---
title: 'How To: Take Notes Like a Champ'
teaser: How to hold your pen and apply it to the parchment with ideas.
tags: design
author: Kevin Burg
published_on: 2010-07-20
---

## Information Overload

One of our newest projects here at thoughtbot is a taxonomic naming app called
GNITE which we're building for the [Marine Biological Lab](http://www.mbl.edu/).
As designer on this project my first challenge was to get a basic understanding
of the subject matter and the goals of the project, but I found the information
to be complicated especially for someone new to taxonomy. We had the pleasure of
visiting the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, MA on Cape Cod recently and in
the meetings I dusted off an old note taking trick I frequently used in college
but with new tools —an iPad and [Adobe
Ideas](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-ideas-1-0-for-ipad/id364617858?mt=8)
app.

## Taking notes vs. absorbing information

Design is often about reducing complex systems to their simplest form. Our
meetings at the Marine Biology Lab could have produced pages and pages of
comprehensive notes but my goal was to organically absorb as much information as
possible without the distracting task of transcribing information. Using Adobe
Ideas, [an iPad and a stylus], I took visual notes, writing down key pieces of
information, embellishing them, and organizing them visually. The embellishment
is the key part - it leaves your ears open to what's being discussed. When
looking back at my notes I can clearly remember who was talking, what the
sentiment was, and other subtle things that could be forgotten during normal
note taking. The visual nature of the notes jogs my memory in a way pure text or
handwriting doesn't. The outcome is an **understanding of a simplified gestalt**
which isn't burdened by details.

[an iPad and a stylus]:https://thoughtbot.com/blog/post/749800833/ipad-sketching-app-review

Click each image to view it larger:

[![notes](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/gnite-notes-1-668.jpg)](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/gnite-notes-1.jpg)

Adobe Ideas allows <abbr title="Fractal-like. You can zoom way in and way
out.">fractalesque</abbr> zooming. You are able to use vast scale differences to
communicate importance as well as benefit from a very flexible canvas, so you
almost never run out of space taking notes.

[![notes](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/gnite-notes-2-668.jpg)](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/gnite-notes-2-668.jpg)

[Check out that mushroom!](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/fungi.jpg) Someone
said "fungi" so I drew a mushroom. As my theory goes, I absorbed whatever was
said after that (it was an anecdotal tale of conflicting fungi names, I
believe).

[![notes](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/gnite-notes-3-668.jpg)](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/gnite-notes-3-668.jpg)

## But won't you miss important details

The drawback to taking notes like this is that many details will never get
written down. If those details are critical bring a voice recorder. In my case
there were two developers in the meetings as well, so I was confident our
team-like approach would yield all necessary information (and it did).

## Life after NDA's

One of the most exciting aspects to this project is it's open source which opens
the possibility to documenting the building process in ways we usually can't
with most client work. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of
posts documenting the design process all the way through to the final product.