VISUAL NOTE TAKING
Visual Note Taking App
Capture ideas as visual maps instead of linear text — with AI turning your descriptions into images on the fly.
How it works
Open a fresh canvas
Start a new board for your meeting, lecture, or brainstorm. The infinite canvas gives you room to spread out without worrying about page limits.
Capture as you go
Type key points, drag in screenshots, and jot down quick notes. Place them spatially — cluster related ideas together, leave space between distinct topics.
Add AI visuals
Describe a concept and let AI generate an image for it. Visual anchors make notes easier to scan later and help with recall. Use AI Workflows to batch-generate visuals for multiple notes at once.
Review and refine
After the session, reorganize your notes. Draw connections between related concepts, add color coding, and share the board with anyone who missed the meeting.
Why visual notes stick
Research consistently shows that combining words with images improves retention. Spatial arrangements help us remember where information lives, and visual cues act as retrieval hooks when we revisit our notes later. Despite this, most note-taking tools still default to linear, text-only formats.
Visual note-taking — sometimes called sketchnoting — addresses this by encouraging you to arrange information spatially and illustrate key concepts. The barrier has always been drawing ability. Not everyone can sketch a quick diagram that actually communicates what they mean.
AI removes the drawing barrier
MyCanva sidesteps the illustration problem entirely. Instead of drawing, you describe what you want to see. “A funnel showing awareness to conversion” or “a network diagram with three interconnected nodes” — the AI generates a visual you can place alongside your text notes.
This works especially well during meetings and lectures where speed matters. Capture the key point in text, then prompt the AI to generate a supporting visual. You do not need to pause the flow to draw — the AI handles it in seconds.
For longer sessions, AI Workflows let you batch-process your notes after the fact. Feed in a list of concepts and generate matching visuals for all of them in one pass. The result is a richly illustrated set of notes that took no more effort than plain text.
Beyond personal notes
Visual notes become more valuable when shared. A well-organized board with clear visuals and spatial groupings communicates far more than raw meeting minutes. Share your board with colleagues who could not attend, embed it in a project channel, or revisit it before the next session to refresh your memory. The canvas persists, so your notes are always where you left them.