Transcripts
1. Design a Digital Planner on Your iPad: Buttons, Stickers, Textures, & Tabs: Hi, everyone. I'm Liz. I'm an artist, illustrator, and teacher. And today I want to show you how to use your iPad to create a digital planner with tabs, pre cropped stickers, and tons of layers and textures. When you take this class, you'll get all of the tools I use to create my planners as free downloads. I'll share with you three leather texture brushes, a paper texture brush, and a ton of stamps for creating tabs, buttons, stitches, and stickers. I'll give you my digital planner so you can have a basic format to get you started with designing your own. I'll show you how my planner sections are linked and how I go about designing each page from start to finish. We'll start with the planning process and go all the way through exporting your file and sharing it online. First, we'll cover how to create a background that'll be the cohesive element that ties all of your planner sections together. I'll show you how to add depth to your background with shadows, textures, and layers. Then I'll show you how to create a grid that keeps everything in alignment so your planner looks clean and professional. Next we'll create planner tabs and buttons that allow you to link to various sections of your planner. I'll show you how to make the tab stand out with shading and overlapping. Next, we'll create each page of the digital planner starting with a goal tracker. I'll show you how to create buttons that stand out and how to add text to your pages. I'll give you the font I created for my planner. So you can use my font or you can find a different font that works for your personal style. Next we'll create year and month views and look at ways to fill up empty spaces in the planner with note sections and lines. I'll show you how to reuse elements from the pages you've already created. So you can cut down on your work and add a cohesive look to your planner. Next, we'll look at ways to work efficiently when you're adding links to your planner. I'll show you some time-saving techniques so you can quickly copy links throughout the planner. Next, I'll show you how I create my digital planner stickers and how to pre crop them for good notes so they're easy to use throughout the year. Then we'll finish by looking at how to export and share your finished planner. Whether you want to design planners to sell, or you just want to create one for yourself, this class will show you everything you need to know to design a digital planner on your iPad. All you need to take this class is your iPad and a stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started.
2. Downloads & Layout: So, the first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads that I'll be using in the class. So, one note before we get started, this is my second class on creating digital planners. The first class shows the basics and goes at a really slow pace. We talk about creating simple shapes and decorations. So, that's a good place to start if you're a total weekender, especially if you haven't used Procreate before or you don't feel very comfortable in Procreate. I'll put a link to that in the about section of the class. So, if you start this class and you start feeling overwhelmed, feel free to go back to that class and then come back to this one later. In this class, we're going to move a little bit faster. I'm going to assume that you know the basics of Procreate, and we're going to go into creating buttons and tabs and doing some complex linking systems and textures. So, we're going to go a little bit deeper in this class. If you're comfortable with Procreate, you can probably just go ahead and jump into this class, but feel free to go back if you start getting overwhelmed. So, you can find a link to get to this page in the about section on skill share. The about section doesn't actually show up if you're using the skill share apps. So, make sure you go to a browser and login to skill share and view the class that way in order to see the link to get to this page and you will need a password to get into that page, and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into the page, you'll see a huge list of downloads here. Some of these are links to other pages and others are direct downloads. So, we'll go through each of these as we go through the class. The first one that you'll need to get started is the Procreate brush set. So, I'm going to click and hold that and click opening a new tab and I'm using Safari I don't know if this looks exactly the same in Chrome, I think it's a little bit different. So, if you have any trouble, just switch to Safari. So, once that start downloads, you'll see the option to open in and then it'll show some program. But we want to do Procreate. So for me, I'll click more. You may see Procreate here and you can just click that. If not click more and find Procreate. Then I'll click that one time. And it should go ahead and open Procreate for you in whatever document you were using last. Then I'm going to scroll up to the very top of my brush list, and you should see the brush set called planners. So, all of the brushes and stamps are within that brush set. The next download on the list is my planner. So, this is the planner that I'm going to create in this class. So, you may want to start by just playing around with this to get an idea of what sections you could use for your planner. So again, I'm going to click and hold, open in a new tab. So, it may take a minute or so for this planner to download because it is a large file. Once you download, you should see the option open in good notes. If you don't click more and then find good notes on that list. So, I'll click open in good notes. If you already had a planner open and good notes, you're going to get this pop-up that says import above, import below, create a new document or cancel. I don't want to put this planner in an existing planner. I want to create a new document. So, click that one time and then it'll ask you what category to use. If you just downloaded good notes, you may not have categories yet. So, you can just click uncategorized. I created a category called planners. So, I'm going to drop it in there, and then you should see the planner in your gallery, click that one time and you'll see it automatically takes you to the cover page. All of these buttons and tabs are linked to different sections of the planner and if you want to click on those links, you have to have that no pencil symbol selected. So, if you use the pen, if you use the eraser, you always have to go back to that to use any of the links and the planner. So, if you play around with this planner or a little bit, you can get to know the sections and see how I laid the planner out. The first section is the year section, where I have every month of the year, and each one of these links to that month. If you click the home button, that takes you back to that cover page, I have a stickers section. All of my stickers are here and these are pre-cropped and I'll show you how to do that. Back to the home button. I'll click tracker. I made this tracker page and each one of these links to the corresponding tracker for that month. So, here's January. I'll click the home button and click blank. This is just a blank page that can be used for anything. Lines where you can do some writing and then I have a link to get to my site to download new stickers. So, if you're going to sell your planner, this is a great way to get people to go to your site and check for your new stickers. Obviously, you would need to actually create some new stickers and you can customize that text. I also have all of these buttons that you see here are also along the top. So, these are a little bit cryptic if you've never seen this page. So, I made this page just to help people know what these little buttons at the top mean. So, you have a smiley face for stickers, a star for tracker. So, once you figure out what sections you want to create for your planner, you may also want to come up with some symbols that correspond to those sections. So for example, I just chose a flower for my stickers because that's one of my stickers. Then when it comes to here, I'll show you how to put all of the text on each tab and also how to get this shading on the tab. So, at this stage, you can really just start thinking about what sections do you want to have in your planner, and how do you want them to be laid out? You can see for my month view, I've got the seven days of the week here, and then I had a little space left, so I added some lines. You can see for my week view, I decided to put a few lines so you can make some notes and I also have slash lines so people can write the date in. So, let's go back to the sticker page and you can see how I've created all of these different symbols, and I tried to choose symbols that were flexible. For example, the heart could be health goals, romance, a date, family. I did a few different symbols that can be flexible like a car maybe could be a trip or car maintenance. I did two people sitting together. That could be a date or a meeting. So, as you're thinking about your stickers, think about what is the final use. If your just making this for yourself, obviously it can be totally customize to you. But if you're making it to sell or to give away you may want to make it really flexible, so that anyone could open this planner and find at least a few stickers that would work for their life. I also tried to create stickers that were flexible. For example, on this planner, I've shown a few different ways to use the to-do list. So, these are two separate stickers, that I've made separately. But you can actually use them together in different ways by putting them on top of each other and connecting them. So, once you take a look through this planner, you may want to play around with that a little bit, and some of the sections, find out what works for you and what doesn't work for you. I always play around with my planners before I publish them, and I always have to make changes. So, it's a great idea to just plan a month, put your life down for one month, and see how it actually plays out and see if that works for you. You can see I've used a few stickers. I have a birthday symbol, I have a trip with the car sticker. I've used some different colors to make sure my paper works well with a lot of different colors. I've also played around with a few of the sections just to make sure they're working as I want them to. So, I've started a work out list on the tracker page. So, once you take some time to play around with my planner, you can start brainstorming your own planner. So, the first thing I always do is just make a list. What are the things that I need to include in my planner? And you may have some things on here that are like question mark, ''Do I need a goal tracker?'' Not sure yet. I took just a few minutes and made a list of everything that my planner includes. A cover page which also functions as the homepage for my links, a year, month, and week view. Those are three separate pages, a goal tracker page, and then a cover page that links to each month. Sticker page, lined writing paper and blank paper. So, when you're ready, take just a minute to make a quick list before you get started. So, once I'm ready and I'm happy with that list, I'm going to click the move tool and make sure that lists is selected and I'm going to swipe down three fingers and click copy and then I'm going to paste this onto a sketch page where I'm going to sketch out all my ideas for this planner.
