Transcripts
1. Design and Create a Digital Planner on Your iPad: Hi everyone. I'm Liz and I'm an illustrator, artist, and teacher. Today I want to show you how to design and create your own digital planner. I'll show you how to use the app procreate to plan and draw a planner template and how to create buttons that link to various sections in your planner. When you take this class, I'll share with you several free downloads to get you started. The first is my planner that I created for this class. The second is my botanical drawings that you can use to decorate your planner. The third is some shape brushes that will help you easily make shapes and sections for your planner. We'll start by looking for inspiration and planning out the sections and layout of our planners. Next, we'll sketch out each page and then use a grid system to create accurate measurements. I'll show you how to create buttons in your planner that will link to the sections you choose and how to use a downloaded font to add text to your planner. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the stylus, I like to use the apple pencil but you could use any stylus. I'll also be using the program procreate but there are a lot of other design programs out there that you could use when you take this class. I think you'll love having your own custom-designed planner that's made specifically for your planning style. So let's get started.
2. Layouts and Inspiration for Digital Planning: The first thing I want to do is show you how I use my Planner so you can start brainstorming about how you want to set up your own Planner. Of course, everyone's going to have a different style and different layout. It's going to depend on how you like to organize. This is just my personal layout, and feel free to copy this. If you don't know where to start, just copy exactly what I'm doing. But if you have an idea and you're ready to start planning out your own design, then just go for it. Let's go ahead and look at my Planner. You can see the Blank Planner is on the left and the one I'm using is on the right. I've added a little text on the front and I'll show you how to do that today. When you click on the Planner, you'll see the main cover, and the next page is the calendar view. I like to have the yearly view at the very beginning. That's the thing I use the most. I'd like to have it front and center. You can see each month here is actually clickable. If I click on June, that takes me to June. If I want to go back to the Calendar View, I just click that little button on the top. I put the buttons up here for this Planner, for the one I do today, I'm going to put the buttons down at the bottom. I think that might be a little bit easier to click like this than like this. Each Planner you make will be a little bit better than the last. You've got your Monthly View that you can click on. If I click on that, you can see I've filled in some recurring items here, some holidays, some recurring things that I do every week. Then I like to put some milestones in the monthly section, just some things that happen that month that were significant that I'd like to remember. The page after my Monthly View is my Weekly View. I just put in Monday, and then for each day I can add the date. Then I have six lines for text. You may just want to have three lines that are long rather than six short lines. Totally up to you here. I chose to put the weekdays this way and the weekends vertically, and then I have a little note section here for the week. Each month has five weeks, so you've got plenty of writing room, and then you get to the next month. There's a few other sections here. If you look in the top right corner, there's a Writing Section. This is where I take my notes. I make notes about classes, blog posts, anything that I want to do throughout the month, and I take some notes about that. I take a lot of notes, and that contend to get a little confusing and hard to find. I bookmark every note. If you click on the top left here and click Bookmarks, you can see all of the bookmarks for the now pages I've done. When I study Spanish, I'll make a page, and sometimes I'll add in a screenshot of some charts and things that make it easier to learn. The cool thing about bookmarks is, it's easy to find things later on. I've got my third section here. That's my Ideas Section. I like to wake up in the morning and write down a few ideas. I think that makes it a lot easier to generate ideas and takes the pressure off coming up with good ideas. I do this almost every day and I like to just save these in my Ideas Section. You may want to have a totally different section. This could be your goal. It could be weight loss tracking, grocery lists. It could be savings goals, anything that you like to track and keep an eye on. You could create a little button for that. Then the last section is just Blank Paper. I like to have some blank paper so that I can take notes on absolutely anything. It doesn't have to be something that goes on the calendar. It could just be an idea or a sketch. I've got some boxes that you can create but the majority of this section is just blank paper so that when I'm ready to add a picture or a drawing, I can just throw that in. Now that you've seen all the sections of my Planner, let's just look at the Blank Planner. I've got a cover with a little white space in the center. I've got the months that are all linked and the buttons are in the corner of every page. I've got a full Month View for each month, and it's the same page for every month. I just changed the text. Then this page is repeated five times after every