graphic recording

How adding a graphic recorder to your event makes it a game changer

07/06/2025 by Ben Crothers

Ever walked out of an event thinking, “Well, that was great… but what actually happened?” You’re not alone. Words fly thick and fast, but they don’t always stick. That’s where a graphic recorder (a.k.a. live scribe or visual note-taker) comes in. Here are 6 benefits for having one around.

I’ve been graphic recording at public events, conferences, and meetings for about 15 years, and even with the advent of gen-AI, these 6 benefits still hold true. Actually, even while technology gives so much wow-factor, we still crave connection, and in many ways, these 6 benefits are more important for events than ever.

🧲 1. It makes people look up from their phones

When someone’s sketching the conversation live in big, bold strokes, it pulls attention in a way bullet-point slides just can’t. A visual note-taker brings the vibe of “something really interesting’s happening here”… and suddenly, people are leaning in instead of tuning out.

^{There’s nothing like seeing a big drawing come to life before your eyes (pictured: Axelle Vanquaillie)}

Oh, and sometimes my clients are worried that graphic recording distracts from the speaker. What actually happens is quite the opposite! It’s like watching a documentary; seeing the action unfold while hearing the narration over the top is the perfect combo.

🧠 2. It helps brains actually remember things

Our brains are wired for stories and visuals, not just talking heads and dense jargon. A graphic recorder connects the dots with succinct phrases in attractive lettering, colour, layout, and metaphor, turning a wall of words into something you can see, remember, and talk about later.

And here’s something nobody talks about: a graphic recorder can make a so-so talk MUCH more appealing, since it helps to amplify the content.

🖼️ 3. It’s like getting a Polaroid photo for every event talk

By the end of your event, you’ve got a collection of boards that are like a set of giant hand-drawn Polaroid photos, or a ‘highlight reel’ of key insights. Each board is part artwork, part documentation, and 100% useful. You can take a photo and boom: your post-event wrap-up just got sorted.

The boards (or charts) also act as postcards of each talk, for your attendees to take with them and share (see #5). Of course each ‘postcard’ doesn’t capture all the detail of what’s in the talk. But just like a postcard, each particular piece in the postcard conjures up memories of that detail, to keep those fond memories around for longer.

^{Graphic recording boards making great souvenirs from a conference}

🌐 4. It makes your event more inclusive

Not everyone processes information the same way. Visual note-taking supports people who think better in pictures, who don’t speak the main language fluently, or who need more than just facts and figures to feel knowledged-up on the topic of the talk, or quick actions to try out.

A lot of what a graphic recorder does is to summarise a speakers’ content (or a conversation) by listening, synthesising and translating that summary into a visual summary. So in a way, the graphic recorder is doing the heavy cognitive lifting for the audience, so that they don’t have to.

It’s a win for accessibility and inclusivity.

📣 5. Hello, shareability

Graphic recordings are super snackable content. One photo of a rich, colourful visual summary can do more on social than five paragraphs of text ever will. It’s a dream for your comms team. And of course your audience will love sharing it, too.

^{Graphic recording works super well at sponsor conference booths too!}

🤝 6. It sparks conversations (and a few a-ha! moments)

When people see their own words or ideas pop up on the board, it builds validation, trust and momentum. It invites discussion, reflection, insight, even laughter. A live scribe doesn’t just record the moment; they shape it.

🧭 7. it’s great for strategy and decision-making

Wait! There are actually more than just 6 benefits. This benefit is actually my favourite. Workshops, planning sessions, roundtables, offsites… graphic recorders shine in these, and I see this play out in my own work all the time. They map out ideas in real time, reveal patterns hiding in the noise, and help groups focus better, and get aligned faster.

Think of them as visual GPS for complex conversations.

^{Even if it’s rough, graphic captures on a whiteboard help groups to focus and have a more productive conversation}

🎉 8. It adds that “Wow, they thought of everything” feel

OK, yes, there’s yet another benefit. This one’s definitely for the event organisers. Having the process and product of a graphic recorder around is a little unexpected, a little delightful, a little premium, and always interesting. When people see a live scribe in action, it tells them your event is top-drawer, thoughtful, professional, and designed for deeper engagement, not just an information dump.

Bottom line? A graphic recorder doesn’t just make your event aesthetically nicer and more engaging. They make it stick.

If you want help with getting a visual note-taker at your event, I got you (links to my business website, Bright Pilots). If you want to learn more about how to draw for graphic recording, look no further than my Presto Sketching book.

5 principles of great layout for your visuals

14/01/2021 by Ben Crothers

Your visual communication pieces can land with your audience or miss them entirely, depending on what layout you choose. This post shows you the principles behind why some layouts work better than others.

Layout: your secret sauce for communication success

One of the questions I get asked a lot in the training sessions I do about sketchnoting (or visual note-taking) is: how do I organise content on the page?