3. Sketching Your Layout: So I like to make my sketch page at 9 by 11 inches, but you can do this at any size. I'm going to swipe down three fingers and click "Paste". Now I've just got my notes here down in the corner so I can keep an eye on those. The first thing I like to do is think about color, I always plan my colors beforehand. The reason for that is you want to be sure you're planner is cohesive. You want all of the parts to work together well. So if you go ahead and pick a color set, it's a lot easier to stick to that color scheme. You can see my color set here and I like to click on each color that I've chosen. Then I'm going to go to my planner brush set and get the solid circle button. Click that one time. You may need to make your brush a little bit bigger or smaller depending on the size of the circle. Then I'll just click the move tool and move that down to the bottom and I've got "Magnetic" selected here, so I don't mess up the proportions of my circle. I'm going to repeat that same process with all of my colors. I'm also going to put each color on a separate layer. You can see I'm just using the one beside it to get the sizing. This doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't really matter if these are the exact same size. It's really just for getting your eyes on these colors and making sure they look good together. I'm just going to take a minute to make sure I'm happy with these colors. If you are a person who has trouble choosing colors, there's one site that may be helpful for you and you can just Google Adobe color wheel. Click on the Adobe color wheel at the top then on the left here I'm going to click "Compound" and you can see these colors displayed here will change as I move my finger around the color wheel. This is choosing colors that work nicely together. So if you have trouble choosing colors, this is a great place to start because you can just kind of look at these and figure out if that works for your personal style. You can go in for more of a pastel or out for more of a bold look. If you want to play around with that, find a color you like, take a screenshot by clicking the power button and the home button, take that back to your Procreate document, click "Insert a photo" and choose that photo. Then you can just click and hold on each color on the document and copy those into your color palette. So I'm just clicking and holding on the color and then clicking on my palate. I'll delete that layer, this is a step that's worth taking a lot of time on because once you choose all of your colors, you can't go back. Because we're going to create a master template that'll have some colors in it and then everything is going to be copied from that. So this is an important time to really decide what colors you want to use. Obviously, you can always make another planner so don't put too much pressure on it. But have a cup of coffee or tea and take a moment to really think about what colors you want to go with for this first planner. The next thing I'm going to do is map out my sections. So I'm going to grab the square button brush and I'm going to get just a gray color. On a new layer, I'll click the square button one time and then resize this to be about the width of a planner. Doesn't have to be perfect, this is just a sketch, I'm just trying to get an idea of how I want this to look. Next, I'll create a new layer and get a different color and that's going to be the color of my cover. I went with a pink, you can choose any color here. You may want to go ahead and play around with the actual colors that you have in your palate. Put them together, play around with shapes and layout the planner just as it'll be on the finished piece. Also, one note here about my colors, you'll see that I have some similar shades. I've chosen a dark pink and a light pink because this will be my base color and then the darker one will create some textures for me. So I do recommend having a shade and then a darker version of that shade and your final cover will be a color kind of in the middle of those two. We'll play around with some textures later on and you'll see what I mean. I'm starting with a color that's lighter than I want, blending it with the color that's darker than I want to get something in the middle. Now that I have my background and my cover set down, I'm also going to put down my paper. I'm using white here with that same rectangle or square brush. So that's going to be the basic layout of my planner. I'm going to merge those three layers together, duplicate that, put "Magnetics" on, so it'll go straight across the page, and then just place these evenly then I'll merge those two together. I'm going to copy that a few times. This is going to depend on how many pages you want to have on your planner. You saw that I had about ten sections, but you can do any amount of sections, it's totally up to you here. You may want to start kind of easy with your first planner if this is the first time you've ever done this. But it's totally up to you here, maybe you're a really ambitious person and you really like to just go for it the first time. That's kind of what I did, but I don't necessarily recommend it. Because, you may create this whole planner and then realize you hate it and you want to start over and make a new one. I'm going to move my writing to the very top so I can see it. I know that I want my first section to be a cover, so I'm going to get the Narinder pencil and just go through here and make some notes about what I want each page to be. Now I have all of my sections titled and now I can decide how I actually want these laid out. What do you want to have on your cover? I want to have some lines where someone could write what they want to use the planner for or maybe just write their name. Then I also want to have some buttons here. There's 12 months in the year, so you can decide how you want to format this. I'm going to do two by three on each page. But you could do this totally differently, you could have six and six, and then you can have a section for notes. This could really be laid out any way that works for you. For my month view, because there are seven days of the week I can't split that evenly, so I'm going to have four on one page and three on another and then I'll have six up and down. The reason I do six here is because even though each month usually only has about four or five weeks, sometimes the month will start right here, and then it won't end until down here. So if you're making an undated planner, I do recommend having six squares or six rows because that's the only way that it will work for every single month of the year. I'm just going to fill that in with a note section and I think I'm going to put the month of the year up here in the corner. I also need to leave room for the days of the week. So that's something I'm thinking about as I'm doing this sketch. How much space do I need at the top here? How much of a margin do I need in order for all of my words to fit? Next, I'm going to do a week view. I'm going to have four days on this page and then three days on this page with a note section. Next, I'll have my guide for my tracker. My tracker works for 12 months of the year, so I need something that'll make it really easy for someone to get to those tracker pages. So this is like my homepage for my tracker. I'm just going to do some little buttons with some squares behind them. If you don't know what you're going to do at this point, just put some circles, it doesn't really matter, you can play around with it as you work. Next, I know for my tracker, I need to have a space for 31 days because some months have 31 days. Then I also need to have space for the month of the year. Next, I'm just going to have writing paper. Then I'm going to have a blank page and that's going to be both my blank section and my stickers page. We're going to put the stickers together in GoodNotes rather than Procreate so when we export this, it's just going to be a blank page. So that's really it, I'm going to refer back to this as I work and now I've done a huge part of the work that's going to really cut down on your stress while you are designing. You don't want to have to think about all the stuff while you're designing, it just makes it much more difficult to focus on the colors and the layout. One last thing I'm going to add to this on a new layer is my tabs. I've decided I'm going to have my month tabs over here. Then on the top I want to link to my special sections, which is my stickers and my tracker. So I'm going to put some little symbols here on the top just to symbolize what I want my special links to be. Then we know that that copies to every other page so I'm just going to leave that on that one piece and I'll remember all of these pages are going to have tabs. So let's go ahead and get started on our planner.
4. Backgrounds & Covers: So the first thing I'll do to get started with my planner is click the "Plus" symbol and choose a size. I'm just going to go with screen size, which is 2732 by 2048 pixels. So that's the screen size for the iPad Pro. If you use a size much larger than that, it ends up conflicting with the pen size and good nodes, so I found that with my last planner, I made it really big and then the pen wasn't large enough in GoodNotes. So GoodNotes does respond to the size of your planner. So for that reason, I just go with screen size, I find that that works better for goodness. So I'm going to click "Screen Size," and the first thing I'll do is insert a background. So you don't have to have a background, but I do think it looks nice and it just makes the overall planner look a little bit more professional but it really depends on what you're going for, so you don't have to use a background. I'm going to click "Add", insert a photo and then I took this photo of just my living room floor, but it has a nice wood texture, and I'm also including this as a download in the class. So you'll see that on the downloads page, I have five different pictures of my wood floor that has a nice texture. So feel free to use those in your planner, whether you use it for yourself or sell it, I don't mind. Then I also linked to some other textures on the site on splash, they have images that are free for personal and commercial use. So I've got some wood backgrounds, break backgrounds, marble, and some other textures. So those are a few that you can pull from or you can take a picture. Go outside and find some brick or some wood. The reason this picture is really evenly lit is because I have a lot of daylight in this room, so you really want to use even reflected daylight if you're going to create one of these pictures. You could use your counter-tops, you could use a shelf or anything in your home that has a nice texture, just give it a try and see what the pictures look like. So the next thing I'm going to do is create a new layer. This is going to be the layer for my cover. I really want my cover to have nice rounded edges that are symmetrical on every corner. So I'm going to use a different app to create this. This is an app called Vectornator, and this is also linked in the class downloads. I'm going to open Vectornator and click "New Document, Custom Size" and then I'm going to click "Pixels" and enter the pixel dimensions of my planner. So it's important that this document corresponds to the same size as your planner itself. Then I'll click "Done" and click "Create." It'll open the document here in your gallery and you just click one time and then pinch to zoom out. This program's kind of similar to Procreate, it has like the double-click gesture control, it has some of the same tools, but it has a really nice shape builder tool that Procreate doesn't have yet. So I'm just going to click this little empty square here over on the left. I'm going to just make sure black is chosen as my fill, I think that's the default anyway, and then I'm just going to tap and drag. I think you can use your Apple pencil or your finger for this. Then once you get these little dots, you can resize, then I'm going to go to this section over here in the Style, paintbrush section and I'm going to adjust the corner radius. So you can see as I adjust that, the roundness of the corners change. So I think 70 has a nice basic roundness here and you can zoom in to check it out. I want to make sure this is perfectly sized, so I'm going to click this little move tool, click on my rectangle one time and that selects it and then I'm going to move it so that it's lined up with the pixel markers on this page. I don't know if you can see the pixel markers in the camera, but they're really light grids that you'll be able to see easily on your own iPad. So I'm just aligning that up so it's one square away from the corner and then I'm going to go to the opposite corner and drag this so that it fits in the exact same position, one square away from the edge. So that's going to make sure that your planner is really evenly spaced in Procreate. I'm going to zoom out, make sure everything looks good, you can still adjust your corner radius if you don't like it by just clicking one time, make sure that selection tool is selected. Click one time, click the style piece again and then adjust your corner radius. So once you're happy with how that looks, click the "Share button", click "PNG," it has to be saved as a PNG. Make sure your transparency is on, make sure that's showing your documents size is the same size as your planner and then click "Save." I'll click "Save Image." Next, I'll go back to Procreate, click the tool symbol, insert a photo, find my piece that I just made and then decide how much of the wood do you want to be showing. Make sure magnetics is selected here and then just pinch in the middle to adjust how much of that is showing. So I'm going to go with that. That's about half an inch. But you could have a little more, a little less, just depends on how much of your texture you actually want visible. Next, I'm going to change the color. Obviously, I don't want this to be black, I'm going to swipe two fingers right to put this in the Alpha lock state or you can just click on it and click "Alpha Lock." Then I'm going to choose my color. So I'm going to go with this lighter color because I know I'm going to add a darker texture later, so I'll click on that one time, that layer and click "Fill Layer." Next, I want to play around with adding some texture to this layer. So I'm going to get my darker pink color, I'm going to go to the planner set and you'll see there are three different leathers. The first one here, I'll change the brush size to be large. You can see if we zoom in, it's got almost kind of a snake skin leather. I'll choose an even darker color so you can really see what this texture is doing. So you could go with a really high contrast like this one. If you don't like the lighter contrasts, choose a darker color and just play around and see how it works out with the textures. Next, I'm going to choose the next one which is called leather tiny and you can see this is just a slightly different kind of leather. The next one is leather wrinkly, and this is the one I'm going to use. I really like this texture, it has a really nice general feel to me, so that's what I'm going to use. If you're looking at these brushes and you wish that the texture was a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller, you can easily adjust these. Click on it one time, click "Grain", and then adjust the scale. So when you adjust the scale, you're adjusting the size of that texture. So I think I had it set at about 42 or 43. You can go up and down with that and that works for any of the texture brushes. So I'm just going to step back to remove all of those textures that I was playing with, I'm going to get my darker pink color that I want to use and cover this whole piece with texture. So this may not be perceptible on the camera, but when you're using this in GoodNotes, the texture is really subtle but apparent. Next, I want to create a little bit of a shadow behind this so that it really looks like it's laying on the table. So I'm going to duplicate my cover layer and drag that duplicate below my original cover layer. So now I've got two of this same color. I'm going to get black, pure black is my color by double-clicking in the color section, click on that bottom cover layer one time and click "Fill." So now I have a black layer behind my cover layer, I'm going to swipe two fingers right to undo the alpha lock state. This blurring tool will only work if you turn alpha lock off. So if you ever have trouble with this blurring tool, you probably have your alpha lock on, click "Gaussian Blur", and I'm going to blur this to about 19 percent. So you can go a little more, a little less, it really just depends on your personal style. Another thing I like to do is go to that layer and reduce the opacity a little bit. I don't like really bold shadows, I like subtle shadows that really just make the viewer feel like this planner is sitting on a table. So I've got 62 percent opacity here and I'm just going to zoom out and take a look at this. So this is going to be our master documents. So this one is worth taking a ton of time on because you're going to have to see this on every single page of your planner. So if there's something you don't like about the texture or the background or the shadow, go ahead and fix that now so that you don't have a lot of extra work later.
