My eyes have been opened.

I’ve never considered myself a “creative”.

I can draw, but I rarely do. I can sketch, but I rarely do. I can think visually, but it isn’t my default.

I know that I am creative, but I express that differently than a proper visual artist, a person who sketches compulsively on every scrap of paper he can find.

Sketching doesn’t come naturally to me. So even though I’ve long known about Excalidraw, I never gave it a fair try. “I’m not visual”, I thought, and so I ignored it.

But that was a mistake!

It turns out that, if you give it a chance, sketching is an easy way to enhance every aspect of your notes. And you don’t need to be “creative” to benefit from it.

On This Page

• 1 Sketch Your Mind

• 1.1 4D Notemaking with Excalidraw

• 2 The Benefits of Sketch Notes with Excalidraw

• 3 Creating Visuals with Excalidraw

• 4 Tip 1: Set Up Default Sizes

• 5 Tip 2: Set Up Colors

• 6 Tip 3: Set Up Icons

• 7 Tip 4: Learn the Keyboard Shortcuts

• 8 Tip 5: Start Small

• 9 Bonus Tip: Have Fun!

Sketch Your Mind

What has opened my mind?

The new book from the indomitable Zsolt Viczian, called Sketch Your Mind. Zsolt is the creator of the Excalidraw plugin. I’ve long been aware of Zsolt’s passion for sketch-noting, but it wasn’t until I read his book that I realized what a powerful tool it can be.

4D Notemaking with Excalidraw

In Sketch Your Mind, Zsolt describes four different levels of note-making, which he calls “4D notes”.

The first level is what I call “fleeting” notes. Back of the napkin, quick to make, but have a very short shelf life. This is the kind of notes that most people make naturally, usually to supplement their memories.

The second level involved taking your fleeting notes and polishing them. Rewrite them for clarify, make sure they are understandable without any context, and you have 2D notes.

The third level is where I usually stop: to make 3D notes, you take your 2D notes and you link similar ideas together. This allows your ideas to collide, and to grow and expand organically. When you do this, you will find that all of your ideas improve at once, because connecting ideas forces you to think harder about them.

And last but not least, the fourth level is to show that you fully understand the ideas by adding visuals.


Above is a somewhat crude visual I created for this process. It’s simple and it only took me five minutes to throw together, but since then I have talked and written about this idea several times, without having to reference my notes once.

Creating sketches that reinforce and expand upon your notes is a great way to delve even deeper into an idea, to make sure you properly understand it, and to improve your notes for years to come.

The Benefits of Sketch Notes with Excalidraw

Sketching has a whole host of benefits, from mental to physical and everything in between.

I am no “expert” at sketching, but here are just a few of the benefits I have noticed recently:

• My memory, especially visual memory, has improved
• I have become more creative
• My sketches make me feel even better about my notes and thoughts
• My sketches make me want to return to my notes and my ideas again and again

Taking notes is generally a very left brained activity. It improves your logical brain, but does very little for your creative brain. In order to live a balanced life, we need both logic and creativity.

We don’t want to be like the skinny guy at the gym with huge biceps. Those are just designer muscles. Sure he can curl hundreds of pounds, but what good is that if his legs crumple at the slightest hint of resistance? If you need someone to help you move house, you need someone with balanced strength, not biceps man.

For the same reason, we should all desire to have balanced intelligence in order to succeed in life. Balanced intelligence allows you to succeed at anything you set your mind to, instead of forcing you into one specialization. Balanced intelligence makes you an interesting person. Balanced intelligence gives you the tools to do anything.

And in order to have balanced intelligence, we need both logic and creativity.

It really is a simple equation: in order to get better at logic, write. In order to get better at creativity, sketch. They are two sides of the same coin, and they are both essential for balanced intelligence.

So let’s get started!


Creating Visuals with Excalidraw

Excalidraw is a great open-source sketching tool.

If you’re like me, you first heard of Excalidraw because of Obsidian. But Excalidraw is a stand-alone tool, with the ability to integrate with Obsidian.

In fact, if you want to try it out, you can see it in your browser by going to excalidraw.com.

