Visual Notetaking is popular online, especially in Bullet Journaling circles. There are (many) whole YouTube channels whose videos are essentially just drawing out lessons from books.
It’s popular because it makes aesthetically pleasing results.
It should be popular because it forces you to actually engage with the content of the material in order to figure out how to best present it.
Writing a ton of words doesn’t produce better learning than doing the work of Distillation. Pretty designs and straight lines are just dessert. Nice, but not the point of the meal.
Example
Tools
- Pen & paper
- GoodNotes 5 + Notion
- Obsidian Canvas
- Excalidraw
- DrawIO - although not particularly great for notes
Source
- Self