month. If you go to the Thumbnail View, you can see exactly how this is laid out. You'll be able to download this planner. If you want to just look at it and play around before you start designing your own Planner, it might be a little easier just to give you an idea of what's possible and help you brainstorm if you just play around with this one a little bit. You can see there's a lot of months and week pages. Then you get into the lined pages and I copied that about 50 times, and then the blank pages, I think I copied that one about 50 times too. That's about it. That's the basics of my Planner. I like to do minimalist planning. I keep it very simple, but you could certainly get a lot more decorative with this and add stickers and colors and tons of different options. As you're brainstorming your Planner, I created a Pinterest board with a little bit of inspiration. I'm going to link that in the About Section of this class. I really recommend going through this and just looking to see what your eye goes towards. Maybe you like some more botanical themed work like this. You could draw some nice little rounded boxes and put some leaves around each one. Maybe you like something really simple where you just put some dots in the background and some numbers and a little bit of text. Maybe you like something a little more illustrative so you have some illustrations on the top, some lettering, and then some simple numbers on the bottom. There's a ton of inspiration on this Pinterest boards. Check this out, start brainstorming, and just think about some layouts that you might want to try.
3. Planning Your Layout: Once you have an idea of how you want your planner laid out, you can go ahead and start sketching it in procreate. I'm going to open procreate and I'm going to go to my good notes stack. Let's just start a new document, custom size. I'm going to use inches, 8.5 by 11 inches at 300 dpi. I want to start by just creating some simple boxes that will be sketches for my pages. This is just going to be like a draft layout of my planner. I'm going to grab the narinder pencil with black and I'm just going to draw a sheet of paper. If you draw on hold that makes a straight line, if you put down two fingers, that snaps it to straight up and down vertically and same thing for horizontal. There's my first planner page. I'm just going to duplicate this a few times and space these out. This is just going to give me a nice visual layout of what my planner will look like. I may still be working out some of the details in my mind but just having this visual guide, I think makes it a lot easier to go through this somewhat complicated process. I think it makes it a lot less complicated to have this drawing. I merged all those layers together by pinching the layers. The first one is going to be my cover. I'm snapping two fingers to step back just because I made a little pencil mark there. So cover. The next one I want to do is my yearly layout. Then I'm going to do my monthly layout, weekly. I'm going to do my Ideas section. I'm going to do [inaudible]
4. Making Your First Planner Page: Let's go ahead and create the grid paper, that's the very last paper here, so I need to create lined grid work and then I need to add my botanicals on the back. I'm going to go to my gallery, create a new document at 8.5 by 11. So this is the size I like to use, but you can use any size at all. This is your planner so go ahead and put this at any size that you like. I'm going to use 300 DPI. I would stick with that DPI that way it won't show up as blurry at all in good notes. Then click, Create. I'm on a new layer and that layer is just set to normal, and I want to grab a brush that's going to allow me to create a grid. This is a brush from the textures section of procreate, so this comes with the program. I've got the size all the way up and I've got my color on black. You can see if I just paint, you get a nice clean grid and I like to go over it twice just to be sure everything got covered. All the little outer edges, and you need to do that before picking up your brush. You can see if you release your brush and then put it back down, you're going to get double lines. I click two fingers to step back, there's my grid paper. If you don't like how it turned out or if you want the lines a little bit bigger, you can click the move tool and make sure magnetic is selected here rather than freeform. Freeform would allow you to mess up your dimensions. Whereas magnetic, we'll preserve the proportions of this grid paper. So we could make this paper a little bit bigger. I like larger grid paper, but I think today I'm going to stick with this and I'm trying to keep in mind the margins of the paper. On the left, there's a little bit of half grid sticking out here and it's the same thing on the right, that's going to help me when I'm building my boxes to count over one, two, three on this side, one, two, three on this side, and then start my box. I do like to keep that in mind when I start my grid. I also like to work in gray for my planners. I don't like black because, I think it makes it a little bit difficult to see the text, especially if you're trying to write over this. So what I do is go to, Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and just increase the brightness until it's light enough for you. I don't want to go pure white, I just want a little bit of gray, so I like that. I think I'm going to stick with that really lite version. The next thing I want to do is add in my plans. I'm creating a new layer here and I'm going to grab some sketches that I already made in a separate document, if