A few months ago, I attended Jonny Goldstein’s “Rock the Whiteboard” class at Indy Hall. I went into the day-long workshop ready to soak in some new techniques and draw all day! I came out of the class having learned Jonny’s method of visual note-taking: techniques to quickly communicate ideas on a whiteboard.

Ideas are easier to understand when you have a quick visual to help you out! Whiteboards are an informal, simple, and inpermanent tool for sketching. You can easily erase, add to, or re-arrange your drawings without getting too messy (or wasting paper). It’s a great tool for us to develop ideas at the same pace they start spewing from our brains. Since the class and my subsequent knowledge share with the I-SITE crew, more of us have been using the whiteboard for various steps in our planning and design process. We sketch out our sitemaps, wireframes, and functionality concepts on the whiteboard before getting anywhere near a computer. It’s a nice approach to collaborating and keeping an open mind before jumping right into the structured environment of Photoshop or Illustrator. Not to mention, the separation from technology for a bit can really help open your mind!

Since the whiteboards are big enough for us to all stand around (and we have tons of amazing colors to choose from thanks to Abby’s marker obsession), we can easily all be understood when we chip in with our two cents about how we think something should look or behave! We have also started using the whiteboard to help us quantify how projects are progressing (in terms of gauging interest levels, timelines, and progress).

I’ll let you take the class for yourself to learn the specifics, but what I took from the class has help out how we approach certain aspects of projects here at I-SITE, and may be helpful for you, too. The attendees of the class ranged across a lot of different backgrounds: research, design, development, testing, pharmaceuticals– everyone seemed to agree the class had something different to offer each of us. But hey, don’t just read about my experience, follow Jonny here and take one of his whiteboarding classes!