Friday 30 March 2012

Evernote and Photo Projects

Hey guys, this post might only apply to BA/MA photo students but I want to make it about my shift to an (almost) entirely paperless workflow for my assignments. Yup, probably the single most interesting blog post you'll ever read, ever.

A few of you already know about what I doing now and are trying it for yourselves but for those that wanted to know more, I'm currently using Evernote. Evernote is a cloud-based note taking and archiving tool. It's basically a faster, more efficient, less vulnerable and far smarter tool than your standard issue Daler Rowney sketchbook.


My problem before going paperless was simply time and motivation. For our photo projects in uni we have to keep a project journal (or 'Research and Development Book' as they call it) which involved a lot of hoarding, printing and sticking and handwriting in a sketchbook/moleskine/folder/whatever was at hand. From contextual research materials to production plans to lecture/tutorial notes and my own thoughts as they developed- there was basically a lot of time spent documenting and organising my work instead of actually working. On more demanding projects I found myself abandoning my conventional RDB simply because it was getting in the way. Ultimately the RDBs, to me at least, existed just so that the tutors at uni would have something tactile to grade. However they always insisted that these books became part of our workflow, a means to take things out of our head and onto paper so we could bring some sense to them or, at least, remember them later. So, with that in mind I tried all manner of paper notebooks and sketchbooks, from tiny little A5 books to post-it arrangements on my walls but in the end I just couldn't keep up with my thought process.