{"id":15390,"date":"2012-08-03T08:24:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-03T12:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2012\/08\/03\/starting-a-new-sketchbook\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:14","slug":"starting-a-new-sketchbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2012\/08\/03\/starting-a-new-sketchbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Starting a new sketchbook"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve pre-ordered Mike Rohde’s upcoming The Sketchnote Handbook<\/a><\/em>, because I’m intrigued by this new form of communication””which I’ve been doing for years without having a name for it. But Rohde and others<\/a> have made a business practice out of, essentially, doodling along to condense the ideas of a talk. I love it!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Could I add this to the things I do professionally? Would I want to? I don’t know, but I would like to cultivate the ability.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I’ve been making lots of notes on paper lately, and I want to collect these in one place””partly because it’s good to look back over these flashes of insight, and partly, I admit, because they look kind of pretty and I always wince a little when I crumple up one of these pages and throw it in the recycling.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So between last night and this morning I made myself a sketchbook:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I gave it ‘deckle’ edges, but I cheated and used a vintage photo trimmer that gives the paper a ragged look, yet is a lot quicker and a lot<\/em> less effort than tearing each page. I guess I wanted it to look a bit rough, because a book that looks perfect is intimidating, and intimidating books stay on the shelf, unused.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I think I’m finally<\/em> getting the spacing right between the book-block and the covers, so the resulting hinge works and doesn’t pull the insides away from the spine. (Sorry for the book-nerdiness there, but I’ve been struggling for a while to get this right.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Testing the book out this morning, I discovered that the paper’s a bit bleedy for my fine markers. That’s sort of a shame, but then, it’s also an invitation to freely use up the pages and surrender that notion of having to produce “art”.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So I got started right away, thinking aloud on paper:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This is one of the best things about using shorthand: I can write any crazy stuff I like without an inkling of self-consciousness, ’cause only a handful of people in the world could read it””not that anyone would be bothered. (Though I do carry around a cheat-sheet of the principles<\/a> in my back pocket.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Some of the squares on my time-management boardgame pose a question or ask me to reflect in certain ways, so these pages were me getting around to answering those questions.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Gosh, it’s a good idea to talk to oneself! It’s amazing how much barely conscious material floats around in my noggin””which I can actually work with once I look directly at it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Now it’s time to write an article, and this afternoon’s challenge is to work on an info-graphic for my client’s blog. This is something new! I’m fine with the ghostwriting being anonymous””that’s how that works””but I think I should push for credit for the graphics, if they work out.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve pre-ordered Mike Rohde’s upcoming The Sketchnote Handbook, because I’m intrigued by this new form of communication””which I’ve been doing for years without having a name for it. But Rohde and others have made a business practice out of, essentially, doodling along to condense the ideas of a talk. I love it! Could I add […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}