Design a Digital Planner with Vectors in Affinity Designer

1. Design a Digital Planner with Vectors in Affinity Designer: Hi, everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer, and teacher. Today, I want to show you how to create a digital planner using vector shapes and Affinity Designer. I love using Affinity Designer for creating planners, because it's so easy to create precise shapes, space them evenly and add vector effects to the shapes. It's also super easy to add dates to the planner and keep the numbers properly aligned. You can choose to create either a dated or an undated planner as your class project. I'll show you options for both and we'll talk about the pros and cons of creating a dated versus an undated planner. When you watch this class, you'll get a workbook with a ton of planner section ideas and color palettes. I'll share with you my finished planner so you can play around with the lengths in customizable sections before you start designing your own. First, we'll look at how to create buttons and icons and cover ways to add effects like glow, glitter, shine, and shadows. We'll cover how to use the precise movement tools in Affinity Designer to create evenly spaced lines, boxes, and buttons. We'll look at how to create stickers and custom sections, so you can design a planner that's easily customizable for the user. In this class, we'll cover every step of the process from planning your layout to creating sticker pages and GoodNotes. Even if you've never worked with vector shapes or Affinity Designer before, you can jump right in and follow along with this process. You can use the planner you create in this class to offer as a free download, sell it on your website or a site like Etsy or just use it yourself. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the Stylus. I'll be using the Affinity Designer app, but you could use vector nader or any other vector app that you like using. Let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing I want to do, is show you how to get all of the downloads that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to the downloads page in the project section on the Skillshare website, not the app. Once you click on that link, you'll see that you need a password to get into the page. I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into the page, you'll see there's a few downloads listed below the image. The first one is the font that I'll be using in my planner. I created this font, and you can feel free to use it in your planner as well. You have two options for downloading that. You can open the file, and then save it to some cloud storage like Dropbox or Drive or iCloud however you save your files in the cloud. Then you can open Affinity, tap on the "Settings", tap on "Fonts", tap on the "Cloud" and then find that font in your cloud storage wherever you stored it. That will only download the font into Affinity. If you also want to download it to GoodNotes, then you would want to download it to your entire iPad. In that case, I like to use the program called iFont. So we'll tap one time, tap "Download", open in, and then choose iFont on the apps list. So iFont is a free app that makes it really easy to put new fonts on your iPad. I'm not going to click that because I've already downloaded this font. I'll open another font here as an example. So I tapped open in iFont for a different font, and it opens the iFont app, and then you'll see files down at the bottom of that app. If you tap on that, then you can find the font and there should be a little install button beside it. So I'll tap that. Tap "Allow" and now we have to give this font permission to be installed on the iPad. So we'll open the Settings app. Tap "General", tap "Profiles" and now the font shows up here at the top. Tap that, install, and then you have to enter your password. It'll say the profile is not signed and you tap "Install" and now this font will show up on the font list on any app on your iPad that uses iOS fonts. So you could use it in GoodNotes or Affinity, and all of the other apps like Keynote that use iOS font bases. Back to the downloads page. The third download on the list is My Planner. I haven't added the link to that yet and I'll do that as soon as I finished filming this class. So this will link to the blog posts where you can download My Planner as a free download, and also if you want to watch the video tour of My Planner just to see how that would look, you can do that as well. So once you download My Planner, you can choose to open it in GoodNotes, Notability, whatever app you like using for downloading planners. I'll show you a quick tour of this planner. You can watch the longer tour on that blog post if you want to see more details. So at the top we've got all of these clickable buttons, and each one takes you to a different section, and this bottom row takes you to customizable sections.For example, in my customizable section, this diamond, I'm calling my photography section, and then I have all of my notes for photography on those pages. So that's something you might want to add in your planner, or you can consider a customizable section if you'd like. My first button is a help button. This tells the user a little bit about how to use this planner, and we'll link to a video that explains how to use it. There's anything tricky in your plan, like mine has some customizable sections that you move around. You may consider making a short tutorial. It could even be a screen recording, with you talking or have some texts on the bottom. Another thing I have on this page is, what do all these buttons mean, so that a new user can open this and see exactly what all the buttons at the top mean. Then I also put the hex codes down at the bottom here so that the user can put these colors into GoodNotes, and use those as their pen colors. I show how to do that in the tutorial on the blog post, so I won't show that here as well. The next set of buttons here is the months of the year. If you click on each of these, it goes to that month and you can see that I chose to do a dated planner. We'll talk more about the difference between a dated and undated planner later in that class, but that's something you may want to start thinking about. If it's your first planner, you may want to just go with an undated planner because it's a little bit simpler, it's a lot less pages. Whereas if you've made a couple of planners, and you're ready for a challenge, start considering doing a dated planner for this one. It's a good challenge and I think it makes it a lot easier to sell if your goal is to sell the planner. Another thing I've done is before January, I included December 2019, and November 2019 because I'm going to list this planner available before the end of the year. So I want people to be able to use it immediately. That's something you may want to think about whenever you're listing this planner. If you're doing a dated planner or do you need to include any months that aren't within a year? Maybe a couple months before, a couple of months after the year, depending on when you release the planner. Another thing you'll notice here is that, my planner is vertical, so I typically use it with my iPad turned the other way. So that's something to consider, do you want to make a horizontal or a vertical planner? I've also included some blank sections here at the bottom of every page, and also at the bottom of each week page here, and the bottom of the year page. There's these little blank sections because I wanted to leave some customizable space for the user. For example, if you go to the sticker section here, you can go to weekly page, monthly page, yearly page inserts, and these fit within that page. I'll show you an example here. Weekly page inserts. I'm going to grab this list here, copy it and again, I show how to do all of this in the video tutorial, so if you're not familiar with GoodNotes, check that out. Paste and now I've got this list that already fits nicely in that space, so the user doesn't have to figure out how to resize it or crop it. We'll look at how to do that in this class today. Feel free to take some time here to play around with my planner and make some notes about what you like and what you don't like. Of course, your planner isn't going to be exactly like mine. You'll want to make some changes, you'll want to make it your own, maybe different colors, different fonts, so we'll cover all of that in the class, but this is a good time to just start thinking about, what is your personal style, and how do you want your planner to look? Let's go ahead and start planning out the layout, and colors for your planner. 3. Sketching the Planner Layout: I always like to start my planner with doing some sketches and notes. I'll look at tons of different planners and try to give an idea of which ones fit my personal style, and then make a big list with some simple sketches. Let's start that process now. I'm going to do this in Affinity Designer, but of course you could do this on paper. You can see I made a huge list with ideas for each of the parts of my planner, and then I just had that beside me as I worked. That's one way to prevent you from having to switch back and forth from screen to screen. If you want to have a paper version of this beside you, feel free to do that. I'm going to set up my sketch in affinity so we can get to know the app a little bit more. I'll tap the plus symbol on the top right corner here and tap "New Document". I'm not going to change the measurement here, I'm going to use points. You can measure this in any size you want, but it is important to think about the fact that good notes slows down if your file is too big. It isn't necessarily better to make a higher resolution file in good notes. What I'm going to do is stick with points, and then I'll set my file size to 1,600 by 2,000. That's going to be the sizes of my planner page. The reason I work at that size is because I downloaded one of the templates that comes with good notes to check the size, and that was the size of the image. I think that's a good size to work with, and of course, if you're doing it horizontally, you would go the other way. To get started with this, I just want to have some pages, so I'm going to click the "Rectangle" tool on the left and just drag a rectangle that's about the dimensions of my page. If you wanted the exact dimensions of your page, you can turn on the magnetics tool and then make it the exact size of your page. As you're dragging in put one finger down and that constrains the proportions. Now, this page is the exact ratio of the original page. Just like in procreate, if you make a mistake, you can tap two fingers to step back. I'm going to tap the "Move" tool over on the left here. One node about Affinity Designer, if you tap the question mark, all of the tool names pop up. If you have trouble seeing the tools on my screen or you can't find a tool, just tap the question mark and it'll show up. I've got the Move Tool selected, I'm just going to move this into place and then I know I need a lot of pages, so I'll just tap duplicate and then move this over because I have magnetics on, it's giving me those lines to help me keep things in place. Now, if I tap "Duplicate" again, it moves it that exact distance. Affinity Designer remembers what you just did, and if you repeat a step, it'll do it again. That's one really nice thing about this app is, it has some smart features. I'm going to drag to select all of those, and then use the magnetics tool to put that right in the center, tap the three-dot menu and tap "Duplicate", and then drag that down. You can imagine if I duplicate again, it repeats it again just like it did for the single dots. That's a pretty