Picture this: You’re in Paris. It’s spring, and the sun shines down warmly on the vibrantly green grass of Buttes-Chaumont Park. The winding back streets exude a romantic glow, while the Eiffel Tower glints in your peripheral vision even when it is out of sight.
Perhaps you had a delectable croissant for breakfast — the French kind, with lots of butter and a finishing crisp. Maybe you spent the morning at Versailles Palace, marveling at its French Baroque architecture and sheer French grandeur. After picking up lunch at a delightful little corner cafe that served the best croque monsieur you’ve ever tasted, you now find yourself in one of the top jewels in Paris’s crown: the Louvre.
You wander its esteemed hallways, amazed. On every corner, in every room, beauty assailes your senses. The Venus de Milo gazes at you with wide, unpainted eyes, while you swear you feel a breath of wind as the Winged Victory of Samothrace stands with robes rippling.
The paintings also astonish with their remarkable detail and attention to perspective. Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of Medusa” sends shivers of trepidation down your spine with its dark menace, and “The Wedding at Cana” by Paolo Veronese has you wishing you could leap into the painting and join the celebration.
When you finally stand before the “Mona Lisa,” Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece and the most famous painting in the Louvre’s collections, you find yourself thinking: I will never forget this moment as long as I live.
Whether or not you are particularly enamored with the “Mona Lisa,” the experience of seeing it is still likely to stick in your memory. Out of all of the gorgeous attractions to be seen in Paris, the art at the Louvre has a quality that captivates millions every year.
What is it about art that draws the eye and captures the heart? If this question piques your curiosity, then keep reading, because we will be discussing the creative side of it shortly! But even if the more philosophical underpinnings don’t intrigue you, you should at least find it worth your time and effort to sit down and read a humble blog post about the benefits of including visual aspects in your note-taking.
Because at the end of the day, visual note-taking has skyrocketed in recent years for a reason. Visual information is all around us and is used in every industry. It grabs the audience’s attention and can communicate a complex message in an instant, just like any one of those pieces of artwork on display at the Louvre.
If you can master the art of visual note-taking, your notes will look stellar on paper — but even more importantly, your productivity will certainly thank you.
The Old and Boring
I don’t mean to knock any of the non-visual styles of note-taking, but … this section is definitely going to knock the non-visual styles of note-taking. Sorry, I can’t help it! You’ll understand why once you see the amazing benefits and features that visuals bring to the table.
It’s also not really that much of an insult, since nearly two out of three people are visual learners, and even if you’re not a visual learner, you can still benefit from having a visual note-taking technique in your toolbox. Creative note-taking is not only helpful but also fun!
But first, let’s take a look at some traditional, non-visual styles of note-taking so that you can see what notes look like without visuals. They can still certainly be successful, and the ones we’re going to discuss here are among the most effective visual note-taking method techniques, but there are definite disadvantages to going picture-less when writing your notes.
The outlining method is probably the one you’re most familiar with and has been around for ages and ages. How it works is that you use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to record information in a descending hierarchical order where each bullet point goes under each subheading and each subheading goes under a heading.
It’s very logical, orderly, and fast.
But it’s not built for images.
Instead, you have a textual outline of the topic, probably with incomplete sentences and plenty of paraphrasing. It’s great for getting the gist and key points of a presentation down quickly in a linear sequence that makes sense at first glance and is easy to recall upon review. To accomplish this, it sacrifices volume and sometimes accuracy.
It’s still a very effective style of note-taking, don’t get me wrong. But because of its narrow focus and lack of visuals, it struggles to capture really complex ideas or information that doesn’t follow an obvious logical sequence. If you’re working with nuanced or abstract topics that have a lot of interconnected or seemingly unrelated pieces, then don’t reach for the outlining method.
The Cornell method is also not going to cut it, though for slightly different reasons. This style of note-taking was developed in the 1940s and has been one of the most popular styles even to this day because it’s easy for students to learn and can be applied to more or less any topic.
You use this method by dividing your page into three sections. On the left, create a narrow column for clues, key words, and any short questions that you pull out of the classroom material. The larger section to the right of that line is the repository for the bulk of your lecture notes. And on the bottom, create another section for summarizing the material after the study session ends.
There’s definitely no room left on the page for visuals, and the problem with this method is that its structure can be very rigid. So it’s fantastic when it works, but if it doesn’t, it’s hard to adapt it to your needs.
Now don’t get me wrong; you can still make these methods visually appealing by keeping them neat and tidy and using good handwriting. That in itself is indeed pleasing to the eye and will bring some of the benefits of aesthetics. But in this blog post, we’re going to define “visually appealing” more ambitiously, with an emphasis on the “visual” aspect. Let’s get started.
