I’m always making notes and sketching on my iPad and people often ask me what app I’m using. So I thought I’d make a video of how I use GoodNotes 5 in my design practice.
Links:
This video on YouTube
GoodNotes
Templates: blank, storyboard, crazy 8s, iPhone X
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Verdi, and I’m a product designer for Firefox. Today, I wanna talk about how I use sketching on my iPad in my design practice. So, first, sketching on a iPad, what I really like about it is that these apps on the iPad allow me to collect all my stuff in one place. So, I’ve got photos and screenshots, I’ve got handwritten notes, typed up notes, whatever, it’s all together. And I can organize it, and I can search through it and find what I need.
There’s really two basic kind of apps that you can use for this. There’s drawing and sketching apps, and then there’s note-taking apps. Personally, I prefer the note-taking apps because they usually have better search tools and organization. The thing that I like that I’m gonna talk about today is GoodNotes 5.
I’ve got all kinds of stuff in here. I’ve got handwritten notes with photographs, I’ve got some typewritten notes, screenshots, other things that I’ve saved, photographs, again. Yeah, I really like using this. I can do storyboards in here, right, or I can draw things, copy and paste them so that I can iterate quickly, make multiple variations over and over again. I can stick in screenshots and then draw on top of them or annotate them. Right, so, let me do a quick demo of using this to draw.
So, one of the things that I’ll do is actually, maybe I’ve drawn some stuff before, and I’ll save that drawing as an image in my photo library. And then I’ll come stick it in here, and I’ll draw on top of it. So, I work on search, so here’s Firefox with no search box. So, I’m gonna draw one. Let’s use some straight lines to draw one. I’m gonna draw a big search box, but I’m doing it here in the middle because I’m gonna place it a little better in a second. And we have the selection tool, and I’m gonna make the, the selection is not selecting images, right? So, I can come over here and just grab my box, and then I can move my box around on top. Okay, so, I still have this gray line. I can’t erase that because it’s an image. So, I’m gonna come over here, and I’m gonna get some white, and I’m gonna just draw over it. Right, okay. Let’s go back and get my gray color. I can zoom in when I need to, and I’m gonna copy this, and I’m gonna pate it a bunch of times. Then I can annotate this. Right, so, there we go.
Another thing that I really like about GoodNotes is the ability to search through stuff that you’ve done. So, I’m gonna search here, and I’m gonna search for spaces. So, this was a thing that we mocked up with a storyboard. This is it right here. And it recognized my, it read my handwriting, which is really cool. So, I can find this thing in a notebook of a jillion pages. But there’s also another way to find things. So, you have this view here, this is called the outline view. These are sorta like named bookmarks. There’s also a thumbnail view, right? Here’s all the pages in this notebook. But if I go to the outlines, so, here, I did some notes about a critique format, and I can jump right to them. But let’s say this new drawing, well, where did I do it? This new drawing, I wanna be able to get to this all the time, right? So, I can come up here, and I can say Add This Page to the Outline, and now I can give it a name. And I don’t know what I’m gonna call this, so I’m just callin’ it sample for right now. And so, now it is in the outline. Oh, I guess I had already done this as a demo. But there it is. And that’s how I can get to it now. That’s super, super cool.
Okay, and then one last thing I wanna show you about this is templates. So, I actually made this template to better fit my setup here. I’ve got no status bar at the top. And then these are just PDFs. And you can import your own. And I can change the template for this page, and I’ve made a storyboard template. And I can apply that here. And now I’ve got a thing so I can draw a storyboard. Or maybe I don’t wanna do a storyboard, but what else do I have? Oh, I wanna do a crazy eights exercise. So, now I’ve got one ready for a crazy eight exercise. I love these templates, they’re super handy. I’ll include those in the post with this, a link to some of these things.
So, that’s sketching on the iPad with GoodNotes 5. Thanks for watching.