5. Stitches and Guides: Next I'm going to add in some paper. I'll create a new layer. I'm going to use that same guide that we made in vector nader. Insert a photo, insert that same rounded edge piece and then I'm just going to use the Magnetic Move Tool to re-size this. You can really use your personal style here to decide how far you want this from the edge. I'm going to have some stitches that go all the way around this edge. Before I continue with my paper, before I continue with the sizing of it, I'm going go ahead and put my stitches down so I know exactly how big to size that paper. For the stitches, you can go back to the planner rush set. I've got straight stitches and slanted stitches. Some people prefer stitches that are a little bit slanted, so they look like they were woven in a diagonal fashion. Other people might like the straight stitches. It really just depends on your style here. Play around with these and see what looks best in your planner. Next, I'm going to adjust the size so I can find a stitch size that I like for this planner. I'm going to go a tiny bit smaller. Once I've got that size set, I'm just going to go back and forth here and do one row of stitches. Once that looks good, I'll click the move tool and put that in place. I'm going to put those pretty close to the edge. They're not going to be right on the edge. I'm going to leave a little bit of space, but maybe a quarter of an inch from the edge. Then I've got the stitches that are just hanging off the side. I'm going to get my monoline brush on a large size and just erase those extra stitches. Now that I have one set of stitches, I'm going to add a shadow to that using the same process that we use for the cover, duplicate that layer, drag it below, alpha lock it, get black as the color. Click fill to fill the layer, unalpha lock it, Gaussian blur and then adjust that to whatever works for your style. I'm going go with 13 and then I'm also going to reduce the opacity again to about 50 percent. This is one where you really need to step back because it may look good close up and then you step back and it looks way too dark. Just take a minute to play around with those settings. That looks good to me. I'm going to merge my shadow and my stitches. Then I'll duplicate that layer, click the move tool, make sure magnetic is selected at the bottom and then pull this down and I want to get that blue line that's telling me this is going straight down. That's just going to help everything be aligned nicely. Then you may just need to play around with the distance here. I am just keeping an eye on that distance and placing it. If you want this to be a little more precise, I do recommend creating a guide. I'm going to create a guide in hot pink just so it's really easy to see. This isn't going to be part of my planner. It's just going to be there to help me keep things in order. I'm going to put this on about 25 percent for the size. I'm going to cover this entire page. I'm going to zoom in and set this guide to help me place my stitches. I'm looking at the corners here and trying to figure out what would be a good size to perfectly align with the stitches and also to align with the edge of the planner. I'm just playing around with this for a second, making sure this top line is lined up here and this bottom line is lined up here. Then you can see on the bottom, if I reduce the opacity of my grid, the stitch is one row down, so I'm going to put it right on that row and then I'm going to do the same thing on the top. Now this is perfectly aligned. I'm going to rename that guide layer, guide, just so I don't accidentally delete it or draw on it. Next I'm going to go to my original stitches layer and duplicate it. Click the move tool and move it into place. You can bring back your guide to help you get that right at one column away or however far you are doing it. Another thing to keep in mind here is how these stitches align with each other. I don't want them to overlap on the corner. I'm just placing them so that they work nicely with each other. Then I can erase those extra pieces and repeat that same process over here on the right side. I'm always duplicating my original. Every time you duplicate and procreate, you're going to lose a little bit of quality. It's a good idea to only duplicate originals and never duplicate a duplicate.
6. Paper Textures & Layers: Now that I have all of my stitching down, I know how big my paper needs to be. So I can see if I'd left it at that size, it would be a little bit too close to my stitches. So I'm going to click the move tool, remove the magnetic setting and make sure my paper layer is selected, and then just take a minute to play around with sizing this. You can also bring back your guide, and let's say you want your paper layer to be one row away from your stitches, you can certainly do that with just using your guide. So now I have my paper layer sized. I can swipe right on that layer, get white as my color, click one time and click "Fill Layer". I'll go ahead and remove my guide just so we can really see what we're doing here with the paper. So next I want to add a little bit of texture to this paper and this is optional. You don't have to have paper texture, but it's just something I like to add to give it a little bit of a paper feel that's little more 3D than this pure white. It's also a little bit easier to look at than a pure white paper. So I have this paper on "Alpha Lock" already. I'm going to click it one time and click "Select", and then create a new layer, and I'm just going to choose my lighter pink as my texture, and then in the brushes, I'm going to click the paper texture brush and cover this whole piece. Then I'll click the selection tool to remove that selection. The nice thing about putting this paper layer on a separate layer is that you can really turn it on and off and take a look and see if it works for your planner or not. You can also click the "N" symbol and reduce the opacity of that texture. So if it's just a little bit too extreme for you, you can just tone it down by reducing the opacity. Next I want to add a tiny bit of shadow to that paper, so I'll duplicate the white layer and move it below the original white layer, get black as my color, just like we did before, "Fill layer", undo the "Alpha Lock", click "Gaussian Blur", and I'll do about a 14 percent, and then reduce the opacity of that layer. I'm not going to give the paper as much shadow as I gave the background, so I'm going to turn that one down to like 30 percent opacity because the paper stuff then it's not going to have a huge prominent shadow. Once you're happy with how that paper looks, you may also want to add an additional set of 3D layers on the side. So what I'm going to do is just merge all three of my paper layers together. So I've got the shadow, the paper, and the texture. So I've merged all of those together. I'm going to duplicate that layer twice. With the first one that I duplicated, I'm going to make the top one invisible, and I'm going to click the move tool, and let's get really close here. Just give it a tiny bit of a movement on the right side, and then same thing, a tiny little movement on the left side. Then you can step back and make sure they're even. This one maybe needs a little bit more of a nudge. So this is just to create a little depth, this is totally optional, but I like to do this. I think it gives it a little bit more of a visual interest on the sides. I'm going to do one more layer. So this next layer is going to pass the original and create a third level of paper. I'm only doing that on the left and right, which means that the top and bottom get a really extreme shadow, because that's three layers of shadow. I like to erase that because it just looks a little bit too intense. So I'm on my top paper layer and I've got the eraser, soft brush, and this is just the air brush that comes with Procreate. I'm going to increase that brush size to about five percent, and then I'm just going to erase that shadow on the top and bottom. I'll do that for both of the top two paper layers so now I just have a shadow for the bottom paper layer. You can step back and turn that on and off and see. Do you like a little more shadow, do you not? This is the time to really take your time and play with all of these options. Next I want to create a stitch in the very middle of my paper that shows the paper being held down. So I'm going to grab one of my stitches and then I'm going to grab the original one that I created because you should only duplicate an original. I'll duplicate it one time, click the move tool, click "Rotate Twice", put that basically in the middle, but I want to know where the true middle is. So I'm going to click the tool symbol, "Canvas", turn on "Drawing Guide", "Edit Drawing Guide", and then increase the grid size all the way so you get the very center of your paper. Click "Done". Then you can just move that stitch over to the very middle. So I'm looking at the top and bottom and making sure this is evenly spaced with the stitches in the right place, and then I'll just erase these extras. I always use the monoline brush for erasing things like this. If you use the air brush, you may accidentally clip off some of your existing stitches. So now we have stitches in the center and all the way around the sides. Once you've finished your stitches, you can go back to your Canvas drawing guide and turn that off so it's not in your way. I'm going to create one last guide before I finish this document. I'm going to duplicate my original guide and make it invisible, and then with this new guide, I'm going to align with the paper. Because on the last guide I was aligning with the outer edge, with this new guide, I'm not taking into account these little paper 3D edges, so this is going to be the guide that sets every single part of my planner. So this is a very important piece of your planner, it decides exactly how big every single element of the planner is going to be. So I'm just making sure this lines up perfectly on the top and bottom corners, and then I'm going to rename this to Paper Guide, and the other one that's aligned with my cover, that's going to be my Cover Guide. So you can see I haven't even started drawing my elements yet and I already have a ton of layers, so you can see how this can get a little bit confusing. So what I'm going to do is start creating some groups. So I've got my Cover Guide, My Cover, the Cover Shadow and the Background. I'm going to select that first cover guide and all the other cover related stuff by just swiping right on each one with one finger, and then I'll click "Group". So that's going to be my Cover Group. I'm going to click the little collapse symbol to hide that so it's not in my way, and now I'm going to do the same thing with my paper stuff. So this is your master document. This will make everything so much easier when you start building your other parts of your planner. This is where I always just try to stay organized, take a look at everything that's a part of my planner and make sure they're all in the right groups. So let's go ahead and start creating some tabs.
