Last year I wrote a few bits (here and here) about trying find and build just the right stylus for my iPad. No luck.
This March I was in Hong Kong and while waiting in a train station gadget shop for a friend buying some iSomething or another, I noticed a chunky, angular pen, with what looked like a rubber tip. Hallelujah! It turned out to be the AluPen from Just Mobile, and it’s hands down the best iPad Stylus I’ve ever used. Grippy, with a tip that is just hard and soft enough, it feels much like using a thick pencil.
If you draw on the iPad, or just get sick of smudging your finger across all that lovely glass, you must try this thing.
Yesterday I went from enthusiasm to disappointment in a few minutes when I hacked together an iPad stylus to use for scribbling sketchnotes. The damned thing just reacted too slow to be useful.
Not long after publishing that post, I went back through the DIY video, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. Towards the beginning (around 0:45), he says “it’s a good idea to make sure the foam you’re using is indeed conductive.” So I snipped off a chunk of foam, and tried drawing with it.
And it worked just as good as my finger.
Holding that little strip of foam, I realised I’d made myself an iPad Charcoal Stylus. I’d automatically gripped it as I’d learned to hold a piece of charcoal way back in art school (ahhhh, those were the days), as seen below.
So if you want the simplest iPad stylus the world’s ever seen, you’ll need:
Some conductive foam (found at an electronics store if you’re not a nerd and don’t have any lying around)
Then follow these complicated instructions:
Cut a strip of conductive foam that’s as long as you want and as wide as the thickness of your foam (a square in cross-section).
Snip the corners off of one end so it’s more or less rounded.
Download Sketchbook Pro, sync your iPad and start drawing!
The foam’s quite rigid stuff, so it doesn’t flop around and is easy to hold. The charcoal grip is best suited to pretty rough drawing, but I’ll be experimenting with longer styluses better suited to a typical pen grip. My first results with the iPad Charcoal Stylus are still pretty rough, but I’m now confident that has more to do with learning & getting the most out of the software, and not a half-functional stylus.
So thanks to the wonders of conductive foam I’ll be snipping myself a few more charcoals and sketchnoting TEDx Sydney tomorrow on the iPad! I just hope the conference coffee’s worth drinking.
Having not sketched a single note since Web Directions in October (and let’s not even go into how long it’s been since I wrote anything here… ahem), and after being interviewed on sketchnoting recently (super sekrit, more on that later), my fingers have started itching. I’m lucky enough to have an invite for TEDxSydney in two days, and if you add that to the new iPad sitting on my desk what do you get? iPad TEDx sketchnotes of course!
Sketchnoting is usually pretty simple: open sketchbook, click pen, get started. An iPad’s a computer, and they’re always more complicated than the anologue world, so this will need a little more preparation. Firstly, the software: there are a few drawing apps out there for the iPad, but the hands-down, knock-down-drag-out winner is Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk. At AU $9.99 it may seem pretty expensive for people used to piddly little iPhone apps that cost $1.99 and do next to nothing, but this is another beast entirely. It does layers à la Photoshop, creates smooth & soft lines and has a simple, smart interface. And the results are often stunning. So no contest there. You can also get the iPhone version, but the small screen always felt cramped to me – the lovely large iPad screen is perfect for it.
The only downside is the iPad wants a finger as input, but only monkeys draw with their fingers (ewwwwww!). Like any other more advanced primate, I want to draw with a pen. I ordered a Pogo Sketch, a pen designed to simulate a finger, but they’re back-ordered two weeks in Australia. Sigh. What to do? The inimitable Stepehan Cox saved the day and gave me a tip. Instead of me prattling on about it, watch it yourself:
So off I enthusiastically went to buy a cheap ballpoint, some copper wire and a chunk of conductive foam (did you even know there was such a thing?)
After following the instructions, I now have two very DIY looking iPad styluses.
I wound the copper wire a bit tighter than in the video, and taped it all down with some grippy black gaffer tape, and voila! They’re done!
Am I excited? Well, no actually, I’m not.
It’s possibly a side-effect of them being DIY, the thickness of the copper wire, how well wrapped in wire the bits of foam are or somethigng else I’m unaware of, but these things react sloooow, and sometimes not at all. I know it’s not an app problem, as Sketchbook Pro reacts with hardly any lag at all when I use my finger, but the lag these styluses introduce makes it almost impossible to draw anything, as you can see…
TEDx is tomorrow (not today as it says in my sketchnote, silly me), so it looks like I’ll be drawing with my finger after all. With any luck the Pogo Sketch will be much more responsive when it arrives in two weeks.
Maybe the ol’ trusty Moleskine & gel pen are the way to draw after all? I will take them along, just in case.
As I mentioned last week, Eric Scheid was generous enough to sponsor me to attend Oz IA to be the event’s sketchnoter. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and will once again indulge my scribbler’s laziness and let some pictures say a thousand words…
Okay, so I’m not that lazy.
I’d never attended Oz IA before, and after my experience at the IA Summit this year, I was a little afraid Oz IA would be a navel-gazing IA rockstar festival, but I was happily surprised. Everyone (okay, almost everyone) was down to earth and had practical, useful stuff to say.
