Sketchnote: Data Visualization Through Visual Thinking

Reading Time: 4 mins

Sketchnote: It is a form of note taking that involves bringing more visuals into the traditional note-taking.

Visual Thinking: It is a way a person organizes the thoughts and improves the ability to think, interpret, and communicate.

It will not be incorrect if we call Sketchnotes as the modern day tool to support Visual Thinking.

Sketchnotes Origins

Will you believe if we tell you that you have already developed sketchnotes earlier in your life? You already know what a sketchnote is, but don’t realize that you have already used it.
Remember your school and high school days when the last page of every student’s notebook used to be a sketchnote canvas.

Observing the above picture you can realize that there is no standard format to sketchnote. It is just a wave of ideas in your mind space that’s fluttering to be visualized. A good sketchnote is something in which the message is clearly delivered to the reader. It should be self-explanatory.

Sketchnotes is more than just drawing. It includes a plethora of activities such as text, fonts, diagrams, bulletins, visual icons, pictures, cartoons, and the list goes on. Gramener’s Associate Lead Designer, Ramya Mylavarapu conducted an in-house Sketchnote workshop where she explained and demonstrated the ability of a good sketchnote to transform into a data visualization. You might want to look out for some impeccable sketchnotes
Gramener’s design team earlier created to celebrate World Sketchnote Day 2018.

But before that, you must know your allies to drive a perfect sketchnote.

Elements for Sketchnoting

“You will become a good sketchnoter if you know these 5 basic shapes.”, Says Ramya.

To add more value to your sketchnote data visualizations always follow the four mantras of Sketchnoting.

• Choose and define a layout that can house all the details of your sketchnote.
• Choose clear letters and fonts to give voice to your ideas.
• Always use basic sketches.
• Stick figures and faces are easy to draw and will give you more time to work on details.

Separate your ideas using cards, clouds/flashy containers, lines, whitespace and connect them to the next elements using arrows and dotted lines. Always highlight the insights from your idea or work using graphical elements such as paths, dashed lines, numbers, and milestones. We used all the instructions to develop our own sketchnotes during the workshop.

Data Visualization Through Sketchnotes

To visualize the data, you need the data. Let’s take a YouTube video where Gramener’s Co-founder Ganes Kesari communicates the reasons a business struggles to adopt Deep Learning.

Although the video content has been explained to bits in Ganes’ medium blog, we tried breaking it more to create a 16:9 widescreen slide sketchnote data visualization.

The First Rough Draft

Summarizing all the elements from the video and the blog, we came to know that there are 5 major reasons that businesses are struggling to adopt Deep Learning.

• Bridging the gap of expectations between what we have and what is still an imagination.
• Lack of training data to train the deep learning models.
• Lots of unlabeled training data.
• High investments decline it to be a cost-benefit trade-off.
• Smart insights post analysis can creep out the people.

Initially, we sufficed the information with what we heard and observed.

The Finalized Sketchnote Data Visualization

It was now the time to make the sketchnote visually impeccable. “There are four basic elements that can help to upgrade the penned thoughts.”, explains Ramya.

• Listening skills
• Focus areas for improvements
• Spellings and errors
• Consistent practice

Gramener’s Airline Cargo Optimization case to Sketchnote

Sometime back we developed a data visualization drawing insights about the factors that cause delay when a cargo moves from an airline to a warehouse.

Apparently, we tried converting some insights from the data visualization into a sketchnote.
Insights.

• Friday and Thursday mornings are particularly bad when it comes to cargo shifting.
• Part shipment products tend to perform worse than full shipment.
• The recovery times are worse on Fridays and best on Saturdays and Wednesdays.
• Shifting fragile items on Fridays make people scowl as a small mistake can spoil their mood for the weekend.

Furthermore, Sketchnotes can add significant details to the visualization and can help in simple data consumption.