7. Creating Tabs: So for my first set of tabs, I want to have 12 tabs, one for each month of the year. So I'm going to create a new layer and I'll get pink as my guide color, and click the grid, I'm going to make the grid brush as large as it can go. Actually let's go a little bit smaller on the grid brush, so I want it to be about 12 squares down. That's perfect. I'll start up here, and then I'm just going to use the monoline eraser to erase whatever is outside of 12. So this is 12 by 1, and I want to make sure that this is perfectly aligned on the left and right here. I'm going to get my paper guide and turn that on and then adjust this to match my paper guide. I can see that there are two squares and then this starts, so I want it to be the same on this side, two squares, I'll click my "Move tool" and adjust my grid so that it's perfectly two squares away from the bottom and top of the paper. Now I can remove my paper guide to get that out of my way and make my tabs guide a little bit more transparent. I'll click the "+ symbol" to put my first tab on a new layer. I'll get gray as my color, and then you can decide what tab you want to use or what will fit well on your planner, I'm going to use this one called plain tab, but there's also a tall tab and then outlined tab that you can use. I'll click one time to set that tab, and let's make it a little bit bigger. You can always make these smaller, but you cannot make them bigger without making them blurry, so what I do is set them to be large like this and then click the "Move Tool" to rotate, click "Magnetics" and then move it to put in place. I'm also going to make it a little bit taller, so I'm just going to use the move tool to adjust the height. I'm going to size it so that it fits perfectly within that little grid. I'm thinking about a few different things here, I want it to be perfectly within the grid, I want it to be tall enough so it can say January right here, I'm just going to abbreviate and have ''Jan'', and I also wanted to slightly overlap with the paper. You can see here we've got the tab and then the paper and they're overlapping, you wouldn't want your tab to be a little bit outside the paper, it just wouldn't look realistic. Once we're done with these tabs, we're going to move them below the paper, but for now I'm just going to work like this so you can really see what I'm doing. Once you have that first tab set, how you'd like it to be, you could create a little shadow just like we've done before, filling it with black, then undo the alpha lock, and do Gaussian blur. I'm going to go 10 percent on the Gaussian blur, and I'm going to go about 75 on the Opacity. Then I'm also going to take the shadow, I've got the move tool selected, remove magnetics. I'm going to add just the shadow slightly coming down like this, so that the shadow is going to appear to overlap with the next tab, that's totally optional, but that's something I like to do. Next time when you go back to my gray layer, swipe right one time to alpha lock it, get white as my color and get the soft brush. Then I'll make the soft brush about the size of half of this tab, maybe a little bit bigger, and then just tap to get a little bit of lightness on there. You can go as far as you want with this, you could go really extreme, or you could go really light, it's totally up to you here, just take a few minutes, and as usual, you want to step back and make sure it doesn't look weird when you step back. I'm happy with that, I don't like it too extreme, so I'm going to go with about two taps. Then I can go ahead and merge my shadow and my tab, so once you're happy with how all of those look, go ahead and merge them. Then I'm going to start duplicating this, and as I duplicate, as usual, I only want to duplicate the original, so each time I duplicate, I go back to the bottom and duplicate that, because the originals always are going to get pushed to the bottom. I'm going to create 12 of these. Obviously we don't want them all on top of each other, so I'm going to start with the first one here, this is going to be January. The second one, I'm going to shift down, so this is going to be February. I'm just keeping in mind that I want these to be within my grid system and I want them to be overlapped with the paper a little bit, so when you use your move tool, make sure magnetics is selected, so that as you move down, you get this little blue line that's snapping it to be perfectly horizontal. I'm just going to go down the list and continue the same process all the way down. Now one thing you may find as you start doing this is they are too overlapped; there's too much overlap or there's not enough overlap, if that's the case, just stop what you're doing, delete all of those layers that are on the top and start with that original layer, and then change that overlap, whatever the problem was, maybe you need to make it a little bit thicker or a little bit thinner, whatever it is, make that little adjustment and then you can start doing your duplication again. So once you get all of those tabs created and sized properly, we can go ahead and make our guide invisible. We want to move those tabs below our paper layer, so I'm going to select the first tab and then select all the other tabs and the tab guide layer and click "Group". Then I can collapse that group and just make sure all my groups are collapsed. This is my paper group that has my paper and the stitches, and then my cover and stitches are all on a separate layer, so I need my tabs to go in-between my paper layer and my cover layer, so then you get this tab that's sandwiched between your paper and your cover. It also takes some of that shadow that comes from the paper, so it really looks like it's being shaded by the paper. I also need some tabs on top, but I don't have to recreate those because I've already created a tab set, I can just copy it and put it on the top, so I'm just going to go to that group, swipe left, click "Duplicate". Then we need to make sure these tabs are the right orientation, so I want to flip horizontally and then click "Rotate" twice, that way the shadows and everything are coming from this direction and the top tab is on the right. You may want to do this differently, you may want to have totally different tabs on the top, that's really up to you, that might add a lot of visual interest, so maybe play around with both options and see what works best for you. Next I'm going to bring back my paper grid, that'll help me make this new tab group be the exact same distance from the edge as the other one was; so we've got, this one is two squares away from the edge, so I want the same thing to apply to this tab group. Now I can make that grid invisible, and I'm not going to need that many tabs, I only need seven tabs, so I can go to that tab group and start removing tabs until I get the correct amount.
