Design an Aesthetic Daily Dashboard in Notion

1. Introduction: If you're someone who loves completely customizable organization systems, then you've probably heard of notion before. Notion is a web-based software that allows you to take notes, design systems, and build organizational tools that work for you. It's a really intuitive program and very easy to get started, but it's a little bit more difficult to design really aesthetic, beautiful pages. That's what we're going to be tackling in this class. Together, we're going to be going through the process of designing a dashboard and notion that you can use to plan your day, organized sub-pages and make lists and notes. You can customize this design as much as you want to suit your taste and your own design preferences. By the end of this class, you will have an easy to use customized dashboard, but also the skills to create other pages for yourself. My name is Rebecca, I will be instructor for this class. I'm a graphic designer or a teacher and also a small business owner. And I use Notion to plan my whole life. I'm really excited to show you the tips and tricks that I've learned to optimize notion. So if you're ready to learn with me, then let's get started on the class together. 2. Getting Started: Before we can start designing our notion dashboard, we're going to need two things. First, a Notion account, and second, a Canva account to do some of the graphic design work that we'll cover later in the class. Both of these are free to make and it won't cost you anything to complete this project. If you haven't used notion before, then don't worry, it's very easy to navigate. But before we get into that, let's first take a detailed look at the dashboard example that we're going to be designing in this class today. This right here is the finished notion dashboard that I created that we're going to be reproducing in this class. Now the first thing you might notice is that the theme for this design is very pink and feminine. And of course that is not required for your design at all. This is just the style that I chose. You'll have a lot of flexibility to pick your aesthetic or your design for your project. As I scroll down a little bit, you'll see that this is a three-column design here at the top. So we have a narrow one on the left, larger column in the middle, and a narrow column on the right. On the left we have a section for different planners. We have a task list, so more like a to-do list and a decorative element in the middle, we have a schedule for the day, and then on the right we have an affirmation of space to put trackers or other kinds of lists, and a chores list as well. Scrolling down even further, we have another section, it's a little bit basic, so you can really customize it to whatever you want and what makes sense for your daily schedule. And there's no space for a quote up here. There are four links here for different pages you can, whenever pages make sense for you if you're in school, these could be different subjects. If you are a business owner, they could be different aspects of your business that you need to access quickly, anything like that. There's also a link space for a video here. And I find it's nice to link in ambient music or work music playlist. That's just my preference. Another space for quote and just some more decorative elements. So that's the basic layout of the dashboard that we're gonna be creating. And we'll go through all of these step-by-step. Now, just to get started, I'm going to open up a brand new page in Notion and we'll just get that ready and we can start designing in the next lesson. So this is what a notion page looks like when you create a new one, it's very blank and we need to set it up a little bit before we start dragging and dropping in our elements. So first thing I'm going to do is go up into the top right corner to these three dots here. And this is going to give you some formatting options for this particular page. So the first thing I like to do is change the style to Sarah. This is just a stylistic preference and it just means that all the fonts on this page are going to be a serif font. That's up to you. Which one you prefer. I do turn on full width because this gives us lots of space to add those three columns. But if you were doing a smaller design, you might wanna do not full width page. Clicking out of that box. All we're going to add is our title and an icon at this point, and then we'll add everything else in the next lesson. So to get started, I'm just going to type in daily planner. You can type it this way. I like to play around a notion with doing different combinations of capitalizing and using spaces. That's because there's not a ton of built-in text editing and formatting options for certain kinds of blocks. So for the header of the page, the way that I like to do it sometimes is to do all caps with spaces in between the letters, just because I think it looks nice, so I'll change it to that and you can play around with it however you like. I said it up more like that. And now we're just going to add an icon for this page. Now you can upload a custom icon here if you have a little square graphic that you want to use, Mr. Page declaration, it shows up here in the corner next to your page name, which is helpful if you have a lot of different notion pages. It just as a quick visual cue as to what you're looking for. You can also use emojis or icons that notion offers. But I just like to use emojis because they're colorful. And I'm gonna go with this cherry blossom icon for this particular design. But like I said, think about the theme or color palette you want for your design. And just look for an icon that fits with that color or design. At this point, we're ready to start adding in our columns and blocks. So let's head over to the next lesson and start populating this with the basic shapes. 