you're not sure how to do some illustration or drawing on your iPad, I have a lot of other classes on that topic, so I'm not going to cover drawing today because I already covered that in a lot of other videos. If you want to see how I made these exact drawings, you can check out my botanical class. I cover every single step of creating these drawings. But today I'm just going to copy and paste these images into my other document, and I'm also going to put these drawings up as a free download on the class download page, which you can find in the about section. If you want to incorporate these botanical elements into your planner, you can feel free to do that. I'm going to click Select, and I've got free hand rather than automatic free hands going to let me just draw around an image. The first one I want to grab is this Monstera leaf. Once I draw around it, I can click that little black dot and then drag three fingers down and Copy. When I copy that image, and then I'm going to go back to my gallery, back to my grid paper. Drag three fingers down and paste, so there's my Monstera. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that one time because I know I want at least two of these on my document. I'm just going to play around with the sizing and layout of these and then I'm going to do this exact same process with all of the other plants that I want to use. I'll go ahead and speed up my video while I do this, because I'm just repeating the same process over and over, that's a good start. I can always add more later on, but I want to start with that. I'm keeping in mind that I want to leave space here for my monthly text and my ideas texts, so I need a little space up here. I also need a little space down here because I'm going to put my buttons at the bottom. I'm not going to put anything over here. I like to leave a little bit of negative space and I may even end up removing that other fern over here to have even more negative space, but I'll just leave that as it is for now. Now that you've seen how I add all of these botanicals, I want to show you the cover because I did the cover in the exact same way. The only difference that I've done with the cover is, I lightened this. I merged all of the plants onto one layer. I clicked Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and I increase the brightness to make it gray instead of black. I'm not going to make the cover on camera because I just showed you the exact process here, so that's one way to make a cover. But, you could do this any way that you'd like. Just find a cover that you really like and you can make one like that. You don't even have to make a cover if that isn't really interest you, just skip that part.
5. Making Buttons: The next thing I want to do is create my buttons. I'm going to have four buttons at the bottom, and I want to be sure that they're in the very center of the paper. I'm going to grab my Narinder pencil and that's the sketching pencil that comes with Procreate. I like to create a saved brushes section over here, so if you want to do that, you can click "New Set" on the top there, and just go to the brush, go to the Sketching section, swipe left, click "Duplicate", and then you can drag that brush into the new set that you created. What I've put in my digital planner set is the monoline pen and this come from the sketching and inking sections of Procreate. The grid texture that we just used, the gel pen which comes from inking, the Narinder pen which comes from sketching, and then a circle and a star brush which I made. I'm going to share those with you in the downloads and I'll show you how to use those in just a minute. If you've never imported a brush into Procreate, it's really easy. You just download the brush from my downloads page and then click "Plus", and then click "Import", and then you can find the brush on your iPad and import that into Procreate. I'm going to grab my Narinder pencil, and I'm going to go to a new layer, and I'm going to do what I think is the middle of my paper here, and then I'm just going to double-check by counting. That's right, this right here is the very center column. I want to do my buttons as circles and I think I'm going to make them pretty large, I found the other one's a little bit hard to click on. I think I want these a little bit bigger. I'm just sketching, I'm on a new layer, I'm sketching out how I think I want this to look and a basic layout. Then I'm going to create a new layer and make my first button. I'm going to choose a gray color that I like, and you can always adjust this later by just adjusting the hue saturation brightness. Just get a general idea of what color you want to use, or just make it in black and change it to gray later, either one is fine. I'm going to go to my brushes and I'm going to get the circle brush that you can download from my downloads page. Let's start with about 17 percent and see what size circle that makes. That's good. You can make a big circle smaller, that's fine, but you cannot make a smaller circle bigger. The reason for that is when you make a smaller circle bigger, you're trying to stretch the pixels and it becomes blurry. It's not okay to make a small circle big but it is okay to make a big circle small. If you want to make your circle smaller on magnetic, we've got the move tool selected and I've got magnetic selected and then I'm just going to re-size this. Let's go a little bit smaller so they have more space, and then when I move stuff around I like to select free form, that's a little easier to move it around. I like that size, I think that's a good start. Now we need to