Apple Freeform: A Simple Way to Get Your Ideas Out of Your Head
I have to admit, when I first came across Apple Freeform, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do with it.
It looked a little bit like a blank page, but with rather a lot more going on.
And that’s actually the beauty of it.
Freeform is basically a big, flexible workspace where you can put ideas, notes, pictures, links, drawings and just about anything else you need in one place. You’re not restricted to writing from the top of the page to the bottom. You can move things around, group them together and build your board in whatever way makes sense to you.
And you don’t need to be particularly “techy” to use it.
So, what can you actually use Freeform for?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
You could use it to plan a holiday, organise a home project, brainstorm ideas for your business, create a mood board or keep track of a project you’re working on.
Students could use it to organise revision, while a team could use a shared board to plan a project.
And if you’re a creative person, there are plenty of possibilities. You could collect images for inspiration, sketch out ideas, save useful websites and make notes about things you want to try.
Sometimes I think the biggest benefit is simply having somewhere to put everything.
You know when you have an idea, then another idea leads to another one, and before you know it you’ve got notes on your phone, screenshots in your Photos app, a few bits of paper on your desk and about seventeen tabs open in Safari?
Freeform can help bring some of that together.
Getting started is easier than it looks
Creating a board is really straightforward.
Open Freeform, create a new board and you’re presented with a blank space.
And yes, that blank space can look a little intimidating at first.
What on earth are you supposed to put on it?
My advice is not to overthink it.
Start with one simple project. Maybe you’re planning a weekend away. Put the destination in the middle and start adding things around it — places you want to visit, restaurants you’ve found, photos, links, travel information and anything else you want to remember.
Before long, you’ll start to get a feel for how Freeform works.
The toolbar gives you access to different tools, including text boxes, shapes, sticky notes and drawing tools. You can also add photos, videos, links and documents.
You don’t need to learn what every button does before you begin. In fact, I think that’s one of the easiest ways to make technology feel more complicated than it actually is.
Just try something.
If you don’t like it, undo it.
You’re not going to break your iPad because you moved a sticky note to the wrong place.
Keep your boards organised
Once you start creating boards, give them names that actually mean something.
“This one” might make perfect sense today. Six months from now, probably not so much.
Something like Summer Holiday 2027, Website Ideas or Kitchen Project is going to save you a lot of head-scratching later.
And if you find yourself creating lots of boards, spend a little time keeping them organised. It’s much easier to do this as you go along than to discover one day that you have a hundred boards and no idea what half of them are.
Don’t be afraid of the blank space
One of the things I like about Freeform is that you don’t have to make your board look a certain way.
You can have a very simple board with a few notes, or you can create something much more visual.
You might put related ideas together in groups, use different colours to separate sections or connect things with lines and arrows.
But there’s something worth remembering here:
You don’t have to fill every bit of the screen.
Leaving some empty space can actually make a board easier to understand.
It’s very easy to get carried away when you discover all the things you can add. Before you know it, you’ve got pictures, shapes, arrows, sticky notes and different colours everywhere — and somehow the board is harder to understand than the original idea was!
Start simple and add things when they genuinely make the information clearer.
Freeform is particularly good for visual thinkers
If you’re someone who likes to see how things fit together, Freeform can be really useful.
Instead of having everything listed one thing underneath another, you can arrange information spatially.
For example, imagine you’re planning a new website.
You could have one section for your website pages, another for blog ideas, another for images and branding, and another for things you still need to do.
Suddenly you can see the whole project rather than having it scattered across several different apps.
And because you can move things around, you can change your mind as the project develops.
That’s quite useful when you’re still working things out.
And then there’s iCloud…
If you use more than one Apple device, you’ll probably want to make sure iCloud Drive is switched on.
That means your Freeform boards can sync between your devices, so you can start something on your iPad and later open it on your Mac or iPhone.
If something isn’t syncing properly, this is one of the first things I’d check.
It’s also worth checking that your devices are running supported versions of their operating systems and that Freeform has the permissions it needs.
These things sound complicated, but they’re usually just settings that need checking rather than anything particularly dramatic.
Working with other people
Freeform isn’t just for working on your own.
You can share a board with other people and collaborate on it together.
That could be useful if you’re planning something as a family, working on a project with colleagues or brainstorming ideas with someone else.
The really useful part is that you can see changes as people make them, so you don’t have to keep sending different versions of the same document backwards and forwards.
There is one downside, though.
If everyone starts throwing things onto the same board without any sort of plan, it can become a complete mess.
Before you start, decide what the board is for and how you’re going to organise it.
You could have one section for ideas, one for decisions and another for things that need doing.
That way, the board becomes something you can actually use rather than just a digital dumping ground.
Freeform isn’t the answer to everything
As useful as Freeform is, I wouldn’t use it for everything.
If you need to manage a long list of tasks, a proper task-management app might be better.
Writing a long document? Use a word processor.
Working with figures and calculations? A spreadsheet is going to make much more sense.
Freeform is at its best when you need a flexible space to think, organise and see the bigger picture.
And perhaps that’s the easiest way to think about it.
You don’t have to know exactly what your finished project is going to look like before you start.
You can begin with a blank board, throw some ideas onto it and work things out as you go.
And sometimes, especially when you’re working on something creative, that’s exactly what you need.