Structured note-taking forms such as sketchnoting, self-tracking journals, and bullet journaling go beyond immediate capture ofinformation scraps. Instead, hand-drawn pride-in-craftmanship increases perceived value for sharing and display. But hand-crafting lists,tables, and calendars is tedious and repetitive.
To support these practices digitally, Style Blink (“Style-Blocks+Ink”) explores handcraftedstyling as a first-class object. Style-blocks encapsulate digital ink, enabling people to craft, modify, and reuse embellishments anddecorations for larger structures.
For example, we provide interaction instruments that style ink for personal expression, inkingpalettes that afford creative experimentation, fillable pens that can be “loaded” with commands and actions to replace menu selections,and techniques to customize inked structures post-creation by modifying the underlying handcrafted style-blocks. In effect, any inkstroke, notation, or sketch can be encapsulated as a style-object and re-purposed as a tool.
Feedback from 13 users show the potentialof style adaptation and re-use in individual sketching practices.