think about how should we decorate this? I'm going to go back to my sketching layer and sketch this out. I'll make my circle invisible. My first button is going to be my calendar button. My second button is going to be my ideas button, which is a star. My third button is going to be a piece of paper with writing on it. Then my fourth button is going to be my grid paper. Actually rather than doing a square, I think I'm just going to do this. Now I know what I want my four buttons to look like. I'm going to bring back my circle, and let's play around with some options here. If my circles gray, my writing could be white. I'm going to double-click on white here and that'll give me a pure white, and then I'm going to get my gel pen on a medium size and let's go a little bit smaller, I like that. If I want to draw this calendar, click and drag and then hold down two fingers. Again, click and drag and hold down two fingers and I'm just going to make a square. I'm actually going to do this on a new layer so that I can play around with this later. If I want to change the sizing or anything, it's way easier if it's on a new layer rather than the gray circle layer. I want this to be square. I'm going to cut off that little excess tail there at the bottom. For that I'll grab the eraser with the monoline pen. I like to do just slight rounding when I erase. Now I can move this around into the center of my button, and then go back to my gel pen, and let's make the gel pen a little bit smaller to do the detail for this one. I might just freehand this so it looks hand-drawn. Okay. I like that button. I like the hand-drawn look that it has. I do think I want to go a little bit brighter with my gray circle. I'm going to go to hue saturation brightness and increase the brightness a little bit. I think that looks good for now. The next button I want to create, I'm going to just duplicate that original circle and move it over to here. Then I want to do a star on this one. I think I'm going to use this star brush. This is another one that you can download from my Downloads page. I'm going to get a plaque and I'm on a new layer. There's a nice star. I'm going to set my move tool towards the magnetic and make it fit within here. That looks good. I'm going to reduce the opacity of this because I really just want to use it as a guide. I'm going to go back to that white text and click and hold the copy that white color. On a new layer, I'm going to get my gel pen and draw the star outline. Now I can remove my black. There I have two nice little buttons. We'll do the same thing for the other two. Duplicate, and then I'm just going to draw just like I did on the calendar one, drawing on a new layer and using my gel pen with white. For this one I want to create a grid drawing, but I only want the drawing to be within the circle. An easy way to do that is click the ''selection tool''. Click ''Automatic''. Then click on the circle. You can see that selection is a little bit rough. If I click and drag up, I'm increasing the threshold, which means I'm increasing more of what should we be selected. Let's just do that a few times to get our threshold nice and smooth. That looks better. Now I can create a new layer and it looks like I've hit my layer maximum. Let's delete the layer and then I can add a new layer. Now when I get my gel pen and I click and drag, I can only draw within that circle. Actually, I think I'm going to use my grid brush for this. Let's get the grid brush on a a small size. We can just paint that in for our button. If you don't like the way that looks at, that's a little too clean. You could make a new layer and just trace over those. I might end up doing that, but let's just see how it looks. I think that looks pretty good. Let's stick with that. Now I can delete my sketch layer, now that I have all my buttons made. I also want to merge the button with the drawing. I feel confident about the drawings. Here's that drawing and that circle. I'm in a click, drag this down and merge those two together. I'm going to do that for each button. Each button is on its own layer with the circle and the drawing. Now I can place these. We know that our middle column is right here. I think what I'll do is put one star button right up against the column here. I'm centering it in this little box. If I draw around this box, the circles fitting perfectly in there. That's one way to just line up the elements. I'll do that with the rest of these. I'm just eyeballing it, getting him in the middle of that little box. I have them separated here by a single column. I think that's going to make it easier for them to be clicked on. The only issue is I have a non-sterile leaf that's now being cut off. I'm going to find that leaf and just compute it over a little bit. I think I could also move this plant over a little bit, so that it's a little more even. This is just to give you an idea of the process that I go through when I'm working on these. Now, we've got four really nice buttons created. We've got our plants in the background. I think I'm going go ahead and merge all of my plants onto a single layer, so that I can change the color. I'm going to increase the brightness here. Let's zoom in so I can compare that color to the color of my buttons here. I may want those to be the exact same color. It's totally up to you. But I think that's what I'm going to do on my planner, is just make everything the same gray. There is our first page and we've really done the majority of the work now. We're going to do a lot of copying and pasting from this point forward. Let's go ahead and move on to the next page.