8. Adding Text & Symbols: Next I want to add a little bit of text to these tabs, so it's really clear what they're for. I like to use the app called Over, and I'll show you how I put the text in. I created a font that I made specifically for this planner, and I'm going to share that font with you as a free download so you can feel free to use that for personal or commercial use for your planners. But you may also want to create your own font if this one just doesn't work for the style of your planner. I have a whole class on how to make fonts. So if you want to see how I made this font on my iPad, check out that class. Or you can just download mine and use that. I'm going back to the Class Downloads page. I'm going to click and hold the Sencillo font, open in a new tab, and if you have Dropbox, you may get some different pop-ups that happen here. I'm just going to click "Continue to website", and then I can click that little three dots section and click "Direct download". Or you could save it to your Dropbox however you like to save your files. I'm going to click "Direct download", and then I'm going to click "More". I don't want to open this in Izip. I want to copy to Over. So when you click "Copy to Over", it's going to go ahead and put this font in your Over app and Over's a free app, and it makes it really easy to put your text and procreate. So I'll just click "Copy to Over", and now you have this font. If you make your own font or you download one from the web, you can do this same process. Now I'll click "Create" and I'm going to click "Transparent" as my background because I just want to get the text. I don't want a solid background. Then I'll just choose a size. I try to always choose the size that has the highest number of pixels because I want high resolution. I'm just going to go with square here and then click the Check symbol to open it. Click the Text Symbol, and start typing my months of the year. Next I'll click the Check symbol to set that type and then click "Color", change that to black so it's really easy to see. Click "Size" and bump up the size. You really want to use this whole canvas, that way you're getting a high resolution image, and then I'll click the Check symbol and then the share symbol, save to photos. Now this is saving these black letters with the transparent background to my photos. I'm going to go back to procreate. Click, "Add", insert a photo, and insert that text. I want to move that text to the very top so I can see what I'm doing. Click the Move tool, and you want to be sure magnetics is selected whenever you're resizing texts so it doesn't get distorted, and I'm just going to get this over to my tabs. I always go by the largest word. So the word September doesn't fit there yet. We zoom in here so you can really see. You can see how September is getting cut off on that tab. I know I need to go a little bit smaller. If my largest word fits than all the others will. I know that's going to work. I'll move it back over here, and you can see sometimes you'll get a little blurriness if you do a lot of copying and resizing and procreate. But I've found a few, just duplicate the image and then merge those two together. It helps a lot, it makes it a lot more bold. Next thing I'm going to do is go to each one of these words and copy it onto a new layer. So every single word is on its own layer. I'll click the selection tool, make sure free hand is selected, select January, drag down three fingers, cut and paste. I'm cutting it off this layer, pasting it to a new layer. Now you can see January's on its own layer. I'm going to go back to my list and move on to February and just repeat the same process for every month of the year. Now every month of the year is on its own layer, and I'm going to go to each layer, click the Move tool and just throw that into place. It's not going to be perfect right now because I'm going to line it up with the grid later, but it's really hard to zoom in and zoom out every single time. What I do is just throw things like this into place as close as I can from this distance and then lay down and grid and fine tune everything. I think that makes your process a little bit quicker and a little less frustrating if you're trying to line up from this distance. It's just not going to work. That's pretty close, but I do want to fine tune it. I'm going to go to my tab group, which has that nice little grid that I made when I was making my tabs, and I'm just going to drag it here up to be with my text. Now I've got this nice tab group and I pulled the one from over here, so I'll just move it into place. I'm just going to shift it up to where I want the bottom of my text to be. I'm going to give it a little bit of space, but I do want it to be in the very center of the tab. Now I can zoom in. You can see they're up and down and up and down. I can go to each letter and put it perfectly on that line to make sure everything's really even. You want to be sure the magnetic tool is off when you do this, because if magnetics is on, it's going to be really hard to adjust these perfectly. So go ahead and turn that off, and then you can do your fine tuning. Now I can go ahead and make my grid invisible so I can just see my text, and I'm going to merge all my text layers together. Once I feel confident that that's all in place, I'm going to merge them all together, and after seeing how this G almost touches the paper, I'm going to click my move tool and shift everything up just a hair. That's the nice thing about working in layers and merging these all together. You can make these tiny adjustments as you work. I'm also going to change these to white. I'm going to Alpha lock, click one time, click fill and I've got white as my color, and if you find that's not bold enough for you, duplicate it a few times and see how bold you can get the text. I do like to go a little bit more bold because I want it to be really easy for people to see what's on these tabs. Next, I want to add some symbols on the top here. These are just going to be my special page buttons. I went ahead and created a bunch of these and made them as stamps. If you want to just use mine, you can do that. But you can also make your own symbols. You can draw them, you could trace something. It's really up to you here, but I'm just going to grab what I already have, and I'm going to work in black so it's really easy for you to see here. But obviously my color's white that I'm working with on my buttons. Normally I would be working in white. I'm going to create a new layer, click one time with my stamp, and then I'm just going to fill that stamp and click the Move tool, and then just put this in place. I'm going to make sure magnetic is set, and then I'll just put this basically in place just like I did the last one. This isn't going to be perfect for now. I'm just getting a general idea of how I want these laid out. I'll repeat this same process with all of the stamps that I made for this, and each one is on a separate layer. Now that I have all of these in place, you can see that I made them a little bit bigger than I need to be. Because of the rule, you can always make something smaller, but you can't make it bigger or it will create blurriness. So I make these a little bit bigger than I know they need to be, and now I can start playing around with resizing them and making them smaller. I'm just going to grab that grid that we used over here for our tabs, use the rotation tool to rotate it, and just play around with how I want these to be sized. I want to make this line here that shows me where the stamps can't go beyond, and then I'll just play with these one at a time, making little adjustments. If anything looks a little bit blurry, again, you can just duplicate it, and also if the lines are just too thin for that particular sticker, sometimes I'll just duplicate it a few times until it's really bold, and then zoom out and see if that's enough. If not, you can keep going. Once you're happy with how all of your symbols look, you can merge them all under one layer. Because I did mine in black, I need to go ahead and change my color. So I'm going to swipe two fingers and click fill. Then I can make my grid layer invisible.
9. Lined Paper: So now this is my master document. I want to really clean this up and I'm going to just go ahead and put everything related to tabs in the tab group. We've got my buttons, up here, we've got the text for the months, just dragging all of those into my tab group, so now I've got this really clean layer system that's going to be really easy, especially if you realize, 'Oh, I accidentally made my paper too dark, I don't like that anymore,' you can go back to your paper layer, make that adjustment, and then copy that to all of your other pieces. So working in this really organized system is going to make your life so much easier. It's totally worth it. Now that we have everything organized here, let's go back to our gallery and click on the title of that document that we just created and I'm going to call this my master dark. This is the master that I'll keep copying to create all my other pages. So I do like to title that just to stay organized. I'm going to select that one time and click "duplicate" and then I'll click on the title of that one, and this will be my lined paper. Let's go ahead and create the first section of the planner. We're going to start with this easy piece. The first thing I'll do is create a new layer and then I'm just going to choose any color, I'm going to go with a pink here, and I'm going to get the solid square button. This is going to allow me to just make a solid shape. I want to turn on my grid, that goes with my paper. So I'm going to turn that paper guide on, that we created earlier, and on this new layer I'm going to click my brush tool and make this brush pretty big and then put it into place. This is going to determine where my lines go on the page, so I'll adjust this to be a rectangle and then decide how far down the page I want these lines to go. I don't want them to go all the way to the bottom, so I'm going to create this little margin and I want them to be about one square away from the edge, so I'm going to make sure that's true on both sides. I don't want it to be all the way at the top, so I'll leave two lines open before I start my lined paper. You may do this totally differently. What I'm thinking about here is, I want people to be able to write titles and texts or put some stickers up here at the top, so I want to leave them a little bit of room for all of that but you may want to go all the way to the top if you are just using this as writing paper. Now I'm going to reduce the opacity of this layer, this is really just a guide layer, and I'll create a new layer. Get light gray as my color, and get the monoline as my brush. Now I need to decide on a brush size and I'm going to go with 14. That just depending on how thick you want your lines to be. Next, I'm going to go to each line in my grid and I'm starting past my square. The square is going to let me crop off all these uneven ends. I'm always going past my square when I start my line, and then I go past my square where my line ends. And you probably know if you hold and procreate it makes a straight line, and if you put down two fingers, it makes a perfectly horizontal straight line. I'm just going to continue the same process, making sure I'm always going past my square all the way down the page. Now that you've drawn all of your lines, you can go ahead and remove that grid, and before we do our selection, we need to make the opacity 100 percent for the speech square. That has to be 100 percent in order for this process to work. I'm going to make sure that this layer is Alpha locked, so you want to see that Alpha lock is on, and then you can click one time, click "Select", go to your lined paper layer, and click out here to remove that layer's panel, drag down three fingers and click "Cut & Paste". You're cutting it off of that layer and pasting it onto a new layer. Now when we make our solid layer invisible and we make the original blank lines layer invisible it shows, right where the square was, it's totally cut off, so you got this nice straight line up and down. Now that we've already cut that, we have that in our clipboard so we can drag down three fingers and paste. Now I can click the Magnetics tool and just shift this over. You can grab your grid or you can just eyeball it. I think with big pieces like this, it's kind of easy to just use your eyes to judge the distance from left to right. Now we've completed our first page of our planner.
