Abby VanMuijen



Lecturer,
UC Berkeley

Were you ever taught how to take notes? Even if you were, do you take notes effectively? Or are you like most of us, who look back at our notes five minutes after weve written them down & have no recollection of what they say? The practice of conventional note-taking has taught us how to be excellent transcribers, but for most of us, this is not an effective way to sit in a class or meeting & actively engage with, process & retain information.

Visual Note-taking (also known as "Sketch-noting") is a skill designed to help you spatialize & visualize information as you hear it. This skill helps with information retention, improves your brains ability to engage during the note-taking process, & its fun! Visual Note-taking is an introduction to visual communication that will help you become more comfortable visualizing & sketching your ideas.

DISCLAIMER: You do not need to know how to draw to find this class helpful! If you can draw a square... even a really bad square... you're more than qualified.

Please bring something to write with & something to write on.

• Gain a basic understanding of the difference between conventional notetaking & visual notetaking


• Better understand your unique thought processes & notetaking needs


• Practice basic drawing exercises & improve your visual vocabulary


• Learn valuable tools to practice & improve your visual notetaking


• Learn how visual notetaking can help you tell better stories & more clearly communicate your ideas

Abby VanMuijen

Lecturer,
UC Berkeley

Abby VanMuijen is a graphic recorder, illustrated video producer & instructor of Visual Note-taking in the Bay Area. She has taught classes on Visual Note-taking, Communication & Design at UC Berkeley & IDEO, Chicago. She is the illustrator for the #GlobalPOV Project with Professor Ananya Roy & has since produced illustrated videos & graphic recordings for UC Berkeley, MIT, Google, USAID, the Wal-Mart Foundation & a number of documentary films.

As a child, Abby was a very visual learner, but a terrible artist. She learned to draw in college, developed visual note-taking skills by sketching out her UC Berkeley lectures & has been making a career out of it ever since. She is passionate about teaching other visual learners & thinkers the tools to better communicate the ideas & pictures in their head.