6. Creating Lined Paper: Now that we've created this grid paper, we can go ahead and use this same template to make our writing paper. I'm going to go to my Gallery. Click "Select", click on the planner, and click "Duplicate". Then, I can click on that new document and create a new layer, and then I'm just going to use these lines to draw new lines for my writing paper. The great thing about this is we've already made the buttons, we've already done the decoration. All we have to do on this document is draw some lines and then remove the grid paper. I'm going to decide where I want my writing to start. You could have a section up here that was date and title, or you could just start going with the lines here. I think what I'm going to do is draw these in black so I can really see them, and then I'll turn them to gray after I'm done. I'll use my gel pen and let's choose a width. I think that's good enough. I'm going to make these really long, so I'm going to choose the longest distance, so that's going to be from here to here, and click and hold and then put down two fingers to set that line perfectly horizontally. Let's say you don't like how close these lines are. I would actually like my lines to be a little bit further apart. I'm going to select my Grid Layer, click the Move tool, click "Magnetic", and then make this paper a little bit bigger, so that way when I'm writing, I have a little bit more space. I have a large handwriting, so I think that size is going to work better for me. Now, I'm going to go back to my line layer, zoom in, click "Free Form", and just line this up perfectly on the grid. Now, that I have one, I can just start duplicating those. I'm going to duplicate it once, line it up perfectly, and then merge those two together, and now I have two lines to duplicate. Merge those two together, and you can see once you get a few of these done, this gets really easy. I'm going to keep doing this and cover my whole document with lines, and then I'll go in later and erase the parts that cover up my plant drawings. That looks good, so I'm going to go ahead and merge all of my lines unto a single layer, and then I can start erasing the ones that I don't like. I don't want anything to overlap my buttons, so that one's going to be totally gone and I'm just using the mono-line eraser. I also don't want anything to overlap my plants. When I have one that overlaps my plants, I'm going to just erase that little area. I like to leave a little bit of space for my design, but you could have it come up right up against your decoration elements. It's totally up to you here. I'll speed up my video while I go through and erase all these extra lines. I'm happy with how the lined paper looks. I want to go ahead and turn these into gray, and I'm just going to make my grid layer invisible, and then go to Hue Saturation Brightness. I'm just trying to match the gray that's in the buttons. That looks good, so there we go. We are finished with our blank paper.
