Preserving a Brighton notebook

A hand-drawn yellow sun with the words brighton sunshine written underneath

Two weeks of improv intensives in Brighton this summer, and one notebook packed full of my scribbles and jottings on the various warmups, exercises and formats we covered. I was curious to see how LLMs could help me to make sense of those notes and turn them into a permanent record of the experience, and a useful resource for sharing the ideas I'd encountered with others in my improv troupe.

My methodology was pretty simple. I photographed my notebook pages and accompanied them with my spoken recollections of each activity.

My opening prompts:

These are my notes from the musical improv residential. In this chat, I want to think about how I'm gonna make use of them.

I'd like to create a resource which acts as my memory for the week.

That will include the taxonomy, stock of exercises and set of principles that you outline. What I'd like you to do is carefully ask me questions about my notes because I'm pretty sure that quite a lot of them will have to be interpreted or guessed. So I want you to interrogate my notes with a series of questions that I can answer so that you understand what things are referring to and what are just perhaps a memory of a prompt that was used. I'm hoping that by interrogating me we can reconstruct what's most useful and then we'll think about the actual form this takes. Maybe it's a static website, maybe it's some form of dynamic slides.

That got me as far as two canonical markdown files summarising the material, one for week one (musical improv) and one for week two (long-form).

I knew I wanted the two weeks to each have a related but complementary look and feel. Musical improv had felt very silly and sunny, the long-form week a little more serious, and it had coincided with the solar eclipse that week. From my initial chat I created a design brief which I handed over to Claude Design. Here's a summary of how the design progressed for week one:

A design journey page titled Stick or Twist, showing six moves from brief to finished page: the first chart, eight directions, bolder and scribblier variants, the brief twisting into a two-week story, commissioned red-and-black line drawings, and the annotated chart synthesis — Stick or Twist: the design journey for the week one page, from brief to page in six moves.

I used GPT Image 2.0 to generate the illustrations which I decided I wanted to accompany the activities.

I then fed my final design along with the canonical content files to Claude Code to build the website. You can explore it here.