Too Fluffy
One of my personal favourites was Anthony Colfelt’s talk, “We’re Still Too Fluffy”, although I got the feeling it wasn’t so popular with the rest of the crowd. It was a wake-up call to information architects that see commerce as dirty, and expect clients (and the general populace) to see their skills as valuable and shower them in riches, just because they exist. Anthony urged us all to more clearly define what it is we do, learn to convince others of the value of design, and to learn to sell. Amen, brutha!
Here’s what I captured during Anthony’s talk…
Is it Art?
Another big hit with me, and apparently many attendees, was “I don’t know much about the web, but I know what I like”, by the manager of information at the Gallery of New South Wales, Jonathan Cooper.
Compared to almost every other presenter, Jonathan’s talk was poor on hard data, research findings and user personas, none of which kept it from being the most engaging, entertaining and interactive talk at the conference. Like all good presentations, showing you his slide deck wouldn’t even impart 10% of the experience of watching him throw rubbish on the floor and transform it into art. If anyone out there has a video I could post, let me know!
Not surprisingly, Jonathan’s show produced my favourite sketchnotes…
On the Job
The experience of sketchnoting Oz IA was a bit different than at UX Australia:
After all the positive feedback from UX Australia, I was more confident, which translates directly into better visual ideas and a stronger line.
Since Eric was sponsoring me, I was under a different kind of pressure: I wanted to give him value during the conference, so I was running out in between sessions to photograph and upload my pages. This had a very exciting immediacy about it — one guy told me on the second day that he’d spent the night before trying to copy my first day’s sketchnotes — but it also meant less chatting and hanging out, and a fair bit of rushing around.
The sketchbook & pen combination from UX Australia didn’t work — the Sharpie bled through the soft pages. Using a pocket-sized Moleskine with heavy sketchbook paper and a Uniball Signo cartridge hacked into a Pilot G2 Mini body proved to be perfect. Thanks yet again to Mike Rohde, sketchnote king.
Looking at my sketchnotes now, I find them very light on information. I still haven’t found the right balance between taking the time to draw and making sure I don’t miss something important.
Even though some of my drawings completely sucked (see for example my portrait of Joji Mori) people were very encouraging anyway. Thanks folks!
Closing the Book
Oz IA was another great conference that I look forward to attending next year. And my second round of conference sketchnoting proved challenging, highly enjoyable, and a great way to concentrate and absorb and save more. If you liked the sketchnotes above, you can see all 13 spreads from Oz IA in my Flickr set.
I can’t wait to capture more sketchnotes at Web Directions this week. See you there!
I’ve been watching Mike Rohde, the unchallenged King of Sketchnotes, for a while now, with a “why didn’t I think of that?” attitude and a healthy side order of “get your ass into gear and start doing that too!”
This year’s UX Australia conference served as a perfect place to get started. Considering how smart & inspiring most of the speakers were, I had the right amount of “yeaaaah!” to almost get myself going. Considering that I taught a workshop called “Scribble Your Way to Success!” – during which I taught people who thought that they couldn’t draw that this belief was complete bullshit – I had the right amount of guilt to actually get myself going.
So, instead of spending hours agonising over the best way to describe the best UX conference I’ve ever attended, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
What I learned from these sketchnotes (other than the smart things the speakers said):
Sketchnoting makes for stronger, more memorable notes than just text notes. I assuming this has lots to do with the left/right brain activity I talked about in my workshop.
The paper in the Windsor & Newtown visual diary I’ve ben using is too thin, and there’s quite a lot of bleed-through. I also miss the warm tone of Moleskine paper, so I’ll be going back to the good old Moleskine sketchbook with the thick drawing paper.
I’m not confident enough with sketching people, so I dodged the portraits through the whole conference, although I did draw half of Alex Wright, a little Paul Otlet, and Guillermo Torres and Ayne Valencia’s hair. Next time I’ll suck it up and see if I can’t get closer to Mike Rohde’s great little portraits. Being afraid to suck at something shouldn’t keep me from trying.
Other than the fact that he’s a far better illustrator than I, Mike Rodhe’s sketchnotes hang together so well due to the simple, consistent elements and the large text, among other things. I’ll emulate those aspects of his notes a little closer next time.
What these sketchnotes don’t convey about UX Australia was how surprised and impressed I was with the sense of community in the Australian UX scene. By way of comparison, last year’s IA Summit in Memphis was full of navel-gazing, rockstar posturing, and no small amount of friction, which left me with little desire to attend in 2010. Now that UX Australia exists, I know I won’t have to. It was full of practical ideas that I can use in my work, fun jibes at how seriously we sometimes take ourselves, and intense conversation between intelligent, grounded individuals. By the time Friday night arrived, I wanted to start a company with all attendees so we could do this sort of thing every day.
It’s been said many times already, but here’s mine: congratulations to Donna Spencer, Steve Baty and all their helpers for not only hammering a stake into the ground of the international UX scene, but also hosting one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. I can’t wait for UX Australia in Melbourne next year!
Last year I wrote a few bits (here and here) about trying find and build just the right stylus for my iPad. No luck.