7. Using Downloaded Fonts: Now I want to go ahead and create my ideas paper. This is a great template for making my ideas paper. I'm going to go back to my gallery. I'm going to click "Select". Select that document that I just created, and click "Duplicate". Then I can open that up. I think what I'm going to do is go through and erase every other line because I like my ideas section to be really open and to have a lot of space. I don't think I need any of those little lines. I'll go ahead and speed up my video while I erase these. I also want my ideas section to just be straight up and down with some borders here. I'm going bring back my grid paper. On a new layer, I'm going to get my gel pen just to make a guide for myself. I think I want this ideas paper to be right here. I want it to cut off. I'm going to make a line here. Then on this side I want this leaf to be the border. I'm going to go right here. Now I can go back to my lined layer. On every line that crosses over, I'm going to get my Monoline Eraser tool. Let's make it a little smaller. I'm just going to erase right there. We can remove the grid paper to make it a little bit easier to see. Now I can remove that guide. Now I just have a nice little ideas list. I think I want to play around with the placement of this, so I'm getting my move tool. What if I just moved it to right there? I like that. I also think this little stem is going to mess up my text. I think I'm going to just erase that stem. I'm going to go to my Botanical layer, get the Eraser tool, and just remove that stem. Now I have a lot of space to put the word ideas. There are a few options for inserting text. You could write this by hand if you like doing hand lettering or creating fonts. You could just go ahead and write this in. I like to use fonts. There's a lot of great fonts that you can get online for free, and some of them are even free for commercial use. If you think you might sell your planner, you probably want to use one that's free for commercial use. I would just type fonts free for commercial use. Then I like this first page. You can get a ton of free fonts. Anything that you wanted to include in your planner, you could use this, and then you can sell your planner too. So these are totally fine to use. If you do want to use a downloaded font, you'll just have to get the program, the app called iFont and it's free. Just download iFont and if you don't already have Pages, download Pages. We're going to use these two together. If I go to that fonts page, and let's go ahead and download a font. I'm just going to click the "Download" button here. On the bottom right-hand corner here I'll click "Download". Then I'll click "Open in" and "Copy to iFont". You would have had to already download iFont by this point. Then I find that you have to go back to Chrome and do that again, sometimes it just doesn't work in iFont, so there I did it the second time and it worked. I don't know why. Something's wrong with the app maybe. Now that it opened correctly, I can click "Import to iFont". Then you'll see that font. If you click files here, that font will be here on your list. There it is. It says installed. Now this font is installed in my iPad. I don't know if it works with all apps, but it will work with the app Pages. I like to use the Pages app because it's really simple. It's really easy to create a document. Just click "Plus", click "Blank" and you can just start typing. I'm making a page that says the word Ideas. I'm going to type ideas, select that, and then choose my font. I've downloaded a font called Playlist that's free for commercial use. So you can download that same font from the website I showed you. I'm going to make this really big. I'm using the text size button on the right here. I want to make it as big as possible without going off the page. Then I want to zoom in, so it's really large. That way you're going to get a really nice, crisp, clean image. I'm going to take a screenshot, so I'll press the power button and the home button on the top there. Now that I have that screenshot, I'm going to go back to Procreate, click the Tool symbol, "Image", "Insert a Photo", tap Ideas. Then I want to remove everything else in the screenshot. So I've got some extra stuff in the screenshot that I don't need. I'm going to click the Selection tool and click "Automatic". Then when I click on the words, they become selected. Again, you want to double check your threshold by clicking and dragging. You can see if your threshold gets too high, it selects everything on the page. Whereas if it gets too low, it might not select the edges. I think for this I'm going to do like 90 percent threshold and maybe like 95 even. Then I'm going to click right here this little Duplicate symbol, that's going to duplicate everything that's selected. Now I can make my screenshot invisible and all I have here is a simple text layer. I'm going to click the Magnetic Move tool to make this smaller. That looks good. Then I want to just make that the same gray. One way that's easier to make something gray. The same gray as what you have here is to overlap it with one of your other elements and zoom in. Then as you increase your brightness, it'll become clear when they become the same color. That's a little bit too light, that's a little bit too dark, but that's right in the middle. That looks good to me. I'm going to go ahead and zoom out. Move that into the center. There is my Ideas page.