The Neuroscience of Beauty
In the modern world, we like to categorize things as either art or not art. But the brain doesn’t actually make those distinctions. Neuroimaging studies indicate that the brain regions responsible for appraising the importance of objects overlap with those involved in aesthetic responses — aka, the brain has systems that evaluate whether an object is appealing or not. Usefulness and beauty are both part of those calculations.
The most important part of the brain for aesthetic appraisal is the anterior insula, which lies deep within the cerebral cortex and has a core role in regulating subjective feeling states and introducing those feelings into processes that involve cognition and motivation.
In other words, the anterior insula assesses whether an object or experience is “good for me” or “bad for me.” This can be a very subjective assessment based on other factors; for example, a piece of chocolate cake will make your mouth water if you’re hungry but may look disgusting if you’re feeling nauseous.
Art, or visuals in general, are evaluated in exactly the same way. No matter how sophisticated we like to think a person who appreciates art, science suggests that our brain’s responses to these two things, a piece of cake and a Van Gogh painting, are actually quite similar.
However, the neurology of art is still a very complex topic. Visuals can arouse complicated and sometimes contradictory emotions within the audience. If you’ve ever felt moved by a piece of artwork, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
The neuroscience behind this is quite romantic (yes, I’m playing off of the double meaning of romantic as a sensation of love/romance and also romantic as in Romanticism, the school of art. Do please allow me such small, nerdy joys in life!). The neuroscience of being moved by art is romantic because it activates two systems in the brain that are normally separate and fuses them together.
Normally, when a person looks at an object, say a piece of art, the brain focuses on the stimulus. But when the brain is moved by a piece of art, the mind begins to wander, activating the system that ponders the self, memory, and future. In other words, visuals can arouse a complex, whole-brain response that unites usually disparate facets of the mind.
The Neurological Impact of Visual Notes
Just think of how the neuroscience of beauty can benefit you when it’s applied to your notes!
If you read about any type of visual note-taking, it will likely tell you that one of the biggest advantages of visual note-taking is that it helps you see associations, connections, and relationships between information. Now you know why! Visuals activate multiple regions of your brain at the same time and encourage communication between them.
When you insert visuals into written text in your notes, particularly if you’re combining visuals with text, those visuals have salience. This is a fancy way of saying that when something stands out from the crowd — perhaps it’s a different color or a different shape — it will be particularly noticeable, both to your eye and to your brain.
This might sound like an obvious statement, but consider how you can use it to your advantage when taking notes. Through the use of highlighters, color coding, or images, you can use visuals to draw your eye directly to the most important information.
As also mentioned, visuals elicit stronger emotional responses than text. This can benefit you in note-taking if you use visuals to further highlight information with emotional connotations. Those visual elements will stick deeper in your memory if you sketch them out in your notes.
As philosopher George Santayana wrote, we have “a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it.” Use that tendency to your advantage in your note-taking by showcasing relevant information with visual appeal.
What do Visually Appealing Notes Look Like?
We’ve talked about the neuroscience of beauty and how you can use this to your advantage in your notes, but what do visually appealing notes actually look like?
If you’re intimidated by this question and/or the prospect of adding a visual element to your notes, just remember that aesthetics are subjective. Philosophers have struggled to define beauty for millennia. When it comes to taking notes, just remember that unless you’re sharing them with someone else, your notes only have to be visually interesting and appealing to you.
Now, most people will agree that a certain level of orderliness is appealing, especially when it comes to systems of organization like note-taking. It doesn’t have to be symmetrical, because asymmetry can also be aesthetic, but a certain neatness will make it appealing. In fact, you don’t even need to include visuals to make your study notes visually organized and visually appealing; just keep them clean and tidy, and your brain will thank you.
Visual Note-Taking Techniques: How to Take Aesthetic Notes
But to give you something more tangible to work with, let’s take a look at some of the best ways that you can make your notes more visually appealing — besides simply keeping them neat and orderly.
It Starts With Structure
Format the structure of your notes in such a way that it makes sense and has a clear flow of information. You can do this by using headings and subheadings and organizing it from top to bottom on the page, or by using a creative means of organizing such as mind mapping techniques, which we will discuss shortly.
The point is to have an obvious and consistent organization to the way that your notes are structured so that you can see how all of the information relates to one another, whether that be hierarchically, logically, or creatively connected.
