I saw some posts on Twitter about rubber stamps used for note taking. They had stamps for the board and each piece, which was pretty impressive and a great idea. I thought I would share how I do the same kind of thing, but digitally.

GoodNotes

On my iPad I use the GoodNotes App. It is a pretty great note taking app, especially if you use the Apple Pencil. There are tons of templates you can use for each page of notes.

I’ve also used paper notebooks quite a bit, but my challenge for chess is handwriting diagrams of boards. I often found myself trying to write out my thoughts which would be much easier to understand with a simple diagram.

One thing you can do with GoodNotes is add custom “stickers.” They call them “elements.” You can read more about that here. There are lots of cool things you can do with those, but for now I’ll just talk about using them to create

Getting Images

Luckily, since Lichess is open-source, I was able to get the same piece images that they use. You can find them all in the Github repository. I like the “Alpha” pieces, but you could use any that you wanted.

These files are all .svg files, which is great for Lichess, but not great for me. I converted them all to .png files using some online converter tool I found. It was kind of sketchy and full of ads, so I’m not going to link to it here.

For the boards, I just went to the board editor in Lichess and took screenshots of the boards. I did one for white and one for black. It is a little tricky because they look the same. In the future I may use different colors for the squares so I can tell them apart.

Once I all the images, I just created a collection of elements in GoodNotes. Then I can use them whenever I need to create a diagram in my notes.

Download

I ended up with a small icon for each piece, and a separate board for white and black orientations.

You can download the files I use here: GoodNotes images (.zip)