3. Adding Basic Blocks: Now that we have our blank notion page ready to go, Let's start adding in the different blocks of our design. Now, as I mentioned, this is going to be a three-column design and we're going to be encapsulating all of our different elements iz, and we call it feature. This is basically a formatting choice that allows you to put all the different aspects. Page links, headings to do list checkboxes, whatever you have within another framed box. And visually, I find that very helpful for dashboards to try and break up and organize the content. We're going to start by putting in one of those. I'm just going to click here in order to add blocks in Notion, you can either click the plus sign or you can type a slash for different commands. Then it will show you all the different blocks that you can use. The first section is basic blocks and that's what you're gonna be using most of the time. But if you scroll down, there's more complex ones. Tables and databases, all sorts of things you can add will be adding images later in another lesson. The first one we're going to look for is the call-out box, which is right here. It's the last one in the basic section. And that's basically what this looks like. It is a fine gray lined box. There's an icon in the corner and then you can type in here. You can change up the way that your box looks if you'd like, by clicking on the six dots on the side and going to color. This first section, we'll change the font color and the second will change the background. So for example, if I clicked orange, the box is now orange. You could do that if you wanted your page to look like this with the white background and the colored boxes. But I'm just going to set this one as default, so we'll just get that thin gray outline. It just really helps to visually separate the content. Before I add anything else. If this icon isn't the one that matches here, you can go ahead and change it or pick a different one if you'd like. And we're going to make three of this box so that we can start creating those three columns. I'll click on the six dots. Hit duplicate, and I'll do that again. Now I have three of these call-out boxes to create columns. All you need to do is go to the six dots, click and hold. And then you can drag it around, reposition it. If you take it all the way to the end. On the right, there's a little blue line that shows up and let go. And it will create this into two columns. We can do that again with the third one, and it creates three columns. Now we can adjust these by going to hover over these gray lines to show up between the columns and make this one narrow and this one narrow. Now we have a big middle section and to narrow columns on the side. This is how we'll structure the top half of this plan or dashboard. Now for this particular design that we're gonna be creating, I'm going to duplicate this one again, because we're going to have to call up boxes on this column. We just need one for the middle and we need three for the right-hand side. As I just duplicate them, they'll just stack one on top of the other. Now that I'm looking at this, I think I want this right-hand column a little bigger, so I'll just drag that one over. Now let's start adding in the headers for these sections. So everywhere it says type something is where I'm going to put a heading. I'm going to use the same typing format with the spaces in all caps because I think it creates a visual distinction from the plaintext, which makes this call-out texts look a bit more like a heading rather than just a plain piece of text. We'll go left to right here. So the very first box is gonna be planners. So I will type that in. The second box is going to be a to-do list. So I'm going to call it today's tasks. Now, there's a couple of formatting errors that came up when I did this. I just want to show you how to get rid of them. On some computers. If you hit space three times rapidly, it will automatically put a period in there for you. So I'm just going to erase it and add an extra space back, but that replaced it. Also because I'm doing this spacing format. Sometimes these apostrophes face the wrong direction. So all you need to do is erase it and the space after the y, add the apostrophe in, use the arrow key over new space and now it's facing the correct way. For the middle column we're going to add in today's schedule. And on the right, I'm going to leave the first box blank because we're going to do something a little different with it. Next one I'm going to add trackers and lists. The last one is going to be where we keep chores. There are headings. Now, you can also add in headings as a separate block, and they look a little bit different than what we've done here. So I'm just going to go down below here. There's a bit of a blank space. Click on it. And we're going to just pull up heading three. That's the smallest size heading. So 123. I'm going to type the word affirmation here. Now you could use the word quote or daily thought motivation, whatever it works, it doesn't have to be an affirmation. I'm going to change the color of this. And I'm going to make the background pink, the fit our theme. And I'm going to click on the six dots and drag this to the top of this column here. I'm doing this because I want this top box to be a little bit of text with a motivational saying, just to start the day off, right? You could change this all the time or leave it the same if you'd like. To make the box a little visually different. I'm going to click on this six dots and I'm going to change the background to pink as well. Now I'm just going to paste in my little quote. There we go. And I've made this quote italics just by highlighting it. And you can go in and get a few different formatting options here. So bold, italics underline strikethrough, as well as you can change the font color if you'd like, but I'm going to leave it as is and just use the italics. So now we've got all these call-out boxes setup and our little affirmation section. In the next lesson, we're going to start populating all of these boxes with different kinds of content. 4. Adding Subpages and Lists: Our daily planner is starting to shape up. We have all these boxes in different columns and now we're ready to start populating these different sections. So let's first add new pages and sub-pages into the planners section and the trackers and list section. To do this, I'm just going to click on the title planners here, press Enter or Return on my keyboard and we're gonna be done on a new line here. I'm going to add in a page features, so that is the slash or the plus sign. It's the second item in basic blocks. And when I click on this, it's going to actually open a whole new blank page for me. You don't have to design every sub page right away. You can just kinda title them and then come back to them afterwards. And that's what we're going to do. The first thing we're going to create is a weekly planner. And I'm going to add in the icon for this design. And then to go back, I'm just going to click on daily planner right up in the top left. Now this is what it turns into a delink right here so I can click on it to go right back to that new page. And it's got the branded icon. So