Visual layout is really important. It’s what guides your audience’s eye around the page (or screen), and sends them a bunch of signals about what parts to pay more attention to than others. And it’s just as important regardless of size and medium, whether it’s small format (like sketchnoting), or larger-format, like scribing and graphic recording, and whether it’s physical or digital.

Some might say that layout doesn’t matter if you’re sketchnoting just for yourself, but I disagree. Once you finish a sketchnote, you actually swap from being the creator to the audience, i.e. you still have to read and understand it yourself. So, why wouldn’t you make it easier for yourself, as well as for others, to appreciate and understand your good work?

Introducing the 5 principles

Let’s jump into 5 principles of great layout. You’ll find that once you see these in other sketchnotes (or anything laid out in print or digital, really!), you won’t be able to unsee them.

A diagram of some gestalt layout principles — Some principles involved in layouts that make them work so well

These principles from from the world of graphic design, and are known as gestalt principles.

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Balance

Think of all the various words, images, lines, frames and whatnot that you draw in sketchnoting as having a visual weight, i.e. a mass and density that they take up on the page (or screen). Some elements – and groups of elements – are going to be visually heavier and denser than others, and this affects how our eyes and brain judge them to be in balance.

Elements that collectively have a visual balance tend to convey calmness, order, and stability. Elements that are not in balance tend to convey disorder, discomfort, and tension. You can use this to great effect, depending on your subject matter, and what you want to communicate!

Visual hierarchy

Our eyes will gravitate to larger visual elements (text or images) before smaller visual elements. That’s why titles are usually the largest thing on a page, and footnotes are the smallest. That’s the logic of having sub-titles smaller than the title, but larger than regular text (or ‘body copy’ in print design parlance). As visual note-takers and communicators, this visual hierarchy of elements is super important to understand and use. We can change the proportion of elements on our pages to guide our audience’s eyes around the page, and use variable proportions of elements to convey what’s more important.

Repetition

Related to visual hierarchy and proportion is repetition. Being consistent in the layout and proportion of elements is a great way to convey unity and in your visual note-taking and graphic recording work, and make them easier to read and remember. Examples:

Keeping all your sub-titles the same size and colour helps your audience to scan and understand the piece much more easily
Using one, two or three colours to set up a visual pattern is often better than trying to use every colour marker you’ve got in the one piece
Using a small set of different types of frames, separators and backgrounds in the one piece, rather than hitting your audience with a kaleidoscope of umpteen different elements

Flow

I mentioned how we can lead our audience’s eyes around a page using visual hierarchy. We can also do this by paying attention to the rhythm, proximity, and flow of visual elements (or groups of elements). Layouts help us ‘package’ groups of elements together, according to rhythm, proximity, and flow.

This makes it easier for our audience’s eyes to read the whole by intuitively knowing what order to read various groups of elements. If there is no layout in place, our eyes find it harder to know how to navigate the whole; if that happens we fall back to an intuitive default of scanning a page from the top left corner to the bottom right corner (for Western audiences at least).

As visual note-takers and recorders, we of course have other juicy elements that pop up in various layouts, to help with flow. These are super effective, and other visual communicators can’t often use these the way we can:

Arrows – arrows are purpose-built to guide the eye. They convey sequence, order, step logic, and progress. Sometimes they even convey speed. Sometimes the whole layout is just one big arrow!
Separators – we can use lines of all kinds and characters to visually separate and sequence ideas and content
Frames – we can add order, sequence and hierarchy using frames of different kinds. Frames can also help audiences know what type of content to expect to read, which helps understanding and recall.
Shapes – we can use different kinds of shapes to arrange and classify content types in layouts. Shapes can be schematic (rectangles and circles), but they can also be metaphorical (e.g. silhouettes of icebergs, hot air balloons, mountains and clouds).

White space

Closely related to flow is knowing how layouts use white space. Layouts have areas of white space built-in.

Use them wisely!

Now that you know these 5 principles, here are some tips to help you actually do something with them:

Take a look at others’ sketchnotes or graphic recordings, and ‘read’ them according to these principles, to help you understand how to apply them. What can you detect about the pieces you see, when it comes to Balance, Visual hierarchy, Repetition, Flow, and White Space?
Deconstruct some of your own sketchnotes or drawings. How might you improve them, according to each of the principles?
The next time you do a sketchnote or graphic recording, pick one principle, and try to do the best you can in expressing that one principle.

I hope this helps you improve in your visualisation and drawing journey!

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A guide to sketchnote layouts

14/01/2021 by Ben Crothers

Here’s a set of sketchnote layouts to try, plus some tips about which layouts to use for which particular purpose.