good start for my planner pages. I want to change the color of these, so I'll just drag to select all of them, tap on the "Color" dot, and for the interior, which is this big circle, the fill, I'm going to click, "No Color". That's the circle with the blue line through it. Then on the stroke, I'm going to tap this light gray here. The stroke is the border of a shape and the fill is the interior of a shape. If you want to make that a little bit thicker or thinner, you can tap the "Stroke Studio" here and just bump up the width. I just want that to be easy to see, it doesn't really matter. This is just my sketch page, so we can tap the "XML" down here to deselect. I'll sketch my pages here, I'm also going to start thinking about color down at the bottom here. I'll click on the "Rectangle" tool twice to get this little pop-out menu, and then I'll tap "Ellipse", so that'll let me get some circles. You can see the circle isn't perfect until I put my finger down and then it's a perfect circle. I know I'm going to do eight colors. If I tap the "Move" tool, put this into place, duplicate, and then duplicate again. You can see it went off the page. I can drag to select everything, re-size, but keep one finger down, and now that fits perfectly across the page. This is one great thing about Affinity Designer. You just make the shapes you want to make, and then you can figure out how to fit them on the page later. Because we're working with vectors, we're not going to lose any image quality, so this is a really great way to lay out your planner. Unlike raster images, where if you resize a lot like this, you'd be getting some pixelation. I'm ready to start sketching the sections of my planner, and I don't want to work with vectors just for sketching, I want to work with pixels right here. If you tap this symbol, this is the pixel studio, or actually they call it pixel persona. When you switch to that, you're working with pixels just like you would in procreate. We can choose a brush. I'll choose this brush over here, and then over here on the brush studio, I can choose a different brush type. I'll select the "Variable Felt Pen", and then I'm just going to choose this bright turquoise color, so it's really easy to see. Then I'll go to the "Layers" panel, click "Plus" and create a new pixel layer. Because I'm using a pixel brush, I need a pixel layer rather than a vector layer. You can see here this is about a medium size brush. Down here on the bottom, you can just drag, click on the width and just drag back and forth to change the brush size. I'll go to small brush here, and I'm just going to sketch out the various sections of my planner. The first section is the help page, and I know I want to have something here at the top, like need help. I want to have some of the common questions that people might have. How do you use this Planner? How to use the stickers? Then a little sticker here that says, watch the video. This button could also say, "See all these answers on my website", or some way to lead people to the answers, or you could just put all of the answer's on this page. You could have a little help section that gives all of the answers in written form. You can decide there whenever you want to do, if you want to have a help page. I'm also going to have a section that explains what all of my buttons are and a section with all of my hex codes. It's a lot easier for me to do this because I've already designed my planner. Don't worry so much if you don't know exactly what you want your planner to be like, sometimes you just need to get in there and start thinking about it visually. Maybe just sketch out some basic ideas here and don't worry so much about the nitty-gritty details. You might just do something simple like a year view, a month view, a week view, and then maybe just some little notes here, I want this to be blank here. Don't feel like you have to plan every single section of your planner right now, just whatever you know, put it down on the page. I know that I like to have custom sections that have different types of lists. I might have some spaced out list, and then I might have some lists with really close lines. I might also have some lists with bullet points or little circle areas that someone could check off. Then I want to have some sticker pages. Feel free to leave some of these blank. You may want to go back later, and as you build your year page and your month page, you might get some ideas for other sections of your planner, so don't feel like you have to totally fill out your sketch in the very beginning. I think the important thing here is to not let the sketching process stop you from moving forward. I think a lot of people abandon a project at the sketching phase because they just don't know where to go. Sometimes I start a planner with just an idea for the year page, like I want my year page to have squares and that's it, and you just start going. This is for someone who likes planning everything in advance. If this intimidates you, just jump in and start building the pages. Don't worry so much about every little part of your sketch being perfect, and leave yourself a little bit of room to add things later on, because as your building needs, you will inevitably get some great ideas. 4. Choosing a Planner Palette: One thing that I would recommend planning in advance is your colors. I'm going to tap the Move tool, and I'm going to tap on that first color here. There are a few ways to play around with color here. First, we need to go back here to the vector studio. Right now we're in the pixel studio so just tap to go back to the vector persona here and then in the color studio, it'll probably open naturally on this color wheel page for you. Here I'm just going to make the stroke invisible and the fill, let's just choose a color here. I like this bright red color. You can then go to your next color and choose the next color. That's one way to do it is just select on the color wheel, visually look at what you might want to use. Another thing you could do is find a color palette online that you like. I've also made a few color palettes for you that you can get on the workbook. To get the workbook, you first have to close out of this page, so I'm just going to go backwards here and open up the workbook page, hold down, download the class work book, open in a new tab, Download, Open in and then I'm going to choose more here and find affinity copy to designer. That's going to open this workbook for you that has one page of ideas for sections that you could put in your planner and also for different color palettes. You may like one of these palettes and you can feel free to use one or you may like just part of it. I'm just opening the Layers panel and making this visible or invisible. For example, let's go to this color palette here. Let's say you like this color palette and you want to use it but you don't really like this mustard. I double tap to open this group and then I tap again to open the shape. You can do it that way by just double tapping until that shape is selected or you can just go to the Layers panel and open up these groups until you find that shape. If you just want to change that one mustard color then you just open the color panel and start playing around there so you can get a totally different color if you'd like. Once you choose a color palette, if you want to use one of these, you can save it in your color swatches. I'll show you how to do that here. First, down to the bottom tab, the swatches button and then at the top here, Tab Add application palate. That's going to create a palette that shows up anytime you open affinity. Then you can just grab this color dropper and drop onto one of these colors and that makes it appear right here.I needed this to deselect the shapes so you don't change the color of that shape. I'll click the little X here to deselect that. Then I'm going to tap this blue color so that appears right here as the fill. I'll tap the menu again and tab Add Current fill to palette. Same thing, drag the color dropper tab to make that a fill, Add Current fill to palette. You can just repeat that same process until all of those colors are in your palate. There's all of the colors saved so now when I open up each of my planner pages, these colors will be there for me and if you tap that menu again, we can rename the palette. I'll call this planner two because I already named my other one planner. Then I'll tap Okay and so all you need to do when you open this color menu is tap swatches and then you might just have to scroll over a little bit to find your color palette. Let's go back to our sketch document and just fill each of these with the colors that we've chosen. I want to show you one trick here so that you don't have to remove the stroke every single time. If you just drag or select these and then click on the stroke and turn it off. Then click on a color. Now when you click on each of these, you don't have to turn the stroke off because you already turned it off on all of them. This is one thing to keep in mind as you're doing this, you can really make your life a lot easier by selecting things and doing batch work like that. This is all I have for now for my sketch. I know what colors I want to use and I know the basic layout. If you want to go ahead and upload this as a skill share project to get some feedback or just share what you've done so far, you can tap the Documents menu, tap Export choose PNG as the file type, tap Share and tap Save Image. That saves it to your camera roll and then you can just go to Skill Share, go to the Project Section on the Website, not the App and upload this as the beginning of your project. 5. Vector Shapes and Effects: Next we're going to create the buttons for your planner. I like to create really simple buttons, but I'm also going to show you a lot of options for more complex buttons so just go with whatever works for your personal style here. Just like we did to start the sketch document, I'll start by tapping the "Plus Symbol", tapping "New Document", and then entering the width as 1,600 and height as 2,000, and again I'm leaving the measurement as points. Points are how we measure vectors, whereas pixels are how we measure raster images. Again, you can work at any size with this planner, but I have found that images much larger than this tend to slow down good notes a little bit. Then I'll tap "Okay" to open that document. I want to start with the background. I don't like pure white backgrounds. I really like having a little bit of cream. That's just a personal preference. Of course you don't have to do this. Over here on the left, I'll tap the "Rectangle Tool" and just drag this to fit my page. Then I've gone ahead and chosen a cream color in my swatches. You just want to make sure there's no stroke selected in the color studio. Right now there's a black stroke which makes a black border all the way around my page. I just need to turn that off by clicking the "White Circle" with the blue line through it. The first thing I want to design is my buttons. Those are going to be at the top of my page. Of course, you don't have to do them at the top. They could be on the side rather than circles. You could do a tab shape. You can really build any shape at all with vectors. We'll look here a little bit at how you can create some various vector shapes. First of you tap the "Rectangle Tool" over here. You'll see there are a lot of shapes that come with this program. You can combine them into a single shape. You really just need to find the parts that you need. Of course, if you can't find the parts that you need, you can use the Pen Tool to click and drag. You can see I'm just dragging after I click to create a shape. If you need a really strange