I'm just going to grab it on the six dots, click and drag and put it right below planners. And that's our first link in this section. I'm going to do is two more times to add in a monthly and yearly planner. And then later in the class I'll show you some examples of what these pages could look like when they're populated. Somewhat faster way to keep the formatting the same is just to duplicate this and duplicate it twice. But obviously we need to change the name, so I'll just click on it. Go in here and change this one to monthly planner. And this one into a yearly planner. And back to home. So now we have three planners set up and ready to design later. We're gonna do the same thing basically over here on the trackers and lists sections. So I'll click on that. Hit Enter, and I'm going to add a new page. Now in terms of trackers and lists and things you want to keep track of, you can really do anything that suits your lifestyle, your hobbies, your interests. The two examples that I'm using here are a reading list and habit tracker. So we'll add those in. And again, we'll take a look at them after just doing the same method as before, duplicating it, going in and changing the name. Here we go. Okay, so now our two sections here have sub pages linked and we can decorate those individual pages later on. And I'll show you examples of how I've set them up. The next thing we're going to do is set up the to-do lists. So those are these two boxes here for today's tasks and chores. In a very similar fashion. We'll just click on that, hit Enter. And then we'll go to to-do list, which is the third item in the basic blocks. It just shows up really easy little checkbox you can click off and you can type in your to-do list. So I'm going to drag this up and put it under today's tasks. In order to create a slightly more complex to-do list, I'm going to add two headers in here for urgent and regular tasks. So we'll do that by adding in that header three again, which is a good size. And instead of doing the all caps for this, because it's sort of meant to be like a section divider, more than just a big header, gonna do it in all lowercase. So we'll do urgent. I'm going to change the color of the font to pink. Just grab it by the six dots here and drag it up. And now we have an urgent section with a blank to-do list item. I'm going to duplicate this one. Click on the dots, duplicate, drag it below. And I'm going to change this word too regular. And again, I'll just duplicate this to-do list item. Now we have some spaces for some items. The to-do list feature is really great because you can pretty easily create a long list. So for example, if I'm just going to type in answer, emails, just hit Enter or Return and it starts another to-do list block. So make coffee. Date notion. You can leave these blank if you want and just populate them with correct information once you're actually using the design. But I'm just gonna put in some placeholder text just to make it look a little bit more realistic when we're trying to visualize how this is going to function for you. That's it for the task list. We're going to create a very similar section over here for the chores. And to make it really easy, I recommend just going in and duplicating some of these. I'm going to duplicate urgent and drag it over here. And I'll duplicate the to-do list and drag it over as well. I think a good way to divide up a chore list is either by room or type of task. So I'll do it by room, will do headroom. Clearly the way of typing with other spaces can be a little cumbersome, but I'm only doing it for headers, so I don't have to do it multiple times. I'm just going to duplicate this and added a couple of different rooms of the house. Was all the headers put in place. I'm just going to duplicate the checkboxes and start dragging them down to the right sections. Then obviously this is not a task you need is a chore. I'm just going to fill this in with some placeholder information again to help us visualize what we're doing. Okay, so now our chore list is done and our today's tasks are done as well. We have our planners and our trackers. These are the sidebars that we're going to be designing so far. We're going to decorate all of this in another lesson, but let's hop over to the next one and look at designing the schedule system in the middle. 5. Adding a Daily Schedule Table: Let's create a table for our middle column here that will help us organize our daily schedule. There are lots of ways that you could organize your day on Notion you could use checklists to organize the different sections of the day. You could use tables. In this particular example, we're going to be using a simple table. So I'm going to find that just by clicking here in the middle, hitting Slash. And we're going to scroll down to table right here in the basic block section. Now, if you type in table, you'll find that there's actually two kinds here. There's a basic blocks, one, or a database. The database table is a bit more complex and lets you add different columns with different types of information. It can auto populate dates. You can use it for categorizing things. It's a much more complex table that has very specific and useful purposes for what we're doing here. I think the basic table works best because we're only actually looking to put in times and one column blank, one for the name of the event and then a little bit of space for notes. So we're just gonna go with a basic table here. When you click on that, it gives you this six box layout. And we're going to click on this gray box on the right-hand side to add a third column. Now I want these columns to span the width of this particular section here. So I'm going to give a little more space for the first column, a lot more space for the second. And then we'll just finish up by dragging third. To the end. We have three columns here. I'm going to go to this very first row. And as I hover UC, there's a, there's two different six dot boxes and one is right on the end here. I'm going to click on this one, and it gives me the option to turn this toggle for header row. And all that does is make this top row a slightly darker color. So you can see that it's the header. I'm going to label these three columns. The first one is going to be time, the second will be event, and the third will be notes. Feel free to adjust this measure right here if you find that you want your note section to be bigger or your events section to be smaller. Now the only column we're going to pre-populate is the time one because that