10. Year View: The next section is the yearly view. I'll click select and click on my master doc, and then click duplicate. I'll click on that title and then call this my year view. I need a guide to help me place the 12 months of the year. I'm going to turn on my paper guide, and then on a new layer, I'm going to grab this pink as my color, just as a guide, and I'm going to get my square button again and have that one time and just to decide, what size I want these to be. I'd like to have two squares on the left, and then I need at least enough space to say the month of the year and then maybe a little bit more buffer. I'm going to leave four squares on the top and two squares on the left. Let's duplicate that square and move it over. Then I can see that I don't have quite enough space for both squares. I'll click on one, select the other, and then I can just play around with re-sizing these until I get the size I'm going for. I'll take just a minute to get these so that I have two columns, two columns and two columns all on each side. I'm happy with that layout. I'm going to duplicate this and move it down, and this is really just a sketch. I'm not going to use these for my final calendar. I'm just using this to get an idea of how I want my months to be spaced. I'll play around with this to get an even number of squares in-between each row, so I have enough space for my text and enough space for just a little bit of buffer around each one. You can also adjust your grid at this point, if you find that the grid isn't quite the right size for what you're working on, just go ahead and play around with the grid size. Sometimes just adjusting that a little bit can make it so much easier to size your squares. After playing around with this, I ended up with two squares on the left and right, two squares in the middle, and then three in between each row, two on the bottom and four on the top. That's just my particular spacing, that doesn't have to be how you do yours, but feel free to copy mine if that works for you. Now, that I have that general guide down, I'm just going to merge all of those squares together, and reduce the opacity. it's just a guide, it's not really part of my calendar. I'm just using it to keep an eye on where I am in the process. I'm going to get gray as my color, and I'm going to get the monoline as my rash. And I'm using the same size that I use for my blank writing paper, which is 14 percent. Next, I'm going to create my calendar. I have 1,2,3,4,5,6 rows, that's enough for every week of every month, and I have seven across. If you don't have that, just adjust your grid so that, that works perfectly for you. I'm going to use the same process that we used with the writing paper, but I'm just creating a rectangle this time. Now, that I have that general shape, I need to decide if I want to fill my calendar with a color or not. Right now, it just has that guide, but I know that I wanted to have a nice pink fill just to make the months stand out a little bit more. I'm going to click on this gray square layer. I'm going to click it one time and click reference. Now, that is my reference layer. The layer below it will reference that layer when I do a color drop. I'm just going to drag that color and then that fills that gray area. Now, I have two separate layers, one is gray and one is a peach fill. Now, I'm going go to a layer above my gray layer, go back to my monoline, make my peach layer invisible, and finish out this grid. Now, I can bring my peach layer back and I'm going to reduce the opacity of that peach layer. I'm going to remove my grid too, so I can really step back and decide what level of opacity I want for that grid. I'm going to stick with 30 percent for that. Once you feel really confident with that whole set, you can merge those together. And then just like we did before, start duplicating, but always duplicate the bottom. We're going to make 12 total, one for every month of the year. Now, I can bring back my peach layer and my guide layer and just take a moment to place all of these. If you need a little bit of an extra guide, you can move your peach layer over to the side and that'll make it a little bit easier to see where you need to land with each square. Now, I can make my original sketch peach layer invisible and I can make my grid invisible. Now, I just have this nice 12 month setup here. I'm going to add text to this using the exact same process that we did last time. I've typed the text and over. Just like we did on the tabs, I'm going to grab that text and separate it onto multiple layers before I do anything else. I'll click the selection tool, circle it, drag down three fingers, cut and paste, and continue that same process for every month. Now, I want to know if these words are the right width for each of my squares. I'm going to select all of these by just selecting one and then swiping right on all the others. I'll click the move tool and I'm looking for the longest word, which is usually September. I'm just going to re-size that until September looks good. Okay, I think that's a good size, so I'm going to stick with that. Now, I can go to each month and just throw it into place, doesn't have to be perfect because we'll do the alignment later. Now, I'm going to bring back my paper guide and see if I can use that to help me line up my text. I think that's going to work. What I'm going to do is put it in the very center of this box that I have here. I want this middle line to go straight across my word. If I click January, you'll see that I have these two dots, and that shows me the very center of that word. Then I can just line that up with this pink line and line these two dots up with the very center of my year. I'll continue that same process for every month. Now, I have all my texts in place, I can remove my paper grid and I can also merge all these months together, by just pinching them together. Like we did before, I'm just going to duplicate these one time so that they look a little more bold. Then I'm going to choose the color that I want to use for these, which is a light gray alpha lock and then fill the layer. I'm going to step back, make sure that looks good. Everything looks good to me, now I'm ready to move on to the next section.
11. Tracker Home Page: So I'll go back to my gallery. I will click select. Click on the Master Doc, duplicate it, and let's rename this Tracker Home. This is the homepage for my tracker. And I've noticed that the year view here is exactly what I need. So I'm going to take a look at this document that has the year view. And I'm going to merge all of my blocks together on the one layer. Click the move tool, drag down three fingers and click copy. So now I have all those squares copied to my clipboard. Go back to my gallery. Click on my tracker home, drag down three fingers, and click paste. So I need to just move those above my paper layer, and there they are. And I want to use this as my framework. So I'm going to make this a solid shape. So I'm going to choose a color, swipe right to alpha, click one time, and click fill layer. And because I had that opaque background, it's not totally filling in the squares. So what you can do is just duplicate and merge a few times to get a totally solid block. So now that I have a solid block, I can decide if I actually want this in this orientation or if I want to move it a little. I want to move it up, and I'm going to bring back my paper guide so I can have exactly three squares on the top and three squares on the bottom. Now I can remove my grid layer and decide how I want the months to show up on this page. First time when I reduce the opacity of this layer, I think it's nice if it is just kind of a decoration in the background and not really standing out. So I'm going to create a button and I want that to be above my peach squares layer. So I'll get a light gray and the solid circle button and then just click one time. And then I can resize that square, making sure magnetics is on and get it to fit nicely within that square. So I'm going to bring my paper guide back and come into here really close and see how this works with my grid. So I can see it's a little bit to the left because I've got these two guide marks here. So I'm just going to move it over a little and then make sure it's in the very center of that piece. And then I want to give it a little bit of decoration. So on a layer above, I'm going to select my gray circle. First, I'll put it in the alpha lock state and then click select. And then on that layer above, I'm going to get a pure white. Get the soft brush, and just give it a little bit of a highlight. Let's get a larger brush. I think two tabs is enough for me, but you can go much more dramatic or much less depending on your style. And so now that I have that nice button, I'm going to duplicate it 12 times and then use my grid to put all of these in place. Now I'm going to move my grid layer above all of these buttons to help me place my tags. And I'm going to use the exact same process for the text. So you already know this process. So I'll speed up my video while I complete this. So now that I have all of those placed, I'll make my paper invisible, my paper guide, merge all of my months together. Swipe left or swipe right, click one time and click Fill Layer and then duplicate that a few times just to make that text really bold. And at this point, if you feel like you maybe did a little bit too much white on your buttons, you can go to the Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and just tone those down a little bit. And that'll give you that nice contrast that you need to see the letters well. So I'm happy with this page. So let's go ahead and move on to our tracker.
12. Tracker Month Pages: I'll go back to the gallery, click select, select my master document and rename this tracker page. For this page, I definitely need a guide. I'm going to grab my paper guide. First I need to decide how much space my trackers going to take up on the page. I'll get peach as my color, and a square. Let's make that smaller. I'm going to decide how many squares away from the edge this is going to be. I need a lot of space for this one. I'm going to leave one square around the edge and three on the top. Actually, let's do four on the top to leave plenty of space for people to put their stickers on the top there. If your paper guide is not quite working with what you're doing on this page, you can always adjust it, a tiny bit, to make it fit your format a little better. Now I can make that rectangle semi-transparent and remove my paper guide. Now I need a new guide, because I need something that's going to show me 30 lines of the noun. I'm going to go back to my grid. I need a pretty small grid if I'm going to do 30. I'm just going to take a minute to find a grid size that works, and count down here to make sure I have 30, at least. That's 31. That tells me this is a good brush size. Remove that grid, and cover this whole area with that size grid. I need to be sure it's exactly 31 from the top to the bottom. I'm just going to count that down. Then I can erase everything that isn't within those 31 squares. Now I need to resize my grid, so that it goes all the way down to the bottom of this page. I'll click the magnetic move tool and shift that down. Then I'm just going to play around with this a little and make it fit my rectangle nicely. Then I can just erase anything extra that I don't need, and reduce the opacity of this grid. Now, on a new layer, I can start drawing my gray mono-line ink. I need to decide how many goals sections I want to have, for my planner I did three, and then I have one section for the date. You can decide how many sections you want for this. I'm just going to take a minute to count these off and then find a nice multiple of three. I have about 20 and that is not ideal. It would be better to have a multiple of three. What I'm going to do is go back to my grid, click the move tool, and remove magnetics and just bring this over to squares. Now I should have 18, which is a nice multiple of three. Now I have two squares for my numbers and six squares for each goal. I'm just going to go through and box this in, and then continue with the same process that we've done before, making lines all the way across this document for each goal. Now I can remove my grid and I'm just going to erase these little guide marks that I made, and. I'm also going to remove my pitch guide that I created. Now that I have this format, I'm sure you can guess what I'm going to do next. I'll duplicate that layer, click magnetic, and shift that over to the other page. Next, I need to add in a number for each day of the year, so I'll use our same number process that I used before. I've already typed these in over. Go ahead and speed up my video while it complete this. One trick you can do with the numbers, to make your life a little bit easier, is to create them in columns when you type them in over. That way when you do your copying and pasting, you can just circle whole column and put that in place and then just do little shifts. Sometimes if you do that is easier than if you just type the numbers out in rows. I'll bring my grid back to put these numbers in place. Rather than copying and pasting these each on two different layers. One easy option, that you can do when you have a ton of texts like this, is just get your free hand Selection Tool selected and then click the Move tool and put it in place. That way you don't actually have to do the copying and pasting thing every single time. It does save you quite a bit of steps when you just have huge chunk of text to place. As usual, I'm going to duplicate this text a couple of times, until it has the thickness that I want, then I'm going to get my Grey color, alpha luck that layer and fill it. I've got the text in Grey and my lines in Grey. Then I can just duplicate that text, click magnetic, and shift this over, to the other tracker page. Now I need to add the months of the year, but I need each page to be a different month. Rather than doing it all on one page like we did before, I'm going to have one page that's January and February on one layer. The next month will be on the next layer. The first step, is the sizing as always. Let's check September here. That looks good to me. Now, I'm going to separate these onto different layers. Before I place these, am going to find the month, that has a letter that drags down like the Y, it has that descender line, and I'm going to let that be my guide for where the letter should go. You can see, May, I need that Y to not touch anything. So I'll set that May down, then on a new layer, let's get pink with a mono-line brush and just create a guide to help us know where to put that text. Now May can rest perfectly on that line. You can make that line semi-transparent if it's in your way. Then for each month, I'll just throw it into place like we usually do, and then make little adjustments once I get everything into place. Now I can make all my months invisible. One at a time, go through and I'm just eyeballing it to get it even with the left and right sides of these lines. I'll take just a minute to do that. Now I can make these visible in the sets. There's January, February, merge those two together and alpha lock fill. Then I've got this January, February set on a single layer. Once I'm ready to save my documents, that will be something I'll have to do in separate layers. I'll continue this same process with each set from left to right. Now we have Tracker pages. It's all the same page with just slightly different texts. January, February, March, April, May, June. This will make it much easier when we start doing our saving process.