shape, you may have to use the Pen Tool to either do straight lines like this or perhaps curves. We'll look more at how to create shapes. For my buttons I'm just going to use circles. I'm going to grab the circle vector tool, drag to create a circle, hold down one finger to constrain that proportion, and then let's get the move tool and put that into the corner. That doesn't have to be in the perfect place. You're probably going to move it around later, so just get it pretty close, duplicate, move it over a little bit. Then just like we did before, duplicate again. You have to think here about how many buttons you need. That's when your sketch comes in handy. I know I need 10 buttons, so I'm going to do five and five. Now I can just select all of those, duplicate and move them down. That looks good. Now I can start playing around with some color. I'll just click on each one and select a color. I'm just going to use my dark colors for these buttons and then I'll use the lighter colors for stickers and some transparent things. You can choose here what you want to do. Do you want to use a lot of different colors here. Maybe you just want to have gray buttons. Play around with whatever works for your style here. Next, I'm just going to drag to select all of those and putting down one finger to constrain the proportions, I'm going to set the size of these buttons. I think that's a pretty good size. Again, you can change it later, so just get it as close as you can. The next thing I'm going to do is take one of these circles, duplicate it, and put it on the other side. You'll remember on my planner that I had the months of the year so I'm just going to repeat the same process. I feel like those should not be the same size as these buttons. I'm just going to drag to select those and make them a little bit smaller. I want a little bit of contrast between those two types of buttons. But of course you could do it a totally different way, whatever works for your style here. I'd like how those buttons look. But of course you may want to have a little bit more visual interest to your buttons like some shadows or some other shapes. Let's create a button that's a different shape here. I'm going to grab this call-out rectangle. That could be a button shape or perhaps a triangle. Let's say you want an arrow. We can put these two together or maybe it's like a house shape. I'll tap the "Move tool", Select that and then get that into the shape I want. Now I want this to be one vector, I want it to be combined. Up here on the top, I'll tap "Add", and now that's one shape, it's not two separate shapes anymore. You can see that you could really build any shape just with what's here and the Pen Tool. You may also want to apply some effects to these shapes. I'm going to get this circle, for example, and just fill it with any color. Then over here on the right, I'm going to click the "FX Symbol" then it'll pop out with all of these different options for changing how this looks. For example, we could do an outer shadow , so I've turned it on and then tapped on it. Over here on radius, I'm going to click and drag. You can see it starts creating a shadow. We can change the color of the shadow to something different. Maybe you want the shadow of the button to be the same color as the button, you can change the intensity of it. If you want it to be more dark, you can offset it so it looks like the light's coming from this side. All you have to do is tap on one of these and drag it around to see what it does. That's just the outer shadow. There all these other options that you can play around with. Here's emboss. It makes it look like a thick sticker or a thick button. You can do outline, you can do an inner shadow and change the color. All of these you can play around with the options down here. Just remember you have to both turn it on and then tap the name to be able to see this menu. Another thing you may want to do is add some kind of texture or a different look to the buttons. Here on styles, you'll see all of these different, some of these are a little bit crazy, but you may find something you like. This would be an interesting button. It looks like a real button that has real effect. There are a lot of things that come with affinity that you can certainly integrate into your planner and just play around with how you want this to look. For me personally, I like the simple look of these and I'm not going to add a shadow or anything, but certainly play around with that and go with whatever works for your style here. One last effect that you may want to add is a gradient. Over here on the left, there's a gradient tool. Actually it's called the fill tool. If you just select that tool and then click and drag, it creates a gradient. You can actually change the color so if I tap on this side of this tool and then select a color, you can have a multi-colored thing, or you could change it to white so it fades. You could move this part of it, move that part of it. Then you also have some options down here to change how this looks. Play around with these. Go with whatever works for your style here, of course. What I'm going to stick with is just this simple colored circles. 6. Creating Button Icons: The next thing I want to do is add my symbols onto the stickers. The first one I'll do is the Help Page, which is right here. I'm going to get the Text tool. I just tapped the Text tool and then tap anywhere to start typing. If you double-click on it, you can highlight it and start playing around with the font. You can double-click or you can just swipe. You can see if I just swipe from wherever the cursor is, it's easier if you get closer, swipe from where the cursor is and it'll highlight that text and then I can just choose a font here and then choose a size, of course. You can use that Text tool to change the size, or you can just use the arrows here with the move tool. I tend to do that because it's a little easier than trying to choose a number. I'll put that in the middle and then I'm going to make my icons the same color as my paper. I'll set that color and then move on to my next icon. My next icon will be my lined paper. I'm just going to make a paper shape here and have no fill and a stroke that is cream and maybe a little bit thicker. I'm tapping the Stroke Studio and bumping up that width. You can do it by scrolling like this, or you can tap on the number and just bump up the number a little bit. Maybe I'll do 1.5. You can see here sometimes it's a little difficult to adjust that to the perfect width, so you can also adjust it by entering a number. I'll tap the Move tool and put this in place. Then I want to have just some lined paper across here. I'm going to duplicate this shape, and I'll just move it over here so you can see what I'm doing. I want to be able to delete some of these points so that I can just have a line. The first thing I need to do is tap the Three dot Menu and tap "Convert" to Curves. What that does is this, turns it into an editable shape. If I tap the Node tool here right below the Move tool, I can tap on one of those nodes down on the menu here I can delete it, tap another node, delete it. Now I have a perfect line, that's just like I want it to be. Just make it a little bit smaller and then I can just duplicate it, do one line, and of course, duplicate again. Oops, I messed that up. Let's try that again. It looks like I turned off magnetics, so I'm not getting that magnetic snapping. If you have trouble with that, just double-check Magnetics. There, I'm getting that green line that helps me get it in the center of this other line. Another thing you may want to change is the rounded edges of the shapes. What I'll do is open my Layers panel, click on "One", and then swipe on all the others. I'm just getting all of these shapes here and the square and I'll go over here to the Stroke Studio. We've already looked at how the Stroke Studio lets you change the width. But if you click "Advanced" here, there are a lot of other things you can change, for example, the Cap. If you see this very end here, we can go from rounded to straight. On the corners, if you look at joined here in the middle, we can change it to a flat edge, sharp edge, rounded edge, we can have it on the inside of the line, the outside of the line. Then here's a really important feature here, Scale with Object. What's nice about that is, if you turn it on, it will keep the lines the same ratio to the shape. If you make the shape really small, the lines get really small, if you make the shape really big your lines get really big. If you turn that off, the lines will stay the same color no matter what size you make this. If you make it really small, it's totally unreadable. You may want to have that on or off depending on what part of your project you're working on. I'm going to go with rounded, I like the rounded feel, it goes with my circle buttons. Play around with those in the Stroke Studio just to see what's going to work for your style. I've noticed these got a little bit off, so I'm just going to adjust these to get them into place. Now, I want to have a blank piece of paper on this button. I'm just going to grab that rectangle, duplicate it, and move it over, and then I'm done with that. That was an easy one. I'll go back to my Rectangle Tool, now I want a Star, putting down one finger to constrain the proportions and then get the Move tool and just put that into place. Now I've got a nice little set of buttons here. I have one last piece to add in, so I'm just going duplicate that rectangle. This is going to be my yearly calendar button. I want it to kind of look like a calendar. I'm going to duplicate that shape that I just created and then I'm gonna drag, this right up here, duplicate it again and drag another one so we can do it that way and just eyeball it, or you may want to do this, so it's mathematically perfect. That just depends on your style and how you like to work. I want to show you that option in case you want to work with perfect ratios here. With that rectangle selected, I'm going to tap the Transform Studio. I'm taking a look at the width and height of this shape. I want it to be really easy to divide this, so I'm going set it to one hundred by one hundred. I'll work with it down here, so it's a little bit easier to see. I'm just choosing any color really doesn't matter. We're going to keep this symbol and do five by five lines. I'll just duplicate this shape and then on the height, I'm going to change the height to 20. I'll duplicate it again and change the height to 40. Again, change the height to 60, again change the height to 80. Now I have perfect lines at 20 pixel intervals. Now all I have to do is duplicate those that I just created, and I'm just swiping on each of those in the layers panel, tapping duplicate, back to the Transform Studio, rotate that one time. That just needs to line up with the edge of the square, so I am just using Magnetics to help me do that and there I have a perfect little grid. If you need one more space here, because well actually we need two, because there's seven days of the week, we could just duplicate this piece that's 20 pixels wide, duplicate"it again, and then make our big rectangle fit there. You can see if you work with multiples of a number, you can easily get an exact measurement with these shapes, or you can just eyeball it. It's totally up to you here. Because I don't need this to be a perfect calendar, I'm just going to use this shape. I'm going change it back to my cream. Looks like I didn't select one, so let's go back and select that one. Then I'm putting down one finger when I resize so that, that has the perfect ratio. That is my calendar symbol. You can imagine here just watching me create these few