is what's going to not change every day. Those are going to indicate the time of day that different things are happening. And then every day you can erase and refill in the event and the notes columns in terms of what times you want to set. This depends on your schedule. If you are in school, maybe every half-hour, you have something different and you want to do twice as many times losses we're going to be doing here. I'm gonna be doing an hourly starting at 06:00 AM to seven and then I'm gonna go all the way up to midnight. But just consider what kind of schedule your events are on. If you go by an hourly system during the day or even smaller chunks of time, I'll just fill in the first one here and then we'll fast-forward. I'm going to use the 24-hour clock, so 06207. Now I'm just going to keep clicking on this gray box here to add more rows as I go, I'm just going to pre-populate this. I'll fast-forward through it and to watch me do it. And then we will look at the final result here. I've now filled in the time sections and you can see this is basically a full day's events. And you can go in and these sections typing your task like wake up at six AM. You can also change the color of each of these columns, which could be a good way to organize the type of task you're doing. For example, if you wanted to color all your work hours, you just go to that same box that shows up here on the end row, on the left-hand side. And you can color the row the same way that we've been doing before. If you want to make them all blue, for example, that will help you change up the different columns visually and organize your day a little bit easier. The last thing to do to get this schedule in place is to grab it with the exterior six dots and drag it into the color box that we put for today's schedule. As you can see, all of our boxes on the top here are filled out. Now in the sample design I showed you, there is a bottom section as well. So in the next lesson, we're just going to add that secondary section. And I'll show you a few different things you can put in there. And then we'll start decorating all of this design with some custom images that will create in Canva. 6. Design a Second Section & Explore Blocks: We filled in the boxes on the top half of this design. So now let's look at the bottom half. This is a section where you can really start adding in some more custom information. The different elements on the top half of this design are really things that you're going to be clicking on and engaging with every day. But you might want to put some more infrequently used but still important information on the second half. To do this, I scroll down here and clicked in the open space and there's a slash for Commands button here. Now, this is actually lower down than any of these other boxes because I'm not in this three column mode anymore further down. And we're going to make a more obvious divider by hitting Slash and typing in divider. This will just add this thin gray line that spans this whole design. So we can really show where the top half starts, ends and the second half begins. As I said, you can get really creative with what you add down here. I'm just going to add a few spaces for textboxes. I'm going to add some options for some special pages that will be eventually accompanied by interesting or relevant graphics. And then add a video in. And I'll show you a couple of the other options, but feel free to customize this either now or later on after you finished the overall template. The first thing I'm going to add is a call-out box. And I will just set it to our standard design here. I think I'm going to make the color of the text different. I'll do it pink here. I'm just going to add a little quote in here. You can put whatever kind of information is important or interesting. Or again, just to quote like me. Further down, I'm going to create four columns that are all going to have an image with a page link or sub page right below it. So we'll add in the image placeholders first. I'm hitting Slash and just go into image, just typing in image. It's under media, which is, I believe the second category after basic blocks. I don't have an image I want to use yet, so I'm just going to click out of it. And we're going to duplicate this three times to have four boxes in total. Now in the same way that we created three columns above, I'm just going to grab these minus six dots, drag it over. And I'm going to create for equal-sized columns, each starting with an image. And we'll put an image in here after. Below each image, I'm going to put a page link. So I will hit slash, good a page. And you can call this whatever you want for now again, it could be relevant to your classes, your work, any sort of projects you're organizing. You could do a page for recipes, one for your budget. Anything that helps your life be a little bit more organized. So I'm just gonna put in placeholder names. And I will add the icon for our design. And there we have it right there. Again, I will duplicate this three times. Go in and I'm just going to clean up these names. There we go. So now we have four links to some pages. And I will just grab the first one, put it right under this first image, you see the blue line just extends along this image. If I put it down a little, it goes across the whole page and that is already where it's placed. So we want to in this column. And I'll do the same for 234. Now when we have pictures here, it'll be a nice image with a link right below it. And that image could be connected to your theme or to the page. One way that it links to. Now I'm going to add another divider here. And lower down. I'm going to just add in some interesting visual elements. The first thing I'm going to add is a video link. You can actually embed YouTube videos or Vimeo or from another site. That's just my slash. I'm just gonna type in video. And there we have it. So you can just paste the link here or you can upload a video, but in most cases you'll want to just link one. So I'm just going to grab the link to a music video, like a cute songs playlist. And I just pasted it there and we'll hit embed video. Now because it's the full span of the page, it will be very large. And that's just the cute thumbnail. I'm going to add another call-out box that will go in the second column in this section. So I'm just going to make it easy and duplicate this one. And then I will drag it and put it over to the side. We get that blue line showing it's going to create a new column. And there we go, It automatically resizes the