This could be a lengthy post. Partly because this article will require imagery to help me explain what I love so much about Milanote. Also though, I may ramble on a bit because there is a lot that I genuinely love about Milanote. No time to waste! To the feature list!
Milanote is officially known as the tool for organizing creative projects—yes, they sadly spell organising with a Z—but I’ve managed to use if for things I’d not class as creative. Although, perhaps now they are creative because they look so much cooler in milanote!
If I had emojis in my articles, I would absolutely use the thinking face emoji here.
Anyhow, let me start with an initial screenshot of my instance of Milanote and its boards. Boards are where you keep your things. Here’s my current home screen which I’ll add to for this article.
The four icons are all my current boards. Each board can contain any of the items you see in the left panel. Me, I generally start by creating a new board. I do that by dragging the board icon onto the main content area. That looks something like the screenshot below.
That little grey icon with the words New Board under it is my new board. Clever! Also, clever is the way Milanote creates a board icon for you based on the name you give your board. For example, the board I’ve created for this article is called Ideas and Milanote added a cool little icon with people with light bulbs for heads. They’re people, full of ideas!
From your new board you can create your content. If you are wondering how to start, Milanote makes your life easy again by providing you with some board layout options.
You can even keep the example content! That’s an absolute time saver.
That’s example content for a logo moodboard. I’ve actually used Milanote already to create a logo for a friend. More on that project later I hope. One thing I can say however is that the ability to liaise directly within the platform with clients on projects is amazing.
Previously I’d relied on emails back and forth, phone calls and/or video conference calls—disgusting. Allowing clients to see your design process, your concepts and your ideas in a platform where they can then do the same is priceless.
From the Publish and share options you can send links to your board, allow comments all while password protecting the board should you so choose.
You can also allow people to become editors of your board. I did this on another board I created for my wife and I to compare our very different opinions on what colours should be included in any potential renovation—apparently not all rooms look great in black and red.
Once you’ve worked out if your board is for you or if it’s for others as well, the real fun begins. What are you including in your board? I feel like I’ve only touched the surface with my experimenting, but so far I’ve utilised the following cards—cards are what you add to your boards.
- Links
- Notes
- To-do lists
- Lines
- Columns
- Comments
- Images
- Files
Yes, you can upload files. I used this card feature to provide a link to the completed artwork files for the logo I’d designed earlier. Neat, right?!
Milanote
When you dig around in the example boards, you discover additional features for the cards as well. Design boards benefit greatly from the colour cards—adding a hexadecimal value generates a sample of that colour on your board.
You can even have boards within boards. The layering options are massive.
Something the screenshot above also highlights is Milanote’s ability to contain unsorted content that you can later sort to your heart’s desire. In my example, I’ve saved two images from a standard Google image search using Milanote’s Chrome extension.
That’s another huge win.
The cards contains links to the source of the image for future reference. Ingenious!
I could go on forever. I could experiment forever—I’ve been playing in Milanote for weeks already—but I will simply summarise with some key points.
- Everything I’ve done so far you can do for free—paid plans provide improved allocations for boards and cards which are totally worth it
- I’ve created boards for design work, project integration with clients and as a replacement to-do list with progress tracking
- There’s also an app for this awesome platform—#winning.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to continue with my own ongoing discovery of all-things Milanote.
