Editing The Pen Addict 17/transcript (section)

== Sketchnotes Tools ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Now, you know, a lot of people listening to this show want to know about the tools that you use to capture your sketchnotes. And we're going to get into that. We got a couple of sponsors today we want to make sure we get to. So, Myke, do you want to take care of that real quick?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Excellent tease, Brad. Well done. Yes. So we must talk about our first sponsor this week, and that is Squarespace. We're so pleased that Squarespace has come back to us this month, and they're going to continue to support this show and their network throughout the whole month of June as well, which is fantastic. Squarespace gives you absolutely everything you need to create an amazing professional website by utilizing simple-to-master WYSIWYG tools. They give the total control over to you, no matter what level you have in the web design process. If you're like me and have no coding background at all, you can just click on some things and drag some sliders, and you can make fonts larger and smaller. You can pick from their extensive Google Fonts library. You can change all the font colors if you want to make the sidebar widths bigger. You can do that by just dragging a selector. It's absolutely fantastic. A recent addition to Squarespace that I want to tell you all about is their new domain service. With every annual account, you get a free custom domain now, and they will take care of all the DNS stuff in the background. If you want Google Apps integration, they'll give you that as well. They'll make sure that MX records and all that sort of stuff is taken care of. All you need to do is say what domain you want, and you just tick a box to see if you want an email address, and they'll sort it all out for you. Squarespace have created the ultimate package to start on your next website. It's painless and hassle-free, and it starts at $8 a month, equivalent for the annual plan. I must mention, because while we were talking and I was poking around your site, Myke, I noticed that Row Design is a Squarespace site.

'''Mike Rohde:''' It is indeed. I'm a huge fan of Squarespace, and I've been with them over a year. I just recently switched Sketch Note Army over because I was having WordPress issues with old versions and spam and stuff. I've been so pleased with Squarespace. It's just been so easy. It totally takes my focus toward creating content and thinking and not about fooling around with details. I'm a huge fan of theirs. I try and convince people to go with them whenever I can.

'''Myke Hurley:''' What I'd say, your site is a great example to me of what's so fantastic about Squarespace. I look at it, and I never would have known. You clearly are not using – well, I would assume you're maybe not using one of the basic templates. You've done some design work on it yourself, and that shows the brevity of Squarespace. I mean, because you can be someone like me who's based our entire website off of one of their templates, or you can be someone like Mr. Rody, and you can just – if you're a designer of your own kind, you can use that. Just use Squarespace's powerful posting tools. They're iOS app, and they're really great hosting services. So I would suggest that you all go check out Squarespace, no matter what your level. And you can do this by going to squarespace.com forward slash 70 decibels. From there, you can start a two-week free trial. And if you sign up, make sure you use the code 70decibels6. It's 6 because we're in the month of June. So that's 70-D-E-C-I-B-E-L-S 6. Use that at checkout, and you'll get 10% off, and this will let Squarespace know that we sent you. So thank you to everyone that has signed up for showing to Squarespace that we're a good place for them to advertise, and I want to thank Squarespace again for taking the time to sponsor us. It's fantastic. So gentlemen, please proceed.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Awesome, awesome. I think how Myke's conversation and I started all these years ago was, you know, I love what this guy's doing. These sketch notes look awesome. What tools is he using to capture these notes? Now, you mentioned you used the pocket-sized Moleskine sketchbook in Pilot G2, 0.7 millimeter, I'm pretty sure, right? That's right, yeah. And that's what you started out with. Has that carried you through all these past few years? Is that what you're still using now? Have you found better things or things that don't work as well for you? So tell us about what you're using.

'''Mike Rohde:''' Yeah, I get into the details. Yeah, I used for a long time. I was sort of flipping back and forth in the beginning between a 0.5 and 0.7, and I ended up settling on the 0.7 just because I could get more ink flow, which felt better for me. The smooth flow was important, and I wasn't as worried about the detail. Again, I was moving towards big ideas and capturing thoughts, so the 0.7 worked well.