I started designing and hand-drawing bullet journals in 2017 as a creative way to keep myself organized. Over the years, as I continued this method of designing my custom agenda, I refined my layouts to best fit with my life at the moment. I also designed bullet journals for clients’ personal use based on their aesthetic preferences and layout needs.
The top three images are part of a single self-care journal that I created for my cousin in Spanish. The monthly cover for June features illustrations of monarch butterflies with an inspirational quote next to it. The monthly tracker page for May has a postage stamp theme for daily mood tracking as well as space for tracking anxiety and habits. The April weekly spread has each day sectioned off to track energy, positives and negative moments, gratitude, self care, and even a space to journal each day.
My bullet journals are the most consistent place I practice traditional art. These monthly and yearly themes include various drawing techniques, lettering styles and materials. The color scheme and lettering style of each monthly and yearly theme ties the illustrative aspects with the text. For many of the script fonts, I used brush markers to give the words dimension and style their flow. I often used juxtaposition of colors, line thickness, and shadows to add interest to the lettering and its surrounding illustrations.
This is a sample of the most effective layouts I have drawn throughout the years. Some spread I use at the beginning of the yearly bullet journals, including yearly goals, semester schedule, and important dates though the months. For my weekly layouts I created iterations that meet different needs.
The ones shown here are some that worked best and I repeated often. The themed monthly spreads include a combination of calendars, mood and habit trackers, and sections to write notes. The weekly layouts for each month match the monthly theme’s color palette, lettering style, and decorative drawings.
