Learn with Phoebe · Visual Thinking & Storytelling

Learn Sketchnoting with Phoebe

Somebody talks for nine minutes and says twelve things that matter. Typed as fast as fingers go, the notes come to 286 words, 84 percent of them the speaker's exact words, and two of the twelve never arrive because the typist was still on the last sentence. Captured as a keyword and one line in the listener's own words: 110 words, all twelve, none of them the speaker's. Six sessions on that second habit. What sketchnoting is when you take the drawing anxiety out of it, the five shapes and the seven layouts, the hierarchy that makes a page readable by a colleague, and a bench that plays the talk at speaking pace and measures what you kept.

6sessions
12ideas, one talk
84% verbatim when typed
0% when chosen
45min per session

The six sessions 🎯 · one talk, six captures

The running situation is Daybreak's autumn roast talk: the founder of the coffee-subscription company from the SQL, dataviz, visual-storytelling and mind-mapping courses gives the roastery team nine minutes on where the launch stands. Twelve things are worth keeping. Every session captures the same nine minutes a different way, so the only thing that ever changes is what you kept and where it sits on the page.

✏️ Session 1 · easy

Ideas, not art

Listening with a pen. The four moves, the drawing objection answered with Rohde's own scale, and three separate literatures read past their headlines: doodling, the drawing effect, pen versus keyboard.

▶ Start here 🔺 Session 2 · easy

Five shapes, one vocabulary

Circle, square, triangle, line, dot. Every icon is a recipe of two or three, and the twenty icons for your own work are built before the meeting so the mark is already in the hand.

twenty icons 📏 Session 3 · bench night

The selection bench

The talk plays one word at a time at 150 words per minute. You capture. The bench counts ideas kept of twelve, verbatim overlap by the research's own definition, and what each idea cost. Four presets and one trap.

★ the bench 🗂️ Session 4 · medium

Seven layouts, one page

Rohde's seven patterns drawn small, and how to pick one from the agenda before the speaker starts. The same twelve ideas on a grid and on a path, and which page a colleague can find something in.

skeleton first 🔍 Session 5 · medium

Readable by someone else

Three weights and one accent. Hierarchy, one rung of the lettering ladder, containers and connectors, and the thirty-second scan: hand the page to a colleague and count.

thirty seconds 📨 Session 6 · hands-on

Live, then shared

One real twenty-minute talk captured live with everything so far, then the one-page recap that leaves your desk. Final scorecard on a page somebody else will actually read.

🔒 final scorecard
easy - everyone medium hands-on bench night

Your passport 🎫

Clear all three quiz questions in a session and it gets stamped. Six stamps means your notes stop being a transcript with gaps. Stamps live in this browser only.

What this course is not, so you land in the right place 🧭

If your question isGo here instead
How do I give my notes a radial shape with one centre and keyword branches, after the meeting?learn-mind-mapping-with-phoebe
Which chart does this question need, and is it honest?learn-dataviz-with-phoebe
The notes are good; how do I turn them into a deck that changes a decision?learn-visual-storytelling-with-phoebe
How do I letter in serif, slab, script and 3D, or draw people well?Rohde's Sketchnote Handbook and Workbook; named here, taught there
How do I capture a live talk as a page somebody else can read, without being able to draw?you are in the right place

Mind mapping is a shape you give notes afterwards. Sketchnoting is what you do while the speaker is still talking. Two courses owning one grammar disagree with each other eventually, so each owns its half.

Choose your path 🗺️

Three doors into the same conviction: the page is the talk reduced to what you will need, made while the talk is still happening, and the reducing is the work.

⏱️ I have a talk to capture tomorrow 1→ 2 the habit and the twenty marks that make it fast
📏 I want to know if it actually works 1→ 3 three literatures read honestly, then a bench that measures the one thing they support
🎯 The whole thing 1→ 2→ 3→ 4→ 5→ 6 from a transcript with gaps to a page that leaves your desk

What is honest here 🧾

The bench in session 3 computes its numbers from what you typed against the transcript. The one-line verdict is a rule of thumb and is labelled as one on the widget. There is no recall model, because the evidence does not support one, and there is no drawing score, because a browser cannot see a pen.

ClaimStatus
Ideas captured, words, lines, words per idea, own wordsReally counted in the capture box against the twelve keyed ideas; the chips show which registered
Verbatim overlap, longest runReally computed with the definition from Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014, the one finding of theirs that Urry et al. 2021 reproduced
The talk at speaking paceReally timed: one word per interval at 130, 150 or 175 words per minute, checked headlessly (ten words in four seconds at 150)
The verdict lineA heuristic, labelled as one on the widget
"Sketchnoting improves recall by X"Not claimed anywhere. Three literatures are quoted with both halves of every abstract, and the sketchnoting studies that exist measured emotions and satisfaction, not recall
Drawing qualityNot measured. Its cost in ideas is, via the anti-preset
Daybreak's talkA teaching situation. The measurement code is real

The knowledge map 🧠

The whole course at a glance - hover a session to spotlight its concepts, click any node to jump in.