Evernote 6
We find out if a digital note-taking solution increase your creativity and streamline your inspirations
Price Free/£4 per month premium vernote is a way of organising and keeping track of, well, anything. On first glance the cloudsyncing suite of apps and browser add-ons may convey a business-like demeanour in its note-taking emphasis, but the flexibility of its Ever-notes, tagging system and notebook structure makes it versatile and a useful boost to creativity.
The interface differs slightly depending on the device and method you use to access your free or premium account (the latter offering attached document search and extra annotation tools), but all evidence of Evernote’s earlier skeuomorphic tendencies has been happily removed.
On the minimalist iOS and Android apps you can create new notes with a tap by inputting styled text and pasting in images or filing photos taken
ECompany Evernote
Web www.evernote.com with the device’s camera. These can be arranged in virtual notebooks, complete with keyword tags and geodata. Notes can be searched for either on a mobile device or from the desktop app, making the archival of pencil sketches by project or inspiration an easy task.
Cataloguing the steps you took to create an illustration or recording the thinking behind a thematic concept are what Evernote also works well at. The tagging system can be used to collate themed virtual mood boards on the fly. The browser extension, meanwhile, is useful for saving web clippings, URLs or whole pages for reference, which can then be annotated using the built-in SketchUp tools. The collaboration tools bring shared notebooks into the mix and the desktop clients enable you to chat with collaborators in-app.
Perhaps one of the best recent additions is – or was – Evernote’s integration with Penultimate, the digital handwriting and sketching app, which made organising sketches extremely simple. The latest version of Evernote has been severely criticised by users for taking away many of Penultimate’s best integration features. Overall, it’s a doozy, but lovers of Penultimate should proceed with caution.
March 2015