full of sketchnotes. I love to riffle through the books and see how my style has evolved and remind me of the talks, meetups and conferences I’ve visited the last years. You can see a big difference between the style of my notes from UIKonf 2019 and UIKonf 2020 (There are 12 months in between!).

Tips and tricks?

I’ve invested some time into preparation. Before the conference started, I wrote all talk titles, speaker names and their twitter handles on my notes, as well as the conference name and my twitter handle.

Sketchnote header, conference and credits signature are highlighted on the sketchnote.

This saved me a lot of time during the actual conference. Between the talks is mostly not much time and all I had to do was to wait for the next talk to begin and start by adding the content.

🤩 I’m so happy when other people like my sketchnotes and tell me that they actually find them useful! It makes everything much more worth!

Even though, nothing would ever stop me from making sketchnotes and nothing should ever stop you 😉

#AppBuilders20

#UIKonf2020

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