But the Obsidian plugin integrates Excalidraw into Obsidian, which gives you both the sketching tools of Excalidraw combined with the linking and embedding capabilities of Obsidian. This is what makes the Excalidraw plugin uniquely powerful.

Obsidian and Excalidraw are a great match. Obsidian deals mostly with text, so Excalidraw feels like an extension that gives Obsidian superpowers.

I’ve only started to use Excalidraw in earnest myself, so I’m far from an expert at it. However I do have a few tips that make Excalidraw more useful for me, hopefully they can be useful for you as well.

Tip 1: Set Up Default Sizes

One of the tricky things about digital sketches is the fact that you have an infinite canvas, but a finite brain.

Thus if we want to make sketching easier, we need to set up some logical constraints. Think about sketching in a notebook: you don’t have infinite paper at your disposal, you are constrained by the size of your paper, and that limitation is a good thing.

So I recommend you set up some default sizes to use for your sketches. The sizes themselves aren’t important, what matters is that they exist, and that they are easy to use.

So create a new Excalidraw drawing, draw a rectangle, and make it reusable. How? By right-clicking on the rectangle (or long pressing on mobile), and selecting “add to library”:


In the image above I’m adding a 1×1 rectangle to my library, which is a very useful size for reusable components. I also like a standard index card size, 3×5. Those are the two I use most often, and the only two I have in my personal library.

Once you’ve added a shape to your library, you can click on the “book” icon in the sidebar to access and reuse your shapes.

Tip 2: Set Up Colors

Excalidraw comes with a built-in default palette, which is quite nice, but you might want to customize your sketches by using your own colors.

When I started looking into this, I was hoping Excalidraw would have a palette setting, that would allow you to set your own colors globally, but I wasn’t able to find that. So what I ended up doing was finding a palette that I liked on coolors.co and creating a new Excalidraw sketch with my selected palette.


Then when I want to use one of these colors, I can reference this sketch. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s simple.

There is also a palette loader script you can use, but I find it overly complicated, and I prefer the simple solution. I do wish this was just an option in settings, but what can you do.

Tip 3: Set Up Icons

One of the best things about Obsidian is the ability it gives you to reuse notes. Links and embeds are what make this possible, and Excalidraw wisely supports the same sort of interconnectivity.

One thing that makes it easier to create sketches it to first create a library of icons. There are numerous ways to do this, but again I like to keep it simple, and create my own.

The key to creating an icon system for Excalidraw is proper naming. I name all of my icons with a standard syntax, so that they are easy to find and reuse. Then anytime I’m looking for an icon, I can search through and find them effortlessly.

My naming syntax looks like this: “Icons – {name} – {source}” For example, “Icons – Person – NounProject”.

Whenever you need an icon to pretty up a sketch, create it in its own file, and embed it into your sketch. The more icons you add, the easier it will be to create new sketches.

This has the added benefit of creating more connections between your sketches. When you embed icons, you’re implicitly creating a list of “sketches that use said icon”, which will likely result in fun new connections that you never would have made without Obsidian.

Tip 4: Learn the Keyboard Shortcuts

Sketching goes much faster if you can use keyboard shortcuts. Fortunately Excalidraw makes it incredibly easy to learn these, so you have no excuse!

Anytime you’re using Excalidraw, you will see the toolbar at the top of your screen. The toolbar has keyboard shortcuts (in the form of numbers) right there for you to see!


You can press any of the numbers above to select the tool shown. You can also hover over these icons to see additional shortcuts: “R” for rectangle, “T” for text, etc. I personally prefer the letter shortcuts because they’re easier for me to remember, but either one works.

Tip 5: Start Small

Start with simple ideas that you already know really well. Maybe something like “my friend likes the color red”, NOT something like “every shade of red and how it makes me feel”.

At first, a sketch should take you less than ten minutes, and include no more than maybe 1-2 paragraphs. Start small, focus on reusability, and soon enough you will see the benefits. If you start something too complex, you will get frustrated and abandon the whole idea (this is what happened to me).

Bonus Tip: Have Fun!

Sketching is fun, and the more you do it, the more fun it gets. Yes it takes time, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. Over time sketching improves every aspect of your note-taking.

Get started with the above tips and before long sketching will become natural to you. Again start small, and enjoy the process.