Really, consistency is key here. You can also use color, symbols, highlighting, circles, underlining, and more to add to the structure of your notes, but it’s only effective if you’re using them consistently rather than hodge-podge. Random color will just add chaos to creative notes, and overbearing doodles will only distract.
Mind Maps
A mind map is a form of visual organization that connects information around a central theme or idea. It’s actually known more formally as the Mind-Mapping method, and how it works is that you draw a circle in the center of your page for the main idea or topic, and then you draw lines branching out from there that provide greater details about the subject and how all the points are interrelated.
If you have a hard time taking notes on a really complex and convoluted topic, then you can use mind maps to record all of the ideas without having to spend large amounts of time organizing them just so. You can also space the information however you want to avoid making your notebook notes messy or crowded.
You can also use color and images in mind maps in addition to text. This will make it both more visually appealing, and more effective for your comprehension, preferred learning styles, and memory.
Concept Maps
Concept maps are very similar to mind maps in that they also use keywords and connectors to visualize concepts. However, this type of map is dedicated to singular concepts, and the connectors or arrows branch out to brief one-to-two-word summary explanations that describe the central topic.
This is a great way to easily organize your ideas about a concept and dive deeper into it, really fleshing out its characteristics and any relationships you may have missed.
Flowcharts
Flowcharts provide a visual representation of a process or event step in hierarchical order, starting with the first step and then having all subsequent steps placed below it. Such a graphic captures the flow of a process in a logical and organized manner.
Flow charts can also utilize all kinds of symbols or different shapes to indicate different things, but you don’t have to make them overly complicated. The common procedure is to use an oval to indicate the start and end steps, a diamond to indicate a decision, and a rectangle to indicate a process. Arrows connect the steps by showing the flow of action.
Thinking Maps
Another form of map is a thinking map, and I should make this plural and say thinking maps, because there are all different kinds. They use eight visual-verbal learning tools to help the note-taker visualize their own thinking process and make abstract thoughts concrete:
- Circle map: helps define context and encourage brainstorming
- Bubble map: describes a concept using adjectives
- Flow map: demonstrates ordering and sequencing (such as with the flowchart)
- Brace map: depicts the whole of something and its parts
- Tree map: helps to classify and group information
- Double bubble map: used for comparing and contrasting
- Multi-flow map: analyzes causes and effects
- Bridge map: helps to highlight analogies
Similarly to the other types of maps, thinking maps break down complex information into easily-comprehensible groupings and, in doing so, help the note-taker discover connections and associations between them. There’s also a high degree of critical thinking involved, as you can see from the eight visual-verbal learning tools.
Graphic Organizers
Another form of visual organization is a graphic organizer. This tool combines text, shapes, and connectors to simplify concepts while still showing the connections between them. There are dozens of graphic organizers, including:
- Persuasion maps: used for mapping out arguments for a persuasive essay or debate
- Sequence charts: lay out a series of events or actions in the order in which they take place
- Story maps: help note-takers learn the elements of a piece of literature by identifying characters, plot, and setting
- Learning maps: highlight the skills, knowledge, and ideas derived from a lesson, unit, or course
As you can see, there are countless ways to organize and share information about whatever you’re learning in a manner that is both visually appealing and effective.
Venn Diagrams
We should all be familiar with venn diagrams, which are interconnected circles that demonstrate the similarities and differences between two or more things. Venn diagrams may seem like a simplistic visual device, but they can actually get quite complex depending on how many circles you include.
Venn diagrams can be used to compare related ideas, concepts, or items. You can also incorporate color to make your notes even more visually appealing.
Color Me Pretty
Speaking of color, it’s a super easy way to make your notes more visually appealing. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy; in fact, it’s recommended to only use two to three colors in order to keep things from getting overly chaotic. Use too much color, and you risk negating their benefits.
Different colors can be traced back to different functions in the brain; for example, blue is linked to productivity, while green is associated with long-term concentration and clarity. But use whatever color code works best for you, or with whatever color pens or pencils you have on hand.
Picture Me This
And finally, of course, you can make your notes more visually appealing by incorporating images. Feel free to be as creative or not creative as possible with these images; they can be sketches, doodles, graphs, infographics, adding images, shapes, or whatever strikes your imagination.
For example, one such technique is known as sketchnoting. Note-takers use simple, hand-drawn renderings of facts, dates, or abstract concepts to better explore and understand a topic.
Using images, as we’ve already mentioned, will draw the eye and encourage emotional connections. There are even types of visual notes that rely entirely on drawings and images without text. But you don’t have to be that extreme unless you want to. Just including a little illustration here and there will be enough to make your notes that much more visually appealing and boost your own creativity.
