Digital Sketchbooks

I have kept idea logs and sketchbooks since high school; for me it has been one of the most important aspects of generating, organizing, and embodying artwork over the years.  The value of keeping a sketchbook certainly isn't limited to the visual arts, it can make the difference in any organization that depends on consistently generating great ideas.  I used to work with the folks at Jump Associates, and they were (and are) masters of generating great ideas about everything from toy guns that spark to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark.  Take a look at their 'Ten Habits of Great Ideators"(http://www.jumpassociates.com/ten-habits-of-great-ideators.html) to see what I mean.

Specifically, lets talk about Habit #7: keeping an idea log.  One of my main problems has always been using sketchbooks as reference material days or years after drawing the original idea -- they are created chronologically and therefore organized as such, which isn't very useful if I'd like to see all of my ideas about chairs or kinetic sculpture -- there may be 100 ideas about each but spread throughout 20 years of sketchbooks.

I used the Rollabind system (http://www.rollabind.com/) for a while, although ideas could still only be categorized by one attribute (I could have a binder for chair ideas, but what if I wanted to see all of my thoughts on chairs AND recycled materials?  Or Europe AND steel AND beer?).  What I needed was a way to tag each sketch much like we tag photos on-line . . . these tools allow you to search for photos of yourself: yourself and Bob; yourself, Bob, and Sammie; etc.

So, enter iPad, Penultimate, and Tagit, my next foray into idea organization.  The iPad is like a big cell phone, minus the phone part and plus a huge touch screen and nerd cred.  Penultimate is a drawing application on the iPad.  (So far, so good -- I've just replaced $5 of notebook and pencil with $650 of delicate electronics that does the same thing, only not as well)  The value comes with using Tagit, another application that applies multiple labels to files on a computer, so you can search for multiple attributes at once.

My process goes like this.
Step 1: Pull out iPad and sketch ideas using Penultimate software.  Bonus points if client is present and impressed with tech savvy.

Step 2:  Email myself a pdf of the sketch idea from the iPad, which is then filtered by the mail program into a folder labelled 'Brilliant Ideas'.

Step 3:  Weekly (translation: yearly) use Tagit software on home computer to retrieve sketches from email and tag them with appropriate labels.  Pat self on back for thinking about 'metadata'.

Step 4:  Use Tagit to search sketches when I need to find ideas on Tables + Car Parts + Elmo Impersonators.

The value of this system increases with each file; its not that useful when there are only 5 sketches, but with 50,000 it certainly helps.  In addition, multiple types of files can be tagged: audio, web pages, images, word docs, etc.  I've even heard of people doing away entirely with the folder hierarchy on their computers and only tagging files.

My biggest issue so far is the number of steps.  How about being able to tag the penultimate pages as they are created, like the way we do blog entries?  I plan on emailing this idea to the creators of Penultimate right after I email it to myself and tag it Ideas, Frustration, GettingOnMyHighHorse, and Sketchbook.