buttons, there really isn't any shape that you can't create with the existing vectors and the Pen tool. 7. Grouping and Staying Organized: You can see that things are getting a little bit chaotic in the layers panel. I'm going to do a little bit of clean up here. The first thing I'll do is this big cream circle, that's my background. Somehow I have two of those. I'm going to go to that layer, tap the three dot Menu and tap Lock. I never want that background to shift around. I just want to make sure that's locked. I'm going to tap the Move tool and select all of these Month buttons. Up here at the top, I'll tap Group. Now those are in a nice group all by themselves. Same thing on the side, select all of those and group. You can see I really cleaned up my layers panel really quickly by doing that and then there's this extra little circle. That just must be a duplicate. I'll delete that. As I'm working on these final pages, I constantly clean up my Layers panel because if things get out of control, then it's really hard to add new elements to your planner. Just take your time here and make sure that things are set up nicely. You may also want to have a group within a group. For example, if I select that rectangle and then all of the lines that go with that rectangle, I can group that. Now I have a group within a group. That's something I do a lot as well because I don't like things to just be floating on the Layers panel and I don't know what they are. I like everything to be in order. It also makes it much easier to edit things later on. Like I can see this is thicker than this, I'm going to go to my stroke studio with all of those groups selected and just bump this up a little bit. I think that looks a little bit better. Those are just things you can play around with as you're creating these buttons. Staying organized with the Layers panel, creating new shapes, playing around with shape options. The next thing I want to do is add my custom sections and I'm just going to use buttons that come with Affinity Designer. I'm going to do a heart, triangle, the call out symbol. You may find that things get out of order on your Layers panel and then you can just reorganize them, for example, this peach circle was way up here and I just clicked and drag it down here with the others. Now I've got all my icons on the top and all of my circles below it and I can collapse that group and they function as one unit. Over here on the left, I want to add some words into this group. I'm opening up the group first and then getting on that very top layer, tapping the Text tool, tapping wherever I want to type. I'm just going to abbreviate these months of the year. I'm double tapping to select all of that. I'm happy with how that looks. I'm going to make this easy by doing some batch work. I always do batch work with my digital planning. I'm just duplicating January and it'll be way easier to change these than it would be to type each one individually. I'll show you what I mean here. Now I can just zoom in, double-tap on that, tap February, tap the Move tool and put that in place. I don't have to recreate that text box every single time. This is a good time to start thinking about the font. Is this the font that you want to use in your planner? Maybe you want to play around with a lot of different fonts. Think about what the style of the planner is, and then go through and try a lot of different options and zoom out with your buttons here. Creating this button's page gives you a good opportunity to really think about the style of your planner. I have a playful text that's really simple, handwritten, minimalist style. Maybe that works for yours and maybe it doesn't. You just have to play around with each of those options and stay open to changing it. This doesn't have to be your final buttons set. Because let's say for example, you changed your mind about your buttons at some point you want to change your tags or you want to change one of these. Because we've put these in groups, we can just take one group, select the next one, Tap Copy, go into a new page. Let's say you're working on your newly page and tap Paste, and then we've pasted those buttons in there. Don't feel like you have to finalize everything right now. Just start working through it and playing around with options and really stay open to new ideas as you create these. Now that we've created all of our buttons, the last thing I usually do at this point is just go through and check everything. Make sure these are all lined up nicely. Make sure you've got your colors right. Your letters are all even and spelled correctly and of course everything is organized in your Layers [inaudible]. We're going to be duplicating this document to make our other pages. It is important that this page is organized and everything is in place. Of course, if you realize a mistake later, you can still adjust it by just copying it like we did earlier and pasting it into all the documents. But it is a lot of work. To prevent yourself from doing a lot of extra work, it's good to take a moment here and just make sure everything looks good. Once you're happy with how these buttons look, we can consider this our blank page. I'll use this throughout the planner for the blank page sections and the customizable sections. I'll tap the Back button to go back and then tap Rename and I'll just call this blank page. Okay, now I can just tap that Menu again and tap Duplicate and let's rename this lined page. 8. Lined Pages and Custom Sections: I always like to create some lined paper in every planner I make. I think a lot of people use planners to take notes and they don't know exactly what kind of note sections they'll need until they need it. I try to leave some blank spaces so that the user can customize the page. Let's start by adding some lines to our blank page. I'll tap on my lined page and I just want to create some even lines down the page. I'll get my rectangle tool, draw a rectangle. I want to have a gray stroke, which is this dark gray. Actually, I think I'll go with a light gray and no fill. Then I just want to check the width of that line, so make sure that's the width that you want. Of course, we can adjust it later, but we want to get close. Tap the Move tool and I want to get that green line so that I know this is right in the center of my paper. If you're not getting that line, make sure magnetic is on. Like we did in the last section, we're going to tap the three dot menu, convert to curves, tap the Node tool, and then delete. Convert to curves just makes this an object that we can edit. It isn't literally curves, it's shapes that can be turned into curves. Delete that point too, and now I just have a nice perfect straight line. I might go to my stroke studio and bump up that stroke a tiny bit. I'm going go with 1.2 and again, we can type that in if we need to. You can tap the X to remove the selection so you can really see the width of that line. If you're happy with how that looks, grab the Move tool select it, duplicate, and you can move it with your stylus or you can go to the transform studio down here. Under this position section where it says Y, Y is vertical axis horizontal. I'm just going to tap and drag and you can see that it's moving different distances here. I'm happy with that distance for lined paper. Of course, you can go with any distance here. Then I can just repeat that process of tapping duplicate until I get to the bottom of my page. Now, if you click somewhere else on the canvas while you're doing this, then you won't just be able to tap duplicate over and over. It only duplicates the very last action. Make sure you don't click over here or de-select this object, while you're doing this duplication process. If you accidentally do, it's no big deal. You just have to start over with the very first line. I think I'm actually going to delete the bottom line and the top line to give a little bit of a margin there. I think that looks a little bit more professional. I also don't like how close it is to the edge. I think I made that a little bit too wide. I've got the Move tool, click and drag. Now I'm selecting all of those so I can just bump that in a little bit and then use the Move tool with magnetic selected to get that green line and let's put that right there, tap X and now our lined paper page is done. Let's go back to the menu and I'm going to duplicate the blank page again, rename, and this is going to be my custom section header. You notice in my planner on my custom sections there is first a folder cover and that's where the user can write the section titles. For me it was photography. It could be health tracking, it could be budget tracking, whatever you want it to be. I'll get the rectangle tool here, drag across. Let's choose a color from our palette and I'm making the first one here, which is the pink. I'm going to have no stroke and pink or peach fill. I want this in the middle of the page, so I'm looking for the red line horizontally and the green line vertically. Once that's in place, I can put some label in the center here, and I want that to be rounded. Under vector tools, let's get the callout rectangle, and I want it to be pretty big. I'll drag it across here, and I want it to be the same color of the paper, so it's like you can see the paper but of course, I don't want this little thing that's jetting out. I'm going to, as you can guess, menu, convert to curves, node tool, tap on that node, delete it, and I don't really need these other two nodes either. Tap the Move tool and again, red horizontal, green vertical. Then I'd like to have a line right across here that is a space for the user to write whatever this section is for them. I'm just going to go back to my blank page. Tap on that first one, three dot menu, copy, back and go back to my custom page, three dot menu and paste. You can start using elements that you've created in other sections and that will really reduce your work. It also makes the planner look more cohesive. If every single section of your planners totally different, it doesn't have that cohesive feel, so feel free to use elements in different parts. I like this label page, but I feel like it needs a little more visual interest. I'm going to duplicate that line, move it up here and stretch it, and let's change it to a cream, and we're going to go with a cream stroke and no fill. I want to change this to a dotted line rather than a solid line. If I open my stroke studio, you'll see a little dotted line option here, and you can play around with all of these points here. We've got the width, which is up and down this way. We've got the dash width, we've got the gap. How far apart they are from each other? You can take a moment and just play around with how big you want these, how far apart you want them. For dash, I'm going to put zero because I want it to be a circle, not a dash. For gap, I want them to be even, so I'm going to play around here until I get an even dot. One other trick you can do here is just make your line a little bit bigger. You can see I'm just stretching the line, and that's changing where that second set of dot lies. I'm just going until that's right in the middle and then I'm happy with that dot, s o I'll just tap the Move tool and bump that up to the top, duplicate it. If sometimes you duplicate something and then it just disappears, that's because the program's remembering our last movement, so just step back and redo it. It sometimes just gets confused about what it thinks you want to do. If something just disappears off the page just step back a few steps and try it again. I'm happy with that page. I'm going to go back and I can duplicate this five times because I have five custom sections and then I'll just open each custom