Switching to Paper

My workflow for years has been completely digital: I take notes on my Mac or iPhone using a simple text editor and draw quick mockups in Sketch on the Mac. 

But meetings or brainstorming sessions have always been difficult to capture digitally. Ideas usually require more time to write down in a cohesive structure, which makes them tricky to take down digitally in a fast-paced meeting. 

Over the years, I’ve typically carried a paper notebook to meetings and jotted down notes there. In UI brainstorming sessions, I started using a dry erase notepad, which is the closest thing to an ‘undo’ feature you’ll find in the analog world. 

Now I’ve started using Paper on the 9.7″ iPad Pro and have to say I really like it: you can capture ideas or notes in a very natural rapid way and don’t have to worry too much about structure. And if you want to add typed notes to a document, it supports that as well. For those of us with less than stellar drawing skills, it has a few smart pens to assist with nicer-looking boxes and lines and the built-in templates for UI design, storyboarding and week planning are ideal for my use cases.

It’s not perfect and the workflow for getting documents back to the Mac could be better, but I’m enjoying being able to to sketch out an idea while I’m working on it.

For someone with very little drawing ability whatsoever, sketching in Paper on the iPad Pro is surprisingly great. And the new smaller iPad Pro is the right size to carry around with as well (although they really should have added a loop or something for the Pencil…)

Thumbs up!