video. I think I'll probably make this maybe a third. There we go. Let's just change this quote to be fun. To fill up this small section, I think an image right here, it'd be really nice. So I'll just click below the call it box and add in another image box. And we'll just leave it blank for now. You can keep going and add more things. For example, I'm just going to show you some of the other blocks that are useful here. You could add additional tables if there's other information you want to trap. You can do lists, make grocery lists, or different ideas for blog post titles, books you want to read, anything like that. Numbered list is a good option. Toggle list is what I use quite a lot and I'll just show you how that works. There aren't any in this particular design, but this is a useful one. Click on Toggle list. It gives you a space to type and this little arrow. So we'll just call it lists. If you click on this arrow was pointing down. Now you have a subsection. We can add extra blocks. I'll just click here. Maybe we'll do a to-do list and then we can have item one. So if you have a lot of lists and you don't want it to be visually cluttering up your dashboard. This is a good option because when you click that, it closes it backup. You can have as many items under here as you want. You can also just do plain text. You can do bullet lists. I find these helpful for my own dashboard. I have a work section and I have lots of work projects. Each project has its own little toggle with its own list that I can put away because I don't always want to see all of the jobs that have to do. As you scroll down through these different boxes, you can see there's a lot of other things. You can add that a more complex. So you can add dates, you can add emojis, math if you needed to do that for some reason. All of these databases are much more complex, but they're really helpful for specific tasks. I will go through them all in this particular class, but you can play around with them if you like. You can also add links to external pages here using the web bookmark, audio and video. If you wanted to add just a sound, you can do Spotify, you can upload a file, a PDF or anything like that. Notion also connects with a lot of other software or other websites. So we have Embed, you can do your PDFs here at Google Maps, but you can also link to items in your Google Drive. Like a tweet, put a map in. There's lots of different options here, really depend on what you're looking to do. But now we have our basic dashboard designed. It's time to start decorating it. In our next lesson, we're going to hop into Canva and look at the different kinds of sizes and designs that will create to fill out your planner and make it look really beautiful. 7. Design Your Custom Graphics: In this lesson, we're going to go over the different graphics that we will create to make our dashboard really beautiful. So first we're gonna go over all the different graphics that I used in this. And then I'll share with you the sizes and we'll go over creating one of them together so you can kind of see the process if you've never used Canvas before. This is what our design looks like overall or rather the finished product. The first image is the header at the top of the page. Now we only need one of these for the dashboard, so it will just be creating one header. Next we have these thin divider images. They're very narrow, but they are also a Cloud graphics, so it's on theme. We use them six times in this design, but you don't have to create six individual ones if you don't want. I actually just created two and use them three times each. So it's up to you if you want to have six individual ones or just one or two. Next we have these wide decorative images. Again, there's three uses of this size, but I only created two of them. And the top one and the bottom one are the same. You can use one every time when you can create three separate ones or whatever you like. I've included two floating images here. Now, these are actually transparent PNGs, so they don't have a background, but the background on Notion is white. You can just use a image with a white background as well. I will show you how in Canvas to search for graphics that are transparent PNGs in case you want to add that style as well. So I use two of those and there are two different images of clouds. Next is a quote image. So this is a rectangular image with just a cute quote on it I came up with, and we only use this onetime on the page. And finally we have Foursquare images. These can be themed. I've chosen all different pictures of pink clouds, or you could seem them to the length that goes right below them. It's really up to you, but foursquare image is basically, again, you could create for all the same. You could just use solid colors as well if you did want to have pictures, but that is what I've done here. This is totally optional, but if you want to use the same aesthetic theme, the pink clouds that I've used for this design. I have put all of these graphics and a zip folder and you can find that link and download it below in the class. And then you can import that into your notion and use them there. But if you want to create your own images, as most people probably would, then you can either pause and write these down, take a screenshot, or you'll find this PNG of this slide downloadable down below in the class with all of the dimensions for the different graphics I just showed you. So you can go into Canva or whatever other software you want to use to create each of these images. Also in the orange text, you'll see the number of uses per design. Like I said, you don't have to create six thin dividers, for example, you can use the same 16 times or whatever combination you like to get you started using Canvas, especially if you've never used it before. We're just going to create one of these graphics together and then you can use the same formula to create the rest. We're going to start by creating the header in Canvas. So lets hop over into that application. Now all the candle website, which is just canva.com. If you don't have an account, you can create one for free. And there is a paid version which is when I have, however, you don't need a paid version to create any of these graphics for our project. To get started on the header for our dashboard, I'm going to go up to create a design in the top right corner. Click on that and go down to custom size. Here I can make sure that we're working in pixels. And then I will type in the pixels from that slide or the graphic