section and change it to the corresponding color. The next one is that blue color. I realize my last custom section is also peach just like my first one, so I don't really need that last one. I'm just going to tap the three dot menu and tap close. Are you sure you want to close the document? Yes. 9. Building a Monthly Page: Next, let's create the month format for our planner. Of course I'm doing a vertical version, but you could do a horizontal version, and space this totally differently. For example, my month days will be squares, but yours could be vertical rectangles, horizontal rectangles, or whatever shape you want them to be. I'll tab "the Three.menu", and tap "Duplicate" on my blank page. Let's rename that month page, and tap "Okay". I'm going to open that up and start building my shapes. I'm going to get the rectangle and just start with about the size that I think one day is going to be, getting that gray color as my square color. I remember on the last one, I did the stroke as 1.2, so I think I'm going to stick with that. I want to make this really easy for me to move each box the exact amount I want it down the page. I'm going to open the Transform Studio, and set this square to a really simple size. Let's go with 200 by 200 pixels. If your square was close to 600 by 600, you'd enter 600 by 600. Just don't let it be like 271.6. That's really hard to deal with, whereas 200 by 200 is going to make your math a lot easier. We've got this in place. I'm going to duplicate it and then on the position on the x-axis, and I've got the Transform Studio open here, I'm going to tap that number. I'm not going to touch that number. I'm just going to tap plus 200. I'm moving the square over the exact width of the other square, then I'll tap "Okay", and just like we normally do, we'll tap "Duplicate" until we get seven. That looks great. We've got seven days of the week. We're going to drag to select all of those. Duplicate. Now we're on the y-axis, which is horizontal. I'll tap "Plus 200". That moves down. Now we need six of these. The reason we do six is because some months of the year will actually run onto this week and this week. If the first is here, the 31st may be here. We need six to work with every month of the year. This is a good time to start thinking about whether you want to do it dated or an undated planner. If you're going to do a dated planner, we're going to customize every single month of the year, whereas if you do an undated planner, you can just leave it as the solid block, and change the month up at the top here. Doing a daily planner is obviously a lot more work, but there are some pros and cons of each one. If you do an undated planner, it is evergreen, so that means it can be used anytime in the future. It can be used for years. It doesn't matter what time of year someone finds your planner, they'll always be able to use it. It's also reusable, so someone might be more likely to spend some money on something that they know they can reuse every year. The undated planners are also a lot easier to design, so it's going to save you a lot of time. Dated planners, on the other hand, are a lot better for the users. People might be more likely to purchase something that all of the work is already done for them. Otherwise, they are going to have to write every single day of the year and on the monthly and the weekly page and that's a pain. You can decide here how far you want to go with this, how much work do you want to put into it, so as you're building your monthly page, it's a really good time to make that decision. For this class, I'll be doing an undated planner, but I'm going to show you how to add dates later in the class. That's an optional section that you can watch later on if you'd like. We need to decide how we want to display the months and what we could do is select that top row, duplicate it, and move it up like this. Then you could put your months of the year right here. That's one option. I'm just going to select and delete that, or we can just type it along the top, so that's what I'm going to do. I'll just get my text tool, tab right here, swipe to highlight, and let's choose a color. I'm going to go with that same gray that I'm using here. Just like we did when we built these buttons up here, I'm just going to duplicate Monday seven times, and then it's really easy to just come in here and fix those. I really believe in batch work. I don't try to complete a process. Every single time I do it, I try to complete one part of the process on all of the days. For example, I'm typing all of the days first. Then I'm going to grab the Move Tool, and just get us in the place, make sure it's in the middle of that square. This doesn't have to be perfect. The thing about letters is that it's easier to space them optically than it is to try to fit them into a perfect little box. I tend to just adjust words and letters by eye. But you can see how this batch work saves a little bit of time, because you're not having to switch from the text tool to the move tool back and forth. You're just doing all your text tool then all your move tool, and that saves a little bit of time. Another thing to think about here is, do you want to start your week on a Monday or a Sunday? Some calendars start on a Sunday. That's the more traditional way to do it. But a lot of calendars now are starting on Monday because a lot of people think of that as the beginning of the week, and Sunday as the end of the week. You have to decide here was best for you, or if you're selling it, what do you think is best for your users? I tend to start on Monday, because for me that's the beginning of a new week. Now we need to decide how we're going to encapsulate the day. If you're doing an undated planner, it's nice to at least give the user some way to know where to write the date. We have a lot of options here. We could do line, dash line. We could do a circle, or some other shape. You can decide here how you want to express this date. Actually, instead of doing it that way, I want it to really be right on this square. Let's just select the square here, duplicate it, keep the finger down to get that perfect square. Then this is a case where you definitely want to use the stroke option, scale with object off. What's happening here is it's making my lines skinnier as it makes the object smaller. Right now, I don't want that. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, so it's important to know when to turn that off. Let's delete that, duplicate this square, and now that scale with object is off, it doesn't change the size of that line as I make it smaller. We could do it that way, or we could make it this way, so we have a little more space to write. If it was December 31st, you need a little bit more space in there. It's important to think about the biggest months when you're doing this. It's important to think about the months that will take up the most amount of space, because you want to be sure there's room for those. January 1st is just one dash one, but the longer months will take more space. We have to keep in mind the biggest spaces we need. Also, I like to zoom out of this, make sure that looks right, make sure everything looks normal there. Another thing you may decide to do, rather than having it enclosed in a box like this, is convert to curves, get the node tool, delete those points, and we could have a line, and then a line, and then grab the text tool, and let's just do a slash here, so then we have line slash line. That's another option for the date. Play around here with what works for your personal style, and what you think works for the style of your planner. Then once you get that into place, you can go ahead and duplicate that to all the other spots. I'm going to use the x-axis movement in the transform studio like we did before, and we're going to go ahead and group these, because they're getting a little out of control with all of these lines and slashes. It's okay to group things whenever it starts to get a little confusing on your layers panel. You'll remember for my planner, I want to delete this little blank space down here for custom sections, so we'll be using that later. I am just going to select everything, and just bump it up a little bit. I felt like it was a little bow on the page. I really want to leave a lot of room for that custom section. You can always just swipe over everything to make a big movement or change. As usual, I'm going to go through and group things that belong together, like all of this big piece here, I think that deserves its own group. Then the words are on their own layer. However you like to organize these, there's no right way to do this. I'm just going to duplicate Thursday and move it up here. I'm going to put my month here. Again, I'm using the Magnetics Tool to get that green line, and put it right in the center. So I'm happy with how this turned out, but obviously you can keep playing around with this. There are so many different ways you could organize this page. Play around with different options for your date. Maybe you want to put some bullet points here, so people can say there's three things that I need to do on that day. Take your time, play around with whatever works for your planner style. Then we'll move on to the next section. 10. Building a Yearly Page: So to build a yearly page, I'm just going to copy the monthly page, so I'll just duplicate that and then rename it. I'm going to delete these date slots because I don't need those, so I'm just swiping on those layers, tapping delete, I'm also going to delete the days of the week because I don't need those and I don't need the month either. So I've got this nice little group that's going to help me build my little yearly sections, and I'm just going to resize it here and then we can go to the stroke studio and just play around with the width. I think it helps to step back when you play around with the width because it's hard to tell really close up what you actually need. So, you may want to add some little section on top for the month, or you may just want to put the month on the top like we did in the other section. I try to keep my planners cohesive, so if I do something on one, I'm going to do it the same way on the other. So lets duplicate that shape, move this over a little, duplicate, so we can go four by three or three by four. I think I'm going to go four by three. So swipe and then resize that a little bit and you can stretch these a little, these don't have to be perfect or you can put your finger down if you want to constrain the proportions and then get that green line, the product right in the middle, duplicate that, and there's my 12 months of the year. I feel like I didn't leave enough space though, so I'm just going to play around with the spacing a little bit. I like using this transform tool to move stuff around because I think it's easier to see you when you don't have your hand on the screen, you can't really see what you're doing or as if your hand is over here, you can get a much better view of how things look. So I'm just selecting parts and then scooting them around a little to get things in place, and then I can add my months of the year just like we did for the other sections. Sometimes I'll turn off the magnetics tool if I feel like it's just making it harder to get things in place, so everything doesn't have to be perfectly aligned. Especially when it comes to letters, they really need some optical adjustment for spacing, so feel free to just play around here a little bit with spacing and I'm going to show you one way that you can kind of check your work if you're having any trouble with spacing. Let's just grab a line from our blank lined page document, copy it, paste it, and let's make it a bright color so it's really easy to see. Get the move tool and put it right at the bottom of January and then I can just go through and make sure every month sits right on our line. Now we can just go to the Layers panel and make those line layers invisible, and now I have some nicely spaced months. Again, I'm leaving that blank section down here at the bottom. 