Style Blink: Exploring Digital Inking of Structured Information via Handcrafted Styling as a First-Class Object

Structured note-taking forms such as sketchnoting, self-tracking journals, and bullet journaling go beyond immediate capture of information 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 handcrafted styling as a first-class object. Style-blocks encapsulate digital ink, enabling people to craft, modify, and reuse embellishments and decorations for larger structures, and apply custom layouts. For example, we provide interaction instruments that style ink for personal expression, inking palettes that afford creative experimentation, fillable pens that can be “loaded” with commands and actions to replace menu selections, techniques to customize inked structures post-creation by modifying the underlying handcrafted style-blocks and to re-layout the overall structure to match users’ preferred template. In effect, any ink stroke, notation, or sketch can be encapsulated as a style-object and re-purposed as a tool. Feedback from 13 users show the potential of style adaptation and re-use in individual sketching practices.