One Year Later with Nicole van der Hoeven - Session 2 at the Sketch Your Mind Conference, 2025

Nicole van der Hoeven’s year-long shift in personal knowledge management centers on one practical decision: make every new note a “hybrid” by default—text plus Excalidraw drawing space—so switching between writing and sketching never becomes a separate workflow. After converting her approach, she reports that the friction disappears so completely that she now creates notes that are purely visual more often than expected, while still keeping text searchable inside the drawing.

The core mechanics start with templates inside Obsidian. Using the Templater plugin and Excalidraw integration, she sets up a new-note template that automatically provides both a markdown/text side and an Excalidraw side. A hotkey flips between modes, and the template reduces the mental question of whether a note “deserves” visuals—every note already has room for them. She also keeps multiple hybrid templates (for example, for people) with front matter and Excalidraw-related metadata, but the principle stays the same: hybrid is the default state.

From there, her workflow splits into two directions. First is “going backwards” by treating visuals as modular components. She builds libraries—especially an icon library—by scanning her vault for assets labeled with a naming pattern (e.g., “icon-”). Those icons function like notes: when an icon appears inside a larger visual, Obsidian backlinks let her trace where each component is used. She gives a telemetry-collector example where a “pipeline” component wasn’t a standalone note, yet it still behaves like one in her system because it’s embedded as a visual constituent and connected through backlinks. This encourages iterative refinement: if she later realizes a component should have been reused elsewhere, she can find it through the library.

Second is “going forwards,” assembling smaller pieces into larger diagrams. She describes embedding a telemetry-collector visual into an “observability” page, so the larger concept inherits traceability back to the smaller parts—links work in both directions, not just top-down. She also deconstructs existing architecture diagrams (from Loki marketing materials) into linked subpages, turning a single slide into a navigable system of concepts.

She addresses practical constraints that come with visual PKM at scale. Excalidraw notes don’t noticeably slow local vault performance, but they can slow publishing and can hit Obsidian Publish storage quotas. She also notes that image formats matter: she prefers SVGs when possible, uses scripts like “Shade Master” to recolor SVGs, and avoids backing up images to GitHub because they’re “hopelessly bloated,” relying instead on other sync/backups.

Beyond diagrams, she applies the same hybrid logic to conferences (embedding PDFs, screenshots, and photos into Excalidraw-based conference documentation), reference notes (book notes with short-form summaries plus per-chapter visuals), and even “observability for her own PKM.” That last experiment pipes note metadata through a Python/cron-to-JSON-to-Alloy-to-Loki-to-Grafana stack to track writing activity over time.

The session’s takeaway is less about drawing talent and more about system design: if hybrid notes are effortless to create and components are traceable through backlinks, visual thinking scales from individual ideas into maintainable knowledge structures.