Use Notability to Create Diagrams and Floor Plans (Ecomaps, Family Trees, Genograms)

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll share how I use Notability to create all kinds of diagrams and floor plans on my iPad.

Notability is my go-to app for handwritten notes.  Or really anything that can't be put into a spreadsheet or typed out.  That means that it is the tool I use for pictographic images.  I have a basic tutorial video for Notability and one on how to use Notability for Mind Maps, but in this video, I'll show you how easy it is to create other kinds of diagrams and floor plans in Notability.

I find it easy to sketch out diagrams or images that I'm going to use in a presentation in Notability before formalizing the design.  That way I can make tweaks before committing a lot of time and resources to the final design.   The nice thing is that Notability provides some tools to make your drawings easier and better without a lot of extra effort.   Let's go through them:

• Auto Shape - first of all Notability has a feature called Auto Shape that changes your approximation of a square, circle, or other basic shape into an actual shape with straight lines and smoothed out curves.  All you need to do is hold for a second and it automatically changes your shape.  It also creates straight lines out of your wobby ones.  I can't tell you how helpful this is.  Next
• Edit Shape - because this is a vector-based drawing program, you can select your shape and make edits to it.  You can change the dimensions by pulling the little handles, or you can do any of these commands that pop up in the menu.  Duplicate makes a copy, cut allows you to paste the shape somewhere else, copy saves the shape on your clipboard so that you can paste it elsewhere, and delete is self explanatory.  Let's talk about the two other options.
• Style - If you select style, you can change the line color and thickness.  In addition, you can hit the fill tab and choose to fill your shape with color.  You can also change whether the line is dotted or unbroken.
• Save Sticker - If you select Save, Notability will save your shape as a "Sticker."  This means you can add it to any document that you create by hitting this plus sign up here and choosing Stickers.  This comes in really handy if you make the same kinds of diagrams over and over again.  The other really nice feature is the
• Snap To Lines - Basically, when you move your shape around, you get these red lines which help orient your shape with other objects in your document.  So, if you are trying to create a diagram with a bunch of triangles in a line, this comes in handy. 
• Grid - You can also change the paper to grid or lined paper to help ensure your diagram is orthogonal and your shapes are spaced correctly.  To do this, hit the 3 dots for more options, then Paper, the choose lines, grid, or dots and choose a size. 
• Rotate and Move - You can always go back to a shape and reselect it.  Sliding it around with one finger will move it around your page, but if you use two fingers you can rotate it.  Just a warning that it is hard not to also change the size of the shape while you are rotating.  And finally, you can add
• Text - to your diagrams with text boxes.  For whatever reason, I find this feature to be a little clumsy, but it does help to make your diagrams more polished if you use text rather than handwriting.  Select the text tool and then press down anywhere on the page to create a text box.  Generally, Notability will remember the style of text that you used the last time, so once you change the font and size, you should be able to use those selections for subsequent text boxes.

So, those are all of the tools.  What kinds of diagrams can you produce?  I'm a therapist, so I use it to create genograms, which are kind of a fancy family tree.  I would suggest creating stickers for the basic shapes so that you can standardize.   Once you add a shape to your document, you can simply duplicate it and move it to where you need it.  Another diagram that therapists produce is an ecomap or ecogram.   This can show all of the systems the clients are connected to like school, healthcare system, family, church, etc..  This is also easy to produce using Notability.  In addition to standard diagrams, I think visualizations are sometimes easier to understand than words, so I use Notability to draw the Window of Tolerance, the hand model of the brain, the relationship between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and other concepts.  A picture is sometimes worth a thousand words and Notability makes it easy to create quick, professional looking images.

Finally, I use Notability a lot for floor plans.  We just finished a basement project which I drew up in Notability.   I've also designed bathrooms, sheds, and all kinds of projects.  This helps me communicate with my contractor with a minimum of back and forth.  For this, I would highly recommend using the grid paper in Notability to show measurements.  Sometimes the line snapping can be annoying here when you are trying to make very fine tuned adjustments to the length of walls or size of door openings, so I wish Notability would give you the ability to turn that feature off temporarily.  Notability is not expressly built for this purpose, so it doesn't tell you the line measurements, but it feels very much like drawing things up on graph paper and, frankly, I'd much rather do it this way than have to waste time learning a new design program that is going to be inflexible in so many other ways.  The other thing I find really useful is to be able to visually rearrange furniture in a room without having to physically rearrange things.   I create the dimensions of the room using grid paper and then I create shapes that show the dimensions of the furniture.  Then I use two fingers to rotate the furniture shapes into different spots in the room so I can see how that might change the function or feel of the room.  Because using 2 fingers sometimes messes with the dimensions of the shape, I solve this issue by copying the shape and then pasting it in as an image.  Then I can use 2 fingers to rotate it without changing the dimensions as easily. 

Let me know what you think!   Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.