11. Building a Stickers Page: Next let's create some stickers. I'll be creating some really simple shapes stickers, but you could get really complex with this. You could have words on your stickers, shapes, symbols, whatever you want to use here, you can layer things on top of your shapes. We'll look at a few different options for creating stickers and then look at how to put them into the document and GoodNotes. Again, I'll duplicate my blank page, open it up, and then start playing around with some sticker ideas. I'm going to get the rectangle. Let's make this a perfect square. I'm going to go with the peach for the first one. I'd like to have one sticky note for each of my colors. I'll resize this sticky note. I think I could fit about four across here, duplicate. Use the transform tool to scoot it over, and then duplicate again. Now that I've got four of these, I can use the magnetic tool to get that rightness center. Then I can just click on each one and change the color. One thing you may want to think about as you build these stickers is making some transparent stickers. I'll show you what I mean here in my planner. If I go to my stickers page and I grab, for example, this turquoise sticker, and I copy it, and let's just paste it over here. You can see that it's actually a transparent sicker. So I could put this over text or I could go to, for example June, and put this on a day and then it wouldn't cover up the actual number. You may want to have some transparent stickers. What we would do in that case is just reduce the transparency of this shape. To do that, we go to the layers panel, click the three dot menu, and then reduce the opacity. So let's go down to 40 percent. The only problem with that is it makes the color really dull. I might go back to my color wheel and bump up that color a little bit. Now we have a transparent version of this color, and you may want to add that to your color palette because you don't know if you'll need that again. I'll go ahead and click add current fill to palette. That will be my transparent version of this teal. I'll repeat the same process with these other pieces. I'm always going to 40 percent for these because I want the transparency to be the same on all of my transparent stickers. Again, with each one, I'm just kind of bumping up the color a little bit. Because I reduce that opacity, I'll lose a lot of the vibrancy of the colors. So I'm just choosing a more vibrant color and then adding it to my palette. I'm going to repeat the same process with some rectangles. I like these rectangles but I also want to add some rectangles that have points. I'm just going to swipe to select one of these. Three dot menu and duplicate. Then I'm going to go over here, just shifted over a little, and I want to add a triangle point to this. There are a few ways we can do that. The easiest way I think is to just add a shape to it. So I'll tap the triangle tool, make a triangle, tap the transform tool and just get this triangle so it will fit nicely on the bottom of the shape. Then I'm going to set it to the same opacity and color as this original shape. You can leave it like that. You could just group these. That would be fine, or you can swipe over them like this. Tap the three dot menu and tap Add. You can see that little line that connected them has disappeared because this is now one vector shape. Now if I duplicate this and move it up, that same shape repeats. I want to increase the opacity of all of these solid ones. I'm just selecting all of those, tapping the three dot menu and going to a 100 percent. That's just going to make it much faster for me to add in my colors. I feel like these aren't leaving me enough room. I'm going to select all of them and just move them down a little bit. So you can see as I build these sticker pages, I don't really know exactly how it's going to look until I am doing it. Don't feel like you need to know every single sticker when you start your sticker page. You're probably going to be figuring stuff out as you do it, and as you look at your inspiration online or in a bookstore or wherever you are. We can also reuse the shapes. Let's say we duplicate this shape here and go to the Transform Studio and just play around here with the shape. This is like a little flag shape you could do. For this one, for example, you might want it to fit nicely on your monthly page so we can tap the three dot menu and tap Copy. Then go to your monthly page and tap Paste. Let's make that fit nicely on a monthly section. However, you want it to fit here. Copy it, deleted off this page, back to my stickers page, delete that original and paste. Now we know that, that sticker fits perfectly on a month page. I like doing that because it makes it easier for the user to use your planner. They're going to be able to just pop it straight into that month page, and that's going to make for a much better user experience, especially if you're selling on a site like Etsy. You may be relying on reviews. It's important to make it as easy as possible for your users to use your planner. You can see we get these really nice alignment tools when I'm trying to line these up. This magnetic tool can be really helpful for getting things in order. That's one sticker page and you can see it didn't take me very long to make this. You can make a few sticker pages and you could use some of those effects that we looked at earlier. We can select a few of these. Go to effects, let's do an outer shadow. Tap on that shadow option. Bump up the radius. You could have your stickers have a little bit of shadow. Let's make this a little bit more intense, or maybe some intense shadow. Play around with this, what will fit your personal style. Personally, I like doing this really simple planners that are really minimalist, so this is the style I tend to use. 12. More Sticker Ideas: I want to show you a few more sections that I created for stickers, just so you can start getting some ideas for your stickers. My first sticker page is the one we just created. The next one is the yearly inserts page. I set this to fit my yearly page just like I just showed you with that pointed sticker. This fits perfectly under the yearly page and then these fit perfectly in this section. I'm just using those boxes to measure how much space can I fit into these little sections. Another thing I've included is some words. You may want to come up with a list of words that may work well on a list like this. For example, users may want to use this for their New Year's resolutions, or goals, or intentions, or five-year plan. I think giving them some ideas of how to use, it can help them use it more because, just looking at these boxes, you may just have no idea what to do with them, but if you have some ideas here, that could spark someone's mind and think, "I'd like to list out my accomplishments or some milestones of this year." Here's my monthly page. Is really similar. I wanted to note here that with this box here, I just did a rectangle box and then duplicated this text and put it here. When you're doing text, just remember to keep each text on a different layer. You wouldn't want to type this like a paragraph, you would type "Notes", duplicate it, type "Schedule", duplicate it. Each of these need to be on a different layer because of the way that we have to do stickers. We have each of these on a different layer. This is the cream color just sitting on top of a rectangular box. The reason I did this is because, if the user wants to use a darker color like this, you can see that the cream looks really nice whereas the dark color looks terrible. You really can't see it. I only figured that out by using the planner. Use your planner, test it out. Once we get into the building stage, you'll see that you can really play around with your planner and figure out what's wrong with it, what's right with it, and make some adjustments. You can see with this sticker section, I just did some simple lines with different widths, different types of bullet points, circles, squares, some smaller ones. This is for people to insert onto the weekly page. I just tried to think of a lot of different ways that they might want to list out items. Then I made some colored boxes that they can put behind these. If they wanted to list something and then put a colored box behind it, they can use either the transparent or the solid boxes. I also made a mini version of each calendar page so that they could insert these onto the weekly page. They can just copy this sticker and insert it onto the weekly page. Then also just some ideas for lists that you may make using this section. There's also just custom page inserts. These can be put in any section of the planner, any of the blank pages and also, I put some goal trackers that are separate from these. So if they don't want to track by month, they can just use that framework to track in some other way. I also did a daily tracker. Just brainstorm here, figure out what's going to work best for the type of planner you want to create. Maybe play around with building some different sections like this and just see what works well for your planner. 13. Creating a Dated Planner: In this section, I want to show you how to add dates to your planner. Of course, this is optional and it may be a little bit too much if it's your first planner. So feel free to skip this video if you do not want to add dates to your planner. So now you've learned all of the skills you would need to build any section of your planner. So you can take some time to build out all of those various sections, and then decide if you want to add dates or not. So this section is optional. This is only for someone who wants to add dates to a planner or just wants to know how it's done to try to decide whether or not it's for you. So I'm just going to go through my process. I'm not actually going to date a whole planner because that would take a very long time, but I'm just going to show you the process that I like to use to date a planner. So the first thing I'll do is go to the month page and just duplicate it. So I'll rename that, Dated, just so I know which document I'm working with here. So if I was going to create Dated months, the first thing I would probably do is remove all of these little line slash lines because that's really only for someone to write that in. So I'm just tapping on each layer, swiping, and then I'll tap "Delete". So I'm just going to duplicate the word Tuesday and move it down here, and let's say this is January 1st. I don't really know if it's on a Tuesday, but let's just use this as an example. So I have January 1st, I'm going to put that in place exactly where I want it to be, and then I want all of my other months to be in that exact same place. So first, we'll decide, is that the text size you want before we do all the duplicating. Is that where you want it to be placed? So just making some decisions here about where you want your dates and how big you want them to be. Next, I'm going to duplicate this big set of squares because I need some guide layer to keep my numbers in place. So I'll just duplicate that layer. Go to the color studio, and choose just a bright color that's really easy to see and easy to differentiate from the actual calendar. I'm just going to put that in place. Now, whenever I put these numbers in, I can turn off magnetics for this, I'm going to line up the