if you download it that the header image is 2 thousand pixels wide and 750 high, then I will click on create new design. Here we have our header image to work with. This is the recommended size that notion suggests for creating these headers. And I just want to note that typically it will cut off a little bit from the top and the bottom when you actually upload it onto notion. So you want to put anything important in the middle of this graphic. And then when you upload it to Notion, you have the choice to rearrange it a little bit. You can drag and move it so you see the top of the graphic or the bottom. But you want to keep your central item in the middle there. Since you're creating this for personally use, this is something that you're just going to use yourself. You're welcome to use any of the elements from Canvas library. If you have a free account, then I recommend when you go to the search bar, we're going to add some filters. But first we're going to look for our term. I'm going to put in pink clouds. This shows us a lot of different items. So I'm gonna go through a few filters. First, I'm going to click on photos because I only want to use photographs. And then I'm going to go to these sliders right here beside the search box and click on that, scroll all the way to the bottom and click on free. That way it filters out any pro elements so you don't get disappointed if they prompt you to pay for it. Obviously, I have a lot to choose from here, so I can just click and drag something into the design. And this will be the header size. You can get really creative with this. You could put text across here. You could put additional graphics on top. Canva has a big library full of things like watercolor graphics, illustrations, all kinds of assets that could suit your theme. So have some fun browsing through their library to find anything that suits your aesthetic and would look cute on your dashboard. Let's say I'm going to use this pink design here. If this looks how I want it to and I'm all done with it. I'm just going to title it header for notion. Then I go to share download right here. And I'm going to download it as a PNG with the size it is and hit Download. That's the very simple process of designing anything with Canva. And if you're creating your own graphics and want to follow my same placement for the images on our dashboard. Then just go through the list of different designs with the dimensions. Create all those Canva graphics, export them in the same way. And then we can move on to the next lesson to start placing them on our design. Before I leave Canva here, I just want to show you if you were looking for anything with a white background or transparent. It's easy just to go into those search filters. Again. If you're searching through photos, then you can scroll down and click on cutoffs only. And it will show you photographs that have the background removed from different images. You can also just go to graphics here. I'm just going to remove that could've only that's just for photos. And see that all of these graphics have transparent backgrounds, so they would show up as white, anything like this image here, I'm just going to remove this background, which open Notion with this white background blending into the back of our dashboard. So this would look like it was floating. You may want to do something like that for the two floating image sizes that I included on the list. Now when you have all of your graphics designed, you'd have all your images together and you know what you want to put in your template. So let's head over back to Notion and start inserting our graphics. 8. Placing Your Graphics: It's time to add our graphics into our notion dashboard. And this is the part where it really all comes together and starts to look really personalized and interesting. I've got all of my graphic saved in a folder on my desktop and we're just going to go through them one by one in order and start placing them in the design. Of course, feel free to put them wherever you like. This is your dashboard after all, but this is just how to create the template or the design that I've created in the first place. We're going to start with the header image. All you need to do to add the header is scroll up to the top and right below your icon will be a button that says Add cover. When we click on that, it's going to automatically just place one from the random library or covers that they have. But we just go to this change covered button here, click on it. It gives us some options. So first of all, there's the gallery. These are all images that notion provides that you might like to use, but they're not very specific to our aesthetic. In this case, there's also upload or you can upload your own, which is what we will do. Then there's link. If there's just an image you want to link on the Internet. And they also help connect to Unsplash. Unsplash is a royalty-free photography sites, so you can actually search for themes here and find pretty decent designs. This is a shortcut if you want to change this often, or if you're just feeling like being really quick. For example, if I type in pink clouds, they do have some photos that would work great. However, I do like doing things manually just so that I can still have my graphics on my computer. I'm gonna go to upload. And here's our collection of images that we're going to be using. Our header is right here. This is the one from the original design with the little moon in the middle. So I'll just double-click that. And it will process and upload. It uploaded and centered itself. Can also reposition just by clicking on this button and drag it up or down if it is not perfectly lined up to your liking. So we'll save that they're header is done. The next graphics we're going to add are the thin dividers. So we'll just start by going down here. There's a little bit of space hitting Slash and typing image that will bring up this little box that we're familiar with. Now, I only have two different designs for my thin dividers, so I'm going to upload them both just as two separate images. I'll duplicate them a few times and rearrange them on the page. So first, let's get the first one, divider one. And I will add another image. Then divide or two. I'm not going to keep them there. That's just where they're dropped for now. I'm going to be placing these thin ones in-between the call-outs just to add a little bit more visual interest. So let's drag one to the top here. The second one we will drag in-between these two. And then I'll just duplicate