How to Get Started
If you’re starting to catch my drift and see the pros of making your notes more visually appealing, then you may be wondering how to get started. Never fear; I am pleased to inform you that it’s incredibly easy and even fun!
The short answer is that you can get started just by adding bits of color, little sketches, or making your handwriting neater. But beyond that, here are some tips for some more substantial ways that you can get started making your notes more visually appealing.
Start by rethinking your page. Don’t be limited by a lack of imagination when looking at this square sheet of potential. Reimagine the space — bend the rules! You can use varying text sizes and fonts. You can add images. You can structure this page however you’d like, so get creative!
A little practice goes a long way. Start with doodling or scribbling to get the creative juices flowing. Then you can practice sketching simple concepts before moving onto more challenging ones.
Develop your own shorthand or symbolic language, but with visuals. You can attribute icons to concepts and your own words and, in so doing, develop your own kind of visual library. Remember, this image doesn’t have to be the Mona Lisa; visual notes don’t have to take themselves too seriously!
As you get more comfortable, you can begin incorporating more advanced visuals and styles. Different visual styles will work better for your topic than others, so play around until you find what works best for you.
Conclusion
In short, art is a fantastic medium that extends even into the note-taking realm. In this blog post, we introduced a couple of non-visual note-taking styles and discussed the pros and cons of using them. Despite not utilizing visuals explicitly, you can still pay attention to their appearance and make them as visually appealing as possible by keeping them neat and organized. You don’t have to be a visual learner to appreciate these note-taking skills and the benefits they offer.
More interestingly, in my opinion anyway, we then went into depth on subjects concerning the study of the neuroscience of beauty, trying to get to the bottom of how and why visual notes are even something that the brain cares about.
We learned that there is no real distinction between what is and what is not art. The brain evaluates an object’s beauty with the same systems it uses to evaluate an object’s importance; in the end, it all comes down to whether or not the brain finds something appealing. Then, we sometimes slap a label on it and call it art.
Different regions of the brain are involved in this evaluation, but the most prominent that we discussed is the anterior insula. The primary question it asks when making its evaluation is whether it is “good for me” or “bad for me.” Though we also learned that being moved by a piece of artwork is a much more romantic experience when it comes to the person’s emotional reaction, The brain is complicated; what can we say?
We can turn this neuroscience to our advantage in our note-taking. Making them visually appealing will increase our ability to make connections within the information, will make visual information more salient than textual information, will elicit greater emotional reactions and thus emotional associations with visual content, and all together will help the material stick in your memory better.
All it takes is a few visual cues in your study notes; they will not only help organize information but also stimulate your thought process. They’ll bring more clarity and put a unique spin on ideas.
The result is a set of beautiful notes that are downright pleasing to look at. Aesthetics themselves are subjective, so what you find visually pleasing may differ from your neighbor’s, but in general, beautiful study notes that are clean and neat will always be visually appealing, regardless of whether you decide to include color or images. Whether they are color coded in sections or don’t lack a single creative part to their pages, creative notes make the best notes.
Then we went into detail about how exactly one can take notes that are visually appealing. We discussed the importance of structuring your notes in a way that is tidy and makes sense, and using color, circles, underlining, and the like to add to the visual format of productive notes.
Mind maps, concept maps, and thinking maps are all great ways to organize your data in a creative and visually pleasing manner. Not only do they look cool, but they also engage your mind in unique ways. There’s nothing like having your study notes organized creatively; this note-taking process is far superior to any other note-taking method.
Mind maps are great for exploring a central idea at length, while concept maps are good for expanding one’s understanding of a single concept. Thinking maps are even more intricate and utilize eight visual-verbal learning tools to connect ideas and make the abstract more concrete.
Flowcharts are similar except they apply more specifically to sequences of a process or event. Graphic organizers are also similar, except they are typically developed to apply to specific contexts, such as the story map for graphing literature.
Venn diagrams are a classic visual tool that most everyone should be familiar with. That makes it a great place to start incorporating more visuals into your notes.
Science supports the use of color in your notes. Not only does it make keywords stand out more in both your awareness and your memory, but different colors are also associated with activating different parts of your brain.
And of course, you can use images of all kinds to make your notes more visually appealing.
Lastly, we considered how to get started making your notes more visually appealing. The gist of it? Roll up your sleeves and simply start taking notes. You can start small by adding color, or you can start bigger with sketches of words or simple concepts. The idea is to practice making yourself comfortable with visuals and to ultimately rethink how you look at your written notes.
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but a set of visually appealing notes will be a pleasure to everyone who sees them.