What belongs in this section?
Everything about designing pages you use for months: weekly spreads, task lists, calendar pages, notes. The difference from a craft project lies in time – a scrapbooking page is made once and then looked at, a journal page is written on, corrected and continued.
Almost everything follows from that. A page that can no longer be written on has failed as a journal page, however good it looks. If you want to build a composition for its own sake, the scrapbooking articles are the better place.
Where does a page start?
With the grid, not with the decoration. First decide where date, tasks and notes go – decorating comes last. Do it the other way round and you end up with a beautiful page with too little space, and write the next one.
For colours there is a number that has proven itself: three. One for text, one for highlights, one as an accent. Anything beyond that no longer reads as order but as chance – and order is the only reason to keep a journal at all. Stickers belong at the margins and in the gaps the text leaves, not in the space you still want to write on.
What helps: a small legend on the first page – three to five symbols for task, done, moved, appointment, note. It costs five minutes, spares you re-inventing your marks every week, and makes a journal readable even for someone who only skims it.
What goes wrong most often?
After three weeks it sits on the shelf. Almost always because every page was laid out differently. A journal stays readable through repetition: the same page layout, the same colours, the same symbols, week after week. That sounds boring and is the reason you still open it after half a year.
A page went wrong. The reflex is to tear it out – and then the opposite page comes loose too, because both hang on the same binding. Paste over instead of tearing out: a strip of paper, a wide washi or a larger sticker, and the page carries on.
The ink bleeds through. A question of the paper, not the pen. Thin paper does not take markers with heavy ink flow; if you want to combine both, test once on the last page before a week suffers for it.
The decoration eats the time. If a weekly spread takes an hour, you keep it up for three weeks. A usable rule of thumb: whatever takes longer than what you write into it is too much. Stickers and washi are fast; drawn borders are not.
Further in the guide
The article that explains the structure:
Related topics: washi tape – here the means of choice for pasting over, because it comes off again later. And scrapbooking, if the page is to become a composition after all.
Pens, stickers and markers are under buy pens and colours.