Lead them down the garden path

One of the questions I get asked a lot in the training sessions I do about sketchnoting (or visual note-taking) is: how do I organise content on the page?

The layout of your sketchnotes and graphic recordings is really important for guiding your audience around the information you want them to take in, much like paths in parks and gardens are designed to help people see the best of what’s on offer. The layout you choose also makes it easier for your audience’s eyes to read the whole by intuitively knowing what order to read various groups of elements. If there is no layout in place, our eyes find it harder to know how to navigate the whole; if that happens we fall back to an intuitive default of scanning a page from the top left corner to the bottom right corner (for Western audiences at least).

Sketchnote layouts to try

Here is a poster image of various kinds of layouts you might like to try. I know there are lots of these summaries around, but these are the ones I teach, that are most effective, most of the time.

Note that these layouts work well for portrait or landscape… or square, for that matter. They’re all based on some age-old gestalt principles, borrowed from the world of graphic design.

And don’t forget to continue reading past this image, because we’ll get into some ideas for which layouts to try for which purpose…

A visual summary of various sketchnote layouts to try

Which layouts to try for which purpose

Columns and grids are your gateway

If you’re fairly fresh to sketchnoting, all this layout business might seem a bit daunting! By now though, I hope you can appreciate that using different layouts isn’t just about making content look more attractive; it’s about adding order and sequence, to make the content more meaningful, more understandable, and more memorable.

The thing about text-based communication is that it treats any topic the same way. Whether it’s a news article, a how-to guide, a work email, or a letter from your grandmother (this blog post, even!), it’s all arranged the same (barring being broken up with images). Paragraphs always come one after the other. To consume a text communication, you start at the top, and work your way through in a linear fashion.

I’m certainly not hating on this format (I rely on it for this post, after all!) but it’s very limiting. By contrast, using different layouts helps us to break out of that linear flow, and lay out our ideas in a sequence and space that often makes communication more effective and more meaningful.

Column layouts are your gateway to this new world! This is the easiest way to start the progression from the regular habit of text-based note-taking, and communicating everything in the same format of slabs of text:

Just like we can break up our text and images into columns, we can also break them up into rows…. although not too many, otherwise it turns into a spreadsheet! 😉

2×2 grids and 3×2 are very popular for communicating content that can be mapped on 2 spectra/axes, or for displaying content in a storyboard-like set of panels.

Radial layouts for guides

Continuing with the theme of freeing up content from the linear railway-carriage style of text-based communication, you might like to indulge in a radial layout.

Radial layouts come in handy when there is a set of principles or ideas related to one overall concept or message, in no particular order. You see this at work in listicles (I mean, try not to click on 20 Lipstick Names That Are Awkward As Hell), and in some public talks and podcast sessions.

Start with the title in the middle of the page (rather than at the top of the page), and capture each idea around the title. Link them with lines and arrows if you want to. Need to go over more than one page? No problem. Just repeat the title in the middle of the next page, and away you go.

Pathway layouts for stories and sequences

If there is a set of ideas that need to be in a specific sequence, then you probably need something like a pathway layout. Pathway layouts are especially good when you know the main topic of what you are capturing is a story of some kind, but you’re not sure where it’s going to go.

Stories and journeys pop up in books (surprise surprise), public talks, podcast sessions, blog posts… you name it! It’s a great format to listen to, and to remember sequences of ideas and events, and pathway layouts lend themselves well to visually capturing these sequences.

Basic layouts for business meetings

Visually capturing the progress and results of business meetings is a huge win for you, and (in my humble opinion) for your team as well. If you jot down your thoughts and reflections of what you experience in a meeting just for yourself, that will definitely improve your focus and your productivity. But if you capture progress and results for everyone else too, in view of everyone as the meeting progresses, you will definitely help everyone’s focus and productivity.

This is a HUGE part of visual thinking and communication to get into, so let me just offer a first step into getting started, with a few examples of simple layouts for a few different kinds of meetings:

Do you need help everyone to:

Define a guiding vision and purpose? Draw the object and subject as a basic map, where object = your customers, clients or community, and subject = you, your team, your product, your service. Draw in the reason driving the object and subject (WHY) perhaps as a mountain. Leave a space for HOW you’re going to achieve this vision.
Analyse the progress of their team or project? Visualise a retrospective by dividing a page into two space to capture your notes: looking back and looking forward
Get clarity and alignment on a topic or scope? Draw two concentric circles, label the outer circle OUT and the inner circle IN. Use this as a guide to help people define (and align on) what’s out of scope and what’s in scope.

Experiment!

I don’t want you walking away from this post thinking that this layout game has super strict rules. Au contraire, rules – once understood – are made to be broken, and one of the great gifts that sketchnoting has given us is its freedom and fluidity! So go ahead and have a play, try different layouts, make them, break them, and see each one as an experiment.