Photo Credit: Amber GregoryOn a professional note, Eva-Lotta is a user-experience designer known for creating gorgeous sketch notes, her way of capturing ideas by combining the power of sketching and writing. She started “sketchnoting” because she was bored by her own notes and after a few years of taking sketch notes, she’s never going back.
“Sketch notes are not about being good a artist, they are about being a good thinker” – Jason Santa Maria
So why is Eva-Lotta the queen sketchnote cheerleader? She breaks it down by saying:
- They’re non-linear: Sketching allows you to arrange thoughts on page in a way that shows connections between ideas. Our thoughts aren’t linear and your notes shouldn’t be either. Sketchnoting forces you to find clever ways to attack the notes.
- You can create visual hierarchy: Sketching gives you the ability to make notes more scannable. Use different sizes and weights. color, etc to make main points stand out.
- They provide visual mnemonics: Visual notes help you remember things to attach new concepts to things you already know and provide doorways into your brain.
- Sketchnotes force you to process your thoughts in real-time: While listening and drawing, you’re making decisions about what interests you.
- It makes you concentrate: Seriously! Someone should clue teachers in on this one. Science has proven that doodling helps you remember things – even the boring stuff. Studies have shown that people who doodle have a 29% higher retention rate.
- Because its fun: Subjective but true.
Before wrapping up her talk, Eva-Lotta challenged the audience to train their imagination muscle by doodling, creating characters and reinventing stories behind pictures.
Also, never draw the speech bubble first. The box will never big enough for the text you want to drawn inside.
Eva-Lotta Lamm
UX Designer, Illustrator, Visual Thinker (Berlin)
Eva-Lotta Lamm is a User Experience Designer, illustrator and visual thinker. She grew up in Germany, worked in Paris and London for a few years before packing up her backpack and go travelling the world for 14 months. She has over 12 years of experience working on digital products as an in-house designer for Google, Skype, and Yahoo! as well as freelancing and consulting for various agencies and her own clients. After being a (semi-)nomad for 2 years, she is now based in Berlin.
Besides her UX work, she has been taking sketchnotes at hundreds of talks and conferences and has self-published her notes in several books (www.sketchnotesbook.com). During her world trip, she documented her experience as daily sketchnotes in her travel diary (www.secretsfromtheroad.com).
Eva-Lotta also is a sought after expert and teacher in the area of sketching, sketchnoting and visual thinking. She is regularly speaking at international design conferences and has been teaching sketching workshops at conferences and for companies for over 5 years. She is currently writing a book on sketching interfaces, based on one of her workshop formats.
Eva-Lotta is the illustrator of Content Everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and The User’s Journey by Donna Lichaw, both published by Rosenfeld Media.
In her personal sketching practice, she is exploring the area of Visual Improvisation, where she is looking at the parallels between sketching and improvisation and experiments with how the principles from her regular theatre improvisation practice can be used to inspire visual work.
Photo: Marc Thiele
— post by Brooke Francesi