blue dots with the red guide. So if it's easier for you to see, you can make the guide a little more transparent. So I'll tap on the guide layer, tap the three dot menu, and then reduce the transparency a little bit. I'm happy with how this looks. I'm ready to go ahead and duplicate these numbers. So just like we did before, I'm not going to start writing dates yet. I'm just going to duplicate and get all of these in place, and I'm actually going to add a number to every single slot on the calendar because some months will start right here, and some months will end right here. So I'm just going to go ahead and add all of those in. Selecting all of them, duplicate, and then putting them on every single line. So now I have a space for every single month of the year. It's really important obviously to stay organized with this. One thing that I like to do is either print out or have this digitally somewhere where it's convenient for you to see and number the weeks of the year. So the week of January 1st is week one, and then of course, you continue. For example, Week 5 ends on the 31st. So the first week of February is also Week 5. So I'm just keeping these numbered so that I can stay organized with my yearly, monthly, and weekly pages. Let's say you've gone ahead and you've filled in January, and you realize that you don't need this first one, you can just tap on it and delete it. If January 1st is on a Tuesday, then you can delete that. You could also delete anything down here that you don't need. You can also even delete some of these boxes. Let's say you don't need these last two days of the year, you can delete those. So you can see how that plays out in my planner if you download it. So let's say February, for example, only has five weeks and we don't need that last square. So I deleted a whole row and I deleted this. I do like to leave the squares up here. I just think it looks a little better to have that filled out on the top. Another thing I have chosen to do with the weekly sections is add a link to the week. So you can see here the week of the 10th. If I click on that, it takes me to the 10th. So of course that's a lot more work. It's a lot more linking to do, but it makes for a great planner. So If you want to do that, go ahead and add in your colored sections here, and that way, you'll be able to link that week to the week on the calendar. So what I would do after setting up this document is just duplicate it, and then I would go ahead and rename that January. Then I would add in all the dates for January. Then I would go back to my original that's call Dated, duplicate it, rename it, and call it February. So I've got a different document for every single month of the year. So we're going to have 12 of those and going one by one and adding in the dates using a calendar. Then we have to do the same thing with the weekly pages. So of course, that again takes a little bit of time. We'd have to make the template just like we did for the month page. Remove line slash line, and put in a date and create our guide layer. Then we have to do 52 of those because there's 52 weeks in a year. So you can see this is a little bit of extra work, but it really makes for a really pleasurable planner. It's just so easy to use when it's already dated. So if I scroll down here, you can see here's all my dated monthly pages, and here's all my dated weekly pages. So it takes a little bit of time to organize all this, but I think it's really worth it if you feel up to it. The last section that I like to date is the yearly section. So for that, I would just do one month and then duplicate those numbers and move them over to the next month, fill those out. So you can reuse the work that you've already done. Just be really careful to triple check your dates. That's one reason I really like to use this numbering system because it allows me to say, okay, does Week 1 on the monthly page match up with Week 1 on the weekly page? Just triple checking all of these numbers and maybe even asking someone else to check it for you. Sometimes there's errors that you won't see yourself, but then someone else will look at it and they'll see it immediately. So consider asking someone else for help if they don't mind. So now that we've talked about how to create a dated planner, lets go ahead and start pulling our planner pages together. 14. Adding Links: Next, we'll take a look at how to add links to your planner. I want to make one note here about adding links. It's really important to triple check your lengths before you copy them to all your other pages. So take time here to really be sure your links are correct before you apply them to your whole planner. Now that we've created all of the sections of our planner, let's go ahead and pull these together and add some links. So to do that, I like to use the app called Keynote. Keynote makes it really easy to pull all the pages together and add in links. I'll tap the plus symbol to create a new presentation. You can choose any of these. It doesn't matter which one. Then on the right side over here, there's a Documents Menu. I'll tap that three dot menu, tap "Documents setup". Down here on slide size, I'll choose Custom and set that to the exact size of our planner pages, which is 1600 by 2000 points. If you did yours horizontally, then it would be 2000 by 1600. I'll tap "Done" and tap "Done" up here. Then I can just tap on that first slide over here, tap "Copy", tap again and tap "Paste". I need to do that for as many slides as I have. So I'm going to go ahead and add in a bunch of pages. I'm not worried about how many because I can always make more. I'll tap on the first slide, tap "+", tap Photo, and then I'm going to find all my planner pages. I went ahead and put these in an album to make this easy to find, so you may want to do that in your Photos app. My first page is my Help page. That may not be your first page, so just use whatever is your first page here, obviously. I've got my first page here. I'm just going to tap on the second slide and then add in my next page, and that's going to be the Yearly page. My planner's dated, but obviously yours doesn't have to be dated, so it may not look like this. I'm just going to continue this same process, adding in one of each type. These don't have to be in the perfect order. You can always reorder these later. So don't worry so much about things being perfect right now. For example, I am not worried if my sticker section should be before my Custom section because I can always grab this slide and just move it down here. It's really easy to adjust these things. You need one of these monthly pages for each month of the year. Here's January, but you'll also need February, March, April, so you can go ahead and paste those in. For your weekly page, you only need one of these right now because we're going to copy all the links before, we start duplicating this page. This is for undated planners. If you're doing a dated planner, you have to go ahead and insert all 52 weeks. So just keep that in mind. If you're doing a dated planner, go ahead and put all your weeks in. Undated planner, you only need one right now and then we'll just duplicate it over and over. The last page I need here is my blank page. I'll just add that in. Now I'm going to go to my first page and start adding in links. Links are really easy. You just tap the plus symbol, tap the shape symbol, choose a shape that's the shape of your sticker. It doesn't have to be the perfect shape, it just needs to be close. Put it into place. One thing I want to note here, if you're having trouble using your Apple pencil with this app, tap the "Documents menu" , tap "Apple Pencil", and turn on Select and Scroll. Otherwise, it'll just draw. I turned that on so that I can actually tap with my Apple Pencil in this app. Back to my shape, I'm going to select the little paintbrush symbol here, and under Fill, I'm going to tap "No fill". Then just resize that, so it's right around that circle. Then I can tap that circle one time and tap "Link". I want that to link to my Custom page which is on slide 9. So I'm going to say link to slide 9. I'm going to continue this same process by clicking on the link, copy, click down here, paste. Then I can just put this into place, tap on it, link, and this is my pink custom section. So that's slide 8. I'm going to repeat the same process with every single link. As you know, I like to do batch work. I'm going to go ahead and paste all of these links in, and then I'll select the slides after that. Once you get all of your links on the right side taken care of, of course, we're going to do the same thing with the months of the year. I'm not going to show you that on camera because it's so self-explanatory. January links to the January slide, February links to the February slide, and on and on. Once you complete all of the links or all of the buttons that you've created for your entire planner, it's time to start selecting them. I've noticed that you cannot do this with your Apple pencil, so forget about the Apple pencil for now. I'm going to put down one finger on the image, and then I'm going to start selecting the other images. It's a little bit tricky. It sometimes takes a few tries, but I'm just trying to make sure every single link is selected. But I don't want this page selected. You'll see how there's little blue dots here? I'm going to tap on the page to get rid of those. So now, only these are selected and I'm keeping my finger down this whole time. Once I release my finger, I'll get the Copy Menu, tap "Copy", and of course, I would do this with these links over here as well at the same time. Because I don't have those in, I haven't done it, but for yours, you'll be doing both sides at the same time. Now I can go to the next page, tap once and tap "Paste", and then paste it right in place. I'm just continuing this same process on all of my pages. But again, I only need to do one of each page type. So if I've got 20 blank pages in my planner, I only need to do this process with one of them and then I can just duplicate that one over and over. Each page type needs its own link treatment. For example, now I've got all of these links on this page, I can tap this page, tap "Copy". And now I can go to my custom sections and tap "Paste", "Paste", "Paste". Now I've got five pages after my Mustard section here, and they all have links. It's a good idea to test your links as you go. You don't want to get too deep into this without doing any testing. I'm going to click the "Play" button. Again, this doesn't work well with the Apple pencil, so I'm just going to use my finger and just test this. Does this button go to your Yearly page? Does this button go to the right custom section? I'm happy with how the links look. I'll just tap. I'll swipe in to remove that. You may have even more links. Depending on your planner, you may have done a lot more links. One thing I like to do when I do a dated planner is I create these little sections on the side that are clickable. So I turn those into links and each of those link to a week of the planner. If you want to get complex, you can start doing that as well. Now I want to take you into my document that I've already finished and put all the links in. Just so you can get an idea of how this should look in the end. I've got all of my months of the year linked. I've got all of my buttons linked. I've got each of these pages, because I did a dated planner, each of these weeks is linked. I chose to put five blank pages after each custom page so you can do that. When it comes to this sticker pages, I've saved the sticker pages without the stickers on them. You'll remember that I had some text boxes here and some cream text over this box? So I'm saving everything but the text. We've got the title of the page, we've got this box. Of course, you don't have to get this complicated. You can just have a blank page and put all your stickers on it. But I wanted to go a little further with this planner and have a title at the top, a section for each sticker, and then on some of these, I am encouraging the user to swipe to the next page. So colors on the next page or there's more on this page. You can feel free to add something like that in if you want to get a little more complex. For those of you who are doing a dated planner, you can see here I've got every week of the year, and I've triple checked these dates and triple checked the dates on these months and made sure that each of these weeks correctly links to the correct week. Once you've put all of your links in, of course it's a good idea to test. So I'll tap the play button and tap on the various sections. I find that Keynote wants you to press really hard. So I do tend to press down pretty hard when I do links in this app. I think these all look good. I've tested these before, but I do recommend testing every single link if you can. Let's go ahead and start putting our sticker pages together. 