the first one and put it at the bottom. I'm going to put three on the right hand column as well. So I'll duplicate this 1 first. These are very similar. They're just two slices of the same image. Basically. I'll put one at the very top. Duplicate the other one. This one after the quote, before the trackers. And I'll duplicate this one on top again. And I will drag this one all the way to the very bottom here. There's all six spots for our thin dividers. You can add more anywhere else you like. Of course, the reason that we designed this graphic to be 2 thousand pixels wide is that if you wanted, you could put it the whole span of the design. I'll just show you what that looks like. It's a little bit thicker when you put it up here that spans the full width. But you could continue to use this as a divider instead of the gray line dividers that are built into Notion or however you like. Next we'll add the wide decorative images. We use these images three times, one at the top of the schedule, one at the bottom of the schedule, one at the bottom of the page right here. I'm just going to find a little bit of space to work right here at the bottom and put in an image block. I will upload wide decorative one. I'm just going to drag that up to the very top of this column. Now this pushed the column down. So there isn't that little workspace here again, but I can just find a plus sign anywhere. Click to add a block image. Then we will look for why decorative to put this at the bottom of the schedule. It's easy sometimes to slip and put it full width or somewhere else. Just look for where the blue line is indicating the graphic is going to set. We've already placed a placeholder down here to hold that other decorative wide image. So I will just click on this and I will select my decorative one. Again. If I'm repeating images like these ones, I try and put them in a different order. So version one, version two here, and then version one again. And just to be a little bit of a perfectionist, I see that these two don't line up, so I'm just going to shrink this column a little bit. There we go. Nice flat bottom to the design. Next we have our floating images for my particular design, that means to cloud images. So I'm going to create some image blocks and import those two floating images, one. And floating images too. I just use each of these designs once in this project. So I'm going to take number one and just put it right below this divider here. And I'll take number two and put it in-between these two blocks here above the chore chart. That's almost it for the top of the design. All we have left is our little quote which goes right here. I'll click and put another block. And this is a little quote image that I created. Keep in mind that as items to your task list and your shortlist, it will increase the size of these columns. So it doesn't necessarily make sense to worry about having these top blocks all line up. But you can always adjust the width of the columns to make them a little bit more symmetrical. All we have left is to add our four images right here, and we've already got those placeholders in. So I'm just going to add one in each of the square images that I've created. There we go, That's it for adding images to our design. As you can see, these links here can correspond to the picture right above them, or they could just be decorative. At this point your dashboard is done being designed and ready to go. You're welcome to keep customizing it, add more graphics, change it up, and make sure that it's really usable for you and your daily purposes. In the next and final lesson, I'm just going to look at the way that I've styled the reading list habit tracker and the three planners weekly, monthly, and yearly, to show you how I've come up with a way to organize this information. And I'll quickly go over what kind of elements in blocks I use to achieve these looks. 9. Further Page Layout Inspo: Before we wrap up the class, Let's take a quick look at some of the ways I've designed these sub pages for this planner. If the template that we're looking at right here, it looks a little bit different than the last one. That's just because I clicked onto the original one I made that I was basing this course design off of. The columns might be slightly different widths. So first let's take a look at our weekly planner. I've started this very much the same as our original dashboard. So I used the wide width and the serif font. This is basically what the design looks like. There are seven blocks here. Design does call out blocks, one for each day of the week with Monday to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the bottom. And then two of the wide decorative images just at the bottom, just to keep it interesting and on theme, I've also added a header up here where I've typed in the date and just used a few different colors and fonts. To make it a little bit interesting. I would go in and custom change this every week along with the names of the days right here to break down the blocks that I used here. This is a header right here. All of these are call-out boxes. I use just the text from the call out here and just a plain text box right here. These are headers as well, much in the same style as our to-do lists on the main dashboard. These are two bullet points and then two checkboxes. I created this once and duplicated it five times, or rather four times, decreed five boxes along here, and then two more and put them down below. It's a pretty simple design, but for keeping things organized on a weekly basis, this could be helpful. Next, let's look at the monthly planner. This page uses a couple of different elements. At the top we have a header with the month that you can change every month. This calendar is created using a database feature. I'll just show you down below here. If we type in slash calendar, it gives you a calendar view. And then when you click on it, it is a bit more of a complex setup. But basically, what it does is it lets you add in little notes for items on each day. They'll show up here like objects on your calendar. So it's a great system. And over on the right-hand column, I've added just a couple of to-do lists and the little reminder. So again, these are call-out boxes, tick boxes, and bullet points. And one of our clouds, the yearly planner, is laid out like this. When I created this, I had to think pretty hard about the best way to organize a yearly planner. So what I decided to do was create call-out boxes and rows of three for each month. I've created these