13. Month & Week Views: Let's move on to the month view. I'll go back to my gallery, select my master doc and duplicate it and then let's name this. I'll create a new layer for my grid, get pink as my color, and then grab the grid brush. I want to choose somewhat, large size for this, enough so that I have at least seven across and at least six down. It doesn't have to be perfectly that, you can make it bigger or smaller, but you want at least that. I've got here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 across, so I'll erase everything after that, and let's make that our top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 down. I'm using the monoline thick brush, this is a brush that comes with procreate. I just made a thick version, to make it easier to erase your large portions of grid. I'll get my move tool. I know I want to have four square across on this side, so that'll be Monday through Thursday. Then I want to have the other three days on the next page. The first thing I'm going to do is size the first page, so I'm just looking at this area right here. I'm going to bring my paper guide up and decide how many squares away from the edge I want each of these. I know I need space to same the days of the week on the top, but you don't really need space on the left and right. I'm just going to let that the open space here, one square and one square, and then three squares on the top. Then it looks like this is a little bit too close to the bottom. I'm going to click the Move Tool and bring this grid up so it's one square away from the bottom. Now, I need to do my three days of the week on this side. I'm going to get my selection tool, I'll drag all the way across that and click Copy and Paste. I'm copying that from one layer and pasting it onto another, and then I'll just shift it over so that it's one square away from the edge. Now, I can get my eraser and remove that portion from my first layer. Now I have four on one layer and three on the other layer, I've got these evenly spaced on the bottom of the screen, the left side and both of the sides. I'm just going to shift my paper guide just a little bit, because I've realized it's not perfectly in the center, so I'm just going to do a tiny little shift there and then I can select both of my grids and make a tiny little adjustment to make it all fit. If you make any size changes to one of these sides, you want to be selecting both of them and change both of them at the same time. That way all of your squares are the exact same size. I'm happy with that. I'm going to merge those together and reduce the opacity, create a new layer, get my monoline brush, and just go through and trace all of these lines. Now, I'm just going through and cleaning up any little edges where I went too far. Now that I have that first grid taken care of, I can duplicate it and move it over here. I only need three of these, so I'm just going to go through with my eraser and try to make a nice little curved edge here that looks really natural. Now, I'm going to add my days of the week using the same process that we did before. I've got these typed in over, I'm going to size Wednesday first, because that's the largest word, and then I'll separate these other two layers. I duplicated this text a few times to make it a little bit thicker. One last thing I'd like to add is a little label that goes behind the day of the week to make it a little more visible. I'm going to do that using the Vectornator app, but I need to know how big I need it to be. If you look at this grid, you can see that something that was two tall by, let's say four wide, would be a nice size for a label. That could be two inches by four inches. Let's go to Vectornator and create a rounded edge label, that's 2 by 4 inches. I'll type 2 by 4 in the document size. I'll get the shape tool, draw that shape and adjust my corner radius, I will go with 25, and then I'll save that as a PNG. It looks like it changed the pixels. I've noticed sometimes this program changes the pixel dimensions of your image. I'm just going to make sure this is 2 by 4 inches at 300 DPI. Two inches would be 600, 300 times 2, Four inches would be 1,200, that's 300 times 4, and then I'll click Save and save that image. Now, I can go back to my document, insert the photo. Insert this label, and let's rotate it and get it into place. I'm going to start with my largest word as usual. Then I'm going to alpha lock that word, make it peach and reduce the opacity. I try to stick with the same opacity if I do multiple opaque or multiple transparent elements in a planner, I try to always use the same transparency. You may just want to write down what you use the first time and just stick with that. I'm just going to duplicate these and put them in place. Now, we can remove our grid layer. Actually, let's use that for one more thing. I'm going to get the monoline brush with my gray, and I'm going to add some just note section here on the side. This is just a free space for whatever people want to use it for. I'm just going to go every two lines, and if this isn't the width that you want, you can just create a new grid and drop this right here to create a different width of line. I remove my grid, go back to my notes section and I can just kind of free form adjusts that, that doesn't have to be perfectly aligned with anything, because it sits on standalone image. Then the last thing I'm going to do is add the months of the year. Just like we did when we did the last tracker page, we're going to have the months of the year on separate pages. The only difference is with this new page, we'll have each month of the year on a separate layer. I'll go ahead and do that using the same process that we used before. Now, I have this month view and each month is on its own layer. When we go to save this document, those will all be available for saving separate pages. One last thing that you may want to add in is a little space for the users of these to write the months of the year. Here's one for example, and I just typed this and over. This is just dash and then a backslash and another dash. I'm just going to copy one of these, cut and paste, and then put that into place wherever you want that to be. This is one option, and then you can copy that to all the other days. Another option would be to just do like a little box to write the date. You could also do a little circle, like use this outline circle button and just have people write the date in that. Just play around with whatever works well for the theme of your planner, and let's go ahead and move onto looking at the week view. Now that you've seen how I make all the other pages, it won't be hard for you to guess how I created this page. This is a simple box like we created before with a cross bars using the grid, then I added some lines which I copied to all the other boxes and some text and a tab made in Vectornator with 30 percent opacity. This is really the same thing you've seen before, just with a slightly different format. I won't make this one on camera, let's go ahead and move on to the cover.
14. Cover Page: So for the cover, I want to remove this side of the paper. I'm going to find my paper layer and then merge all three papers together. I had those three layers of dimension. I'm just going to merge all those together. Next I'm going to get a rectangle. Just drop that in. Then I want to cover this right up to the very middle of these stitches. I'm going to zoom in and be sure I'm in the very center of these stitches. Then I'll click that layer. Click "Alpha-Log", click it again, click "Select". So now I'm selecting all that area. Now, I'm going to go to my paper layer, drag down three fingers and cut. If I remove my pink rectangle, that side of the paper is gone and it reveals this nice covered texture that we have hidden. I want to add some buttons to this page and I've already shown you the whole process for making these buttons. I'm just going to show you the documents so you can see exactly how I made these, but I won't make them on camera. We have several layers here. The first layer is this gray background. I used vector nader to create this square. Next, I added our shadow layer, which has the Gaussian blur of the same percent that I used before. I also moved the shadow down slightly so that it looks like the light's coming from this direction. You can do that or you can just have a straight on shadow. Next, I use these stamps that you've already seen in the set and then I added some text. I just created these buttons and then removed the background layer, which is the very bottom layer, click "Share", and then click "PNG". "Save Image". PNG is the only file type that's going to save this transparent background. So you want to be sure you use PNG. And then when we go to our cover, we can just use a grid to place all of these buttons down. I won't continue this process because I've already showed you how to use a grid to place objects, but you get the idea here. You can come up with some interesting buttons for your front page and then you'll have all of those lined up here.
15. Inserting Links: So now we have every single section of our planner created. Blank page, Cover page, Week View, Month View, Tracker page, Tracker home, Year View and Lined Paper. So we need to export these into Keynote, and keynote will allow us to put all of the links we need to make this planner function in good notes. The first thing I'm going to do is save everything that is a single page that doesn't change. Any of these pages, where we put in months on separate layers, I'm not going to touch those right now. I'm just going to select, I click Select, I'm going to select my master doc, my cover, my week view, not my month view, not my tracker page, yes to my tracker home, yes to my year view and yes to my lined paper. Now I'm going to click share and choose PNG as the file format, and then click save. So now I just need to work with these pages individually. So I'm going to open my tracker page and I have January and February text showing, so I can click Share, click PNG and save this. Now I need to reveal March and April and May, January and February invisible, and then save. I'm just going to repeat the same process for all of the sets of months. Now I can go back to my gallery and do the same thing with my months, although with this one I have to do one month at a time starting with January, and I do this in order because it's going to make it a lot easier when you put it into keynote, if you stick with going from January to December in order. So once you have all of those saved, you can go ahead and open keynote. So Keynote is a free app and it makes it really easy to put links into your planner. So first thing I'm going to do is open keynote, click create presentation, choose any color, doesn't matter. Next, we'll click this three dots on the top here, and then click documents setup right here. I need to change the size of these slides, so I'll click slide size, then click custom, and I want to input the exact dimensions of my planner, which is 2732 by 2048 pixels. So if you sized your planner in inches, you'll have to convert that to pixels, and you can check that and procreate, it'll tell you how many pixels that document is in the canvas information tab. So then I'll click Done and Done again. Now we have our presentation and we can go ahead and start creating our slides. What I like to do first is just create a bunch of blank slides, I think that makes it easier. So now I go to my first slide, click the plus symbol, click photo, go to all photos, and then find whatever is your first page, which for me is my cover. Then I'll repeat the same process, go to the second one, my second page is my year view. So I'll continue the same process for all of the pages that I saved. So I'll show you the order that I put this in, the first is the cover, then the year view, then I put January, then I put the week view because I'm going to have weeks duplicated after every single month, so it will be a month, and then six weeks, and then a month and six week. So that way, it's going to make it easier for me to copy it to every single month, if I just stick it in there after January. So then I have February, March, April, all the months of the year. Then I have a blank page, which is going to be my sticker book, but we're just going to leave it blank for now, and then put the stickers in good notes. Next is my tracker homepage. Next is my tracker pages in sets, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, so all of those. Then I have blank pages and I'm going to duplicate that, probably have 20 of those, and then my writing pages have 20 of those as well. But I'm not going to do any of that duplicating first because the very first thing I want to do is set all of my links, so that everything is linked before I start making copies. So when you're ready to start putting your links in, you can click the shape tool, and then you can click any shape, whatever shape works best for the button that you have. It'll drop a shape in the middle and you can just resize it to fit perfectly around your button. Then you can click the little paint symbol here, click on fill and swipe over and click no fill. You don't want this to have a color, you just want to be an empty shape. Then I'm going to click on it one time and click link, and then it's asking me, what do you want to link this to? I want to link it to a slide, what slide? My second slide, which is my year view, slide number two. So now I can click on this one time, click copy, click again anywhere on my canvas and click paste, and then just paste over and over until we get all of our buttons down. Now I can click on each one. Link. What do I want to link that to? My stickers page, which is slide 16. Next is my tracker, which is slide 17. Then we have the blank paper, which is slide 24. Then we have the lined paper which is slide 25. Then the last one goes to my website, so I'll click link, link to slide, and I'm going to change that slide to web page, and then you can just put in whatever web page you want that to link to. I actually have it linking to my stickers page, so it's a special link, but put in whatever you want that to link to. Then we're going to continue that same process on the top. So I'm just going to zoom in a little bit here, because it's a little easier to see if you zoom in. So I'll do the same process, create a shape, put it over your button, and keynote is a little odd sometimes you'll accidentally move your images, but you can just click that back button and it'll undo what you last did. So I'm just going to resize this so it fits perfectly within that tab, go back to our paintbrush symbol, click fill, no fill, and then same process, copy and pasting, and you'll notice that when you paste, it goes to the middle of the canvas no matter where you're working. So that's another odd thing about keynote. So you have to just zoom out and do all of your pasting from there, and then you can zoom in and work on your links. So I'm going to continue the same process for my horizontal and vertical tabs, linking to the corresponding tab, that I want that button to go to.
