Colorful Second Brain - Part 3: Simple rules for beautiful and reusable sketches

Reusable sketches depend less on artistic talent than on a small set of repeatable rules—especially around color and typography. When icons, diagrams, and text blocks share consistent sizing and palettes, they drop into new pages without looking “off,” and the process stays fast instead of turning into endless manual tweaking.

A key example comes from a stencil library of icons and parts built with different color schemes. Reusing an icon from a mismatched palette can make the whole drawing look worse, even if the icon is resized correctly. The bigger problem appears when resizing forces line thickness and “slopiness” to become visible at smaller scales. The workaround isn’t constant retouching; it’s designing the library and the drawing system so reused elements naturally fit—through similar sizes (set by text standards) and shared color palettes (set by consistent rules).

Color also functions as a readability and content-balancing tool. A disciplined palette adds contrast so viewers can quickly distinguish imagery from primary text and locate supporting details like arrows or secondary labels. That same structure helps assess whether a sketch is overloaded with visuals or with explanation. Because color composition mirrors content composition, balanced palettes tend to produce balanced notes: enough explanation to remember later, enough imagery to stay grounded, and a layout that reads at a glance.

For color management, three approaches are recommended. First is the “three color technique,” credited to Dog Neil from Verbal to Visual and adapted for sketchnoting in Obsidian with Excalidraw. It assigns one strong color for imagery, a second strong color for primary text, and a third lighter gray for secondary text and helper graphics (like arrows and clouds). The gray prevents secondary elements from competing with the main message; vivid everything makes pages hard to read. The gray can be literal gray or simply a lighter helper tone.

Second is a monochromatic palette: one color family used with different shades so drawings stay visually coherent without becoming overwhelming. Third is multi-color palettes, where an accent color stays vibrant while the remaining colors are dimmer. If more than two colors are needed, a four-color palette can add flexibility—but the accent still anchors the hierarchy.

To keep palettes practical over time, the system emphasizes standardizing palette structure and even adding comments/links inside palette files. Using palette tooling (Paletin) and exporting palette values as text, users can fine-tune saturation, brightness, and contrast to generate dimmer secondary colors that drift toward gray. A further reusability boost comes from keeping color order consistent (vibrant first, dimmer later) so palette switching can repaint an entire drawing coherently with a single action.

Typography ties the whole system together. Excalidraw’s text sizing standards—small, medium, large, extra large—help ensure images scale correctly relative to text at common zoom levels (like 200%). Consistent heading and tag styles reduce the need to resize components when copying from a stencil library. Even the title treatment can be standardized by duplicating title text in a different color to create a shadow effect. The result: sketches that look consistent, reuse cleanly, and require less friction to maintain across an Obsidian vault.