little graphics and Canva just with different colors on a color scale. I believe they were the size of the wide decoration just shrunk down to fit the space. In each box, I've included the name of the month, just decorative graphic than any events. I just found a list online of important holidays to keep track, added them in here, and then some reminders. I figured the way that this is probably going to be used is to remember birthdays, big assignments, or significant events happening on different months. Obviously, there's a lot of different ways you can conceptualize a yearly planner, but I think this both looks nice and is relatively functional as well. Next is our reading list. This page is a little bit more complex. I've quite a lot of elements on here. But if you're a book lover and have a really big reading habit than it might be nice to have a place to organize that information. So this is what the page basically it looks like. It's not very long, but it has a couple of important aspects. First, we have the currently reading, and I've just found a book cover that matched my theme. But you can import the cover of whatever book you're using or simply just write it out in text. I added a quote here, and this is set within a call-out box with a little divider below this column we have the two clouds and then a quote box here. This is an element we didn't use before, but if you typed slash and then quote, it just adds the text with this line beside it. I don't really love how it looks in most contexts, so I don't usually use it, but here I did. Then I added another graphic. This is the same size as the image that we used on the other page. And in the fourth column, I created a to-be Red List with tick boxes so you could check them off as you read them or as he purchased them. Scrolling down a little bit, I added a very simple table again here with a place to put book reviews. So the columns, I have our book title, completion date, rating, and then notes. Over here, I added a color box with just text inside, and I created a little rating system. So it would be really easy to figure out how I write books as I finished reading them. Reading lists are really popular on Notion. I find that most templates I see include a book section, a place to put what you're reading. So there's lots of more inspiration for this on places like Pinterest or Instagram, wherever people share their notion designs. The last sub page I will show you is the habit tracker. This page is pretty simply designed but doesn't include another one of the database features. So at the top we have just the name of the page. This is a colored box where I included a lot of contexts to explain how to use it. You don't have to do this in your own design. I just did this to remember how to actually use this page. Scrolling down. This is a complex table using the database feature and then just to graphics on the side, the Cloud again, and this one using the quote image sites template. The reason I used the database base table is because it lets you do checkboxes that you can actually tick off, which is useful for a habit tracker. Way that you use this as basically under the date column, you'd fill in the date. Then you would rename these based on the habits you're doing, like drink water or exercise or whatever it is. It's a little space for notes on this end as well. And you'd click it off every day that you do the thing. It's not particularly hard to create a database table. I'll just show you very quickly, which is two slash table. It's under database rather than the basic blocks. Click on that. And it first will ask you for a data source, will just click on new database and then it gives you to fill in. So it's not that different from a regular table or the redesigned, except you can add multiple pages to it. Pick just clicking on this here. You can add your title right here. And then you can really customize these columns. So the first one would be your date. You can just change this here to date. The second one is currently listed as tags, but you can go to Type and click multi-select. And it will give you all these other different types of column you can add. I was using the checkbox version. And now there's a checkbox in each one. You can change the size of these columns really easily, make them really small if you want, but I find it, you can label them this way. So I just made them a little bit bigger. Go in and change this to like exercise. And then you can take them off. One of the downsides, in my opinion, which is a very small one to using the database style table, is that there's just all this extra visual clutter that with the symbol table we used on the main dashboard that doesn't get included. So it works really well for a habit tracker in particular. Now we've reached the end of the instructional part of the course and we can move on to the few wrap-up tasks. So first, I would love to see the dashboards that you've created through this course. And that's our class project. When you're done following the instructions in this class and creating your own dashboard, just take a screenshot of either the top of it or a section you find really interesting. And please do upload that graphic here for the class. I would love to see them personally and they can be really inspiring for your classmates as well. It would be great to see what kind of designs or aesthetics you come up with or how you reinterpret what we've done in this class to suit your own needs. If you have any great ideas for other elements to add to your dashboard or other kinds of sub pages that might be helpful. Then please do hop down to the class discussion and share your thoughts on what could be added. Because notion is so open-ended, it can be a little tricky to come up with inspiration sometimes as to creative things to add to your dashboard. So take a look if there's any other good ideas there and please do feel free to share your own. With that being said, we've reached the end of the course. So thank you so much for joining me to learn about Notion. If you'd like to leave a review for this class, I would really appreciate it. I read them all and they help other students find my course. And finally, if you liked learning with me, I teach a lot of other classes. So please check out what I offer on design skills, e-commerce and business skills. I hope that this notion design is really helpful in your organization going forward and that you've gained some skills that you can use on other designs as well. Happy creating. And I'll see you next time.