16. Exporting & Testing: So once you get all of your links set and you're sure that they're linking to the correct slide.You may want to take a minute to just check them.So click the play symbol and just click on each one. Then go back to the cover page and try it again and just make sure you're going to the correct page because once you start copying all these, you're making a lot of work for yourself if you have to redo at all. So I'm going to go ahead and start selecting these.So the trick to that is to put one finger down. And let's select the first one.And then you start selecting the other ones, but leave your finger down. So this fingers isn't moving.And the other one is just clicking all of the links. So anything that you've accidentally selected, you can just de-select by clicking it again.And then you can remove your finger and you'll see all of those are selected. And I've got this little menu. So I'm going to click copy.And now I can go to my next page, click one time and click paste. So all of those links are pasted onto this new page. And so I can continue that same process for every page of my planner. So once every page has that, then you can start duplicating your pages that are reoccurring. So for example, I'm going to put six of these after every month.And so I want to duplicate this slide six times. So I'll click it one time, click copy, click it again, click paste. And I'm going to do that four more times.So once you have six of those, you can select them and we're going to use the same selection process. Click the first one, and then click all the others, and then release. And then click and hold.And that's going to give you a menu.You can click copy. Then I'll click on February, click one time and click paste.So that's going to paste six weeks below February. And I'll continue that same process with every month of the year so that I always have six-week pages after every month page. I'm also going to do that same process with the blank pages because I want to have 20 blank pages and 20 writing pages. You can do that same amount or you could do more or less. Just one thing to keep in mind is that the user can insert more pages if they wanted to. So you don't have to put 50 blank pages because not everybody's going to use that.And people who really want more can always copy one page and insert it.So I tend to just do about 20 and that seems to be enough for most people.I'm also going to create links, that link from this page to the month view.So this button will link to January, and February button will link to the month of February. So I'll do the same process with those buttons. I'll also repeat the same process on this page, but this is my tracker page, so it links to a double page.So rather than doing two buttons, one for each month, I can just do one big button. And then that will be one big link that no matter where someone clicks on this section, they'll still get the link that goes to the January, February page. So I'll go ahead and continue with this planner so you don't have to watch me link every single thing. But let's assume I've done all of my links. The last thing you can do is check everything.So I'm just going to click that full screen button here, click play. And then you can really just click around in your planner and make sure everything links to the page you want it to.I've found that keynote isn't quite as responsive as good note. So you do have to hit kind of hard and then wait a second. But once you get into good notes, it should work normally. This is a great time there to just double-check everything.Makes sure all the images and everything looks great before you import into good notes.So the next thing I'll do is go ahead and put this in good notes.So I'll click the three dots here. Click export, and you'll choose PDF. Once that exports, you'll see the option, copy to good notes or whatever planner app you're using. And then you'll click create new document and choose a category or just choose uncategorised. And then you'll see your planner and you can start playing around with it, testing it out. Just makes sure that no pencil symbol is selected or none of your links will work. But this is a great time to just double-check everything because you don't want to get through this whole process and then realize you have to change something big if you do, it's not the end of the world, but it's better to just really take some time here.What I always do at this point is start writing in my planner. I'll actually go through and fill out a month and put some stickers on it.And I almost always find some kind of little mistake that I have to go back and fix. So this is the time to do that.
17. Pre-Cropped Stickers: The last thing we're going to do is create a sticker page. I'm going to click on my sticker page, which is the smiley face symbol and then I'm just going to start inserting my stickers. I'll show you how I make the stickers, they're so simple that it's not worth doing a demo. I'll show you how this document is set up because it's very simple process. So the first thing I do is create a circle, I just dropped in the circle using the solid circle button. The next thing I did was tap the air brush, the soft brush one time with white to get that nice little button feel and then I laid down an image and traced it, then I flipped the image so it didn't look exactly like the picture and I changed some of the curves and things like that to make it my own. Then I have that nice image and I can just change the color of that circle duplicate it a few times and do a few different colors. Now I have four different stickers out of one image. The next thing I do is save all of the stickers, you have to save those as a PNG, just like we did with the buttons for the cover of the planner. You'll remove the background, click share and click PNG. So this does have to be saved as a PNG or else it won't have the transparent background that you need for GoodNotes, double-check that you're doing that and so what I did was, I created a ton of different images using that same circle, $ sign, laptop sign, a cake sign. So you can see how I did it all on that same document with a bunch of different images and symbols. You can do it this way, but there are a ton of different ways to make stickers. I would go online and just find some stickers that you like and figure out why those speak to you. I tried to do some that had some variation, like some notepads and some text and some just plain symbols that could be versatile. Take your time, this could take a while, so maybe think about it for a few days, make a list of all the stickers you want to make and then just do that export PNG process for each one. So once you have all of your stickers, you can click the plus symbol, click Image, photos and then find your sticker that you want to add and put it in place. If you need a little help sizing this what I recommend is just creating a grid. I'm going to get pink as my color, get a grid and figure out how many stickers you have, so I had 64 stickers, which is 32 on each page, which is four by eight. So I'm going to create a grid here that's four by eight. There's my four by eight grid, I'm going to click Share PNG, save Image and then import this into GoodNotes using the same process and then I can just drag this until it fits nicely in that area, then drop each of my stickers into there. If you need to move something, click and hold, click edit and then I'm just going to get that into place and then start with my next sticker. I'll continue that same process with all of my stickers and one really good thing to know, let's say you realize the mistake in your planner and you've already made your sticker page and you don't want to have to redo all of this. You can just get your lasso tool at the top, circle all of those stickers, click and hold, copy, go back to your new planner, click and hold and paste and they're all you're stickers that you had already added to the planner. They're not lost if you make a mistake, you can always paste these or if you create a new planner and you want to use your old stickers, you can still use them. I'm going to just circle little corner of this grid with the lasso tool and then click delete to get that grid out of the way, now that we have our whole sticker page ready, and this is a blank planner that I could sell or give away, I'm ready to export it. I'm going to click the three dot symbol up here and click export, export all pages and then we have to choose a format. You want to be sure it's on GoodNotes document, that's going to preserve your links and you're stickers. Everything else set to normal and then click export and then you can choose a saving option, I usually use Dropbox, but you may use Google Drive or something else any of those will work and then once you save that, it'll be in the format that you see mine on my website. If you share it with people, you just want to be sure, just like I showed you in the beginning, you want to click on the file and click open and GoodNotes and then you'll see all of those stickers, they're pre-cropped. The user can come in and circle sticker, click and hold, copy, and then copy that onto a different page. You can see how this is a really awesome thing to sell or share online, maybe with your first planner, you just want to make one and get some feedback from people. You could share it in a Facebook group and ask people if they'll use it and tell you what they think and let that be your prototype. This planner that I showed you today, I've made it several times, this is not the first time I made this planner, each time it got better and better, so don't feel like your first planner is your last planner, It's really just so learning experience and you'll learn so much more every time you create a new one. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own digital planner on your iPad. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad, like how to create illustrated maps, how to paint watercolors and procreate, and how to create modern floral illustration. Check this out on my profile if you want to see more and if you want to get a notification every time I publish a new class, click follow on my profile. Also, I share a lot of free downloads on my blog, if you want to get more downloads like the ones you've got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see your finished planner or maybe just some pages from your planner as you're working on it. Please share with to make and you can do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you can tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letterers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work check out the group. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skill Share or you could reach out to me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