15. Creating Sticker Pages: To get started with the stickers we first need to export this planner. Again, for my sticker pages, I've just put one header page that links to each sticker page. For example, this page will link to my shapes stickers, this page will link to my yearly stickers and on and on. This page is obviously optional, you can just have one page of stickers or two pages of stickers. You don't have to have these titles, you don't have to have these boxes, it could just be a blank page. However you want to do this just make sure you're leaving some room for your stickers. Then on the top right corner here I'm going to tap the three dot menu and tap Export. Then I'll choose PDF as the file type and that will take a little bit of time to export so this is a good time to go get a cup of coffee or do something else while you wait for it to export. When it finishes exporting you should get this pop-up menu. You can swipe over on the menu and tap more, and then choose your planner app. I use GoodNotes. I think it's the best planner app, but of course you could use Notability or if you have some other app that you like to use. I'm going to click copy to GoodNotes. It's going to ask you where you want to put this. I'm going to tap change location and then tap Documents, Import as a New Document. That way it's not being smashed into the middle of some other document. This is another good chance to just play around with all your links and double-check everything, but I'm going to go ahead and go straight to my stickers page, to my shapes page. Now I'm going to insert my stickers one at a time, but I need to know how big to put each sticker on the page. I want it to be spaced nicely like it was an affinity. What I'm going to do is go to Affinity, get my sticker page. Here's my sticker page that has all my stickers and buttons and everything. I'm going to tap the Menu on the top and tap Export, Share, Save Image, I'm just saving this file and then tap "Cancel". Now I'll go back to my gallery here, tap plus, Import from Photos and choose that file that we just saved and now I have that all on one player. I can tap the three dot menu and reduce the opacity, so I'm just going to have a semi-transparent version of this as a guide. With that layer selected, I'm going to tap Export, and under the area I'm going to tap Selection Without Background and that's going to save it as a PNG. Make sure PNG is selected, selection without background, share and save image. The nice thing about this, if I open my photos menu, I've got this nice semi-transparent version of that page. If I go to GoodNotes, zoom out, scroll up gently here, and move the photos up already here, I can just drag and drop this onto the page. I don't really need this anymore so I'm going to move that out of the way. Then I'll just resize this to perfectly fit this page. That looks good. Now I need to export my stickers individually. I'll go back to Affinity, go to my stickers page, tap on the first sticker, file, export, selection without background and PNG and then save image. I'm going to continue this same process, always selection without background and save for every single sticker. I'm not going to do this on camera because it would be very boring for you. I've already done this and I went ahead and put it in an album. I do recommend putting these in an album because it makes it so much easier to find everything. Here are all my stickers. Back in GoodNotes. I've got my transparent guide. Oops, I accidentally resized that so I'm going to grab the Lasso tool, resize and fix that. Now I'm ready to put the stickers on my page so I'll swipe up, move the photos app over here. I'm in my stickers album here, I want to be sure I'm in my stickers album. Looking at this zoomed out view and then I'm just going to go one at a time and drop these onto the canvas. I'd like to do this in batches, I'm going to do all the square ones first. It keeps the canvas a little bit easier to look at when you don't have so many pieces on the canvas. I'll get rid of my photos app for now and then I'm just going to start putting these into place. I usually just do some rough sizing first, just get it close and then I'll zoom in and do some more careful sizing. You can see I just click on the sticker and it selects it, and then use a little tool on the right to resize it. I've got them pretty close to being in place. Now I can zoom in and get them spot on. GoodNotes resizes from the center so if you put something in the center and then pull out, that's the easiest way to resize in GoodNotes. I'm happy with how those look. I would just continue this same process with every single sticker. Again, I won't do that on camera because that would be too boring for you. But it's the same process, drag-and-drop and then resize. When you're all done with that, of course you want to remove your guide layer. We can just tap up here where the guide layer is and tap that little x to get rid of it and then we have our nice sticker section. I've finished doing this on another document. You can see there's all my shapes stickers. I did the exact same process, saving every single piece of text separately, every single box separately, and on and on. You can imagine every single sticker I put in separately. This is one piece, this is one piece, each of these are individual pieces, so you can paste those onto the week. Each of these words are individual pieces and these boxes. Of course, you don't have to do this many sections, but if you'd like to know that that options available to you if you just put in the time. 16. Fixing Mistakes and Exporting: The last thing I want to do is talk a little bit about testing your planner and fixing mistakes without having to redo the entire planner. I've never made a planner that's perfect the first time. It always has to be checked and fixed, so go through your planner, check everything, use it like a real person would use it, try writing on the pages, fill out your schedule, and you'll see as you do that, that it becomes clear that some things need to be fixed. What I like to do is, number 1, never think that you have to redo the whole planner if there is an issue. For example, let's say I realize that this day of the week is wrong. Let's say I did that date wrong. It says, "12/26 12/26." that's not going to work. What I would do, instead of deleting this slide, you'd never want to delete a slide once you created, it's better to replace it. What I would do is go into Designer, find that page wherever it is in your documents, fix the issue and then re-export this file, Save Image, back to Keynote, click Plus, Photo and insert the photo. The reason we're doing that instead of deleting this slide is because, this slide is connected to other things in your planner. If I delete this, that messes up the month where it links to this page. Fix things by pasting over rather than deleting a slide. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can move things around in Keynote. I can move this slide up here, and that's not going to affect my links. The links follow the slide wherever it goes. Don't worry if you don't put things into place perfectly, you can always shift them around later. Another thing to note is that if you realize you made a mistake and you have to re-export from Keynote, you don't have to redo your sticker pages, you can just paste them into your new document. I'll show you an example. Let's say I fix that date that we just talked about, and I inserted that new page, and I re-exported and brought this into GoodNotes, so then I've got the sticker pages that are blank. All I have to do is go to the sticker page, if you've already created it in good nodes, and you can just circle all of the stickers with the lasso tool, tap one time, tap Copy. Then you've got your stickers the right size in place and you don't have to redo that. That's an important lesson to learn because it's very likely that after you get your planner and GoodNotes, and insert all your stickers, that you will find a mistake. That's okay, it's really easy to fix those. My last tip is to share your planner with other people. There are so many places online to share your planner. You could sell it, you could list it as a free download. You could give it away. You could post it as a free download on the Skillshare, Projects page. Just share it with others and ask them to give you some feedback. Your first planner is not going to be your best planner ever, but each planner you make will be a little bit better than the last. The last thing I want to show you is how to export your file from GoodNotes with all of the stickers in it. There's a little Share button at the top of GoodNotes. Once you tap that, you can tap Export All, then you're going to get some options. You'll see number 1, PDF, which has flattened. That means all of your stickers will no longer be movable. We don't want to use that option. The next option is image, that would also flatten everything and so you're nice individually crops stickers would disappear. We're going to use the option GoodNotes. That means it's only going to work in the GoodNotes app, so if you wanted to offer this for notability users too, you'd have to do this same sticker process in Notability. What I usually do is offer the GoodNotes version and then sometimes I'll offer the Notability version, but I think most people use GoodNotes, so it seems to be working okay for me now. But I'd love to hear how you use this planner and what response you get to the different file types. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own digital planners. 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 use Affinity Designer to create repeat patterns with a live pattern preview. How to design an Illustration series, and how to set up their Society6 shop and create mockups of your digital art. Check those out on my profile, if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class. Check out my slide. I would absolutely love to see your finished planner, so please share what you make. You can share it as a project here on SkillShare, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, Illustrators, letters, 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 and conversations, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work, check out the group to the link on my website. If you have any questions as you work through this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here in the community section on Skillshare, or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.