8. Weekly Page Part 1: I've finished my grid paper, I've finished my writing paper, and I've finished my ideas paper, so, now I'm ready to start working on my weekly layout. Let's go back to the gallery, and I think I'm just going to use my grid paper for this. So I'll click Select, the grid paper and duplicate it. For this one, I'm going to start by just creating a new layer and sketching this out how I want it to look. I want to have a section here that's for the week days, and then a section here for weekends, and then a note section. I think I want the note section to be a little bit bigger, and then these can be a little bit smaller. Okay. That looks good. I need to have five days here, so, I need to have four lines. It looks like three squares would be a good size, and so, let's see if we did that, it would be three squares, three squares. Actually I think I could do four squares. Now let's go with three. I think three is plenty, 2,3. I don't really know what this is going to be until I start planning it, so, just take your time with the sketching process and don't put too much pressure on it, just play around with a lot of different options, and eventually it'll just become clear with the best thing to do is. I like to overlap with these plants a little bit. I think it looks cool when they overlap just a little bit, but that's totally up to you. So I think that's going to be my general layout, so, I want to make sure these are coming off the edge at the same place. We've got 1, 2, 3 squares. Let's start it right there, 1, 2, 3 squares right here. Okay. I'm going to make this layer semi-transparent so you can just barely see it, and then on a new layer, I'm going to get black and go ahead and start drawing this box. So now that I've got my outer square, I can do these crossbars, and again, I am going past where I know I need to go, because I would rather go too far and erase, then not go far enough. It's really hard to make a line look good when you have to try to make up for a space you didn't cover before. Okay. So there's the main structure for my weekly layout. Now I'm just going to go through with my monoline eraser on a pretty small size and just clean up any little place where I went over the edge. Okay. So that looks good. Now I need to decide how I want to show the days of the week. So I think because my buttons are circular, I'm going to also do a circular shape here for the text that says Monday. Let's go ahead and just grab this gray down here. So I'm going to click and hold, so, I know I have that exact gray, then I'm going to make a new layer and grab my circle brush that you can download. So that looks good. Remember, we can always make a big shape smaller, but we can't make a small shape bigger. Let's just sender that here using our grid. That looks good. Now I'm going to duplicate this layer, and with the magnetic tool, I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to go to hue saturation brightness and make this pure white, and then if I grab the free-form tool, the Move tool, I can send her this right in the middle and just make a nice little outline circle. So you could do a solid circle, you could do an outline circle. I think I'm going to do an outline in this case. So I'm going to just zoom out and made sure I like that size. I think that looks pretty good. So I'm going to merge these two together. So that way these two shapes can move together, and then I can just duplicate them for each day of the week.
9. Weekly Page Part 2: Now I can go ahead and create some lines on my planner. I'll have some space to write my tasks for the day. I'm looking at this grid and it looks like right now there's only space for two lines. I'm going to go down to my grid paper. I think I'm going make this grid paper just a little bit smaller and I'm going to make sure I'm on the magnetic tool. Let's see if we can get three lines. I think that would be perfect. That would be one, two, three lines of text. I think that would be plenty. Let's go ahead and use that as our template. I want to make sure that there is a break in the center of these. I want to start by finding my center. I'm just creating a new layer using the narrow under pencil to just do a little bit of sketching here. I think the center would be right here. It would actually be this bar right here is our center. In that case, I think I want my text to go from the middle of this and from the middle of that square to the edge of that square and the edge of that square. That gives me an idea of where to put my lines. I'm going to go back to my gel pen and I've still got black selected and I'm on a new layer. I'm going to click and drag to the middle of that square. Looks good. I'm using this edge of this grid to mark where my line starts. I'm going to duplicate that line and line it up with the first one. Then do that again. Now I'm going to merge all three of those lines that I just created and duplicate them. Then come over here to this other side. My marker over here, let's say something didn't go right with that. Let's try it again. I've got that layer. I'm going to duplicate it. Here we go. I want to line this up with the edge of that grid. That looks good. Now I can remove those sketching lines that I just did. I can merge my six lines together. Let's duplicate the six lines and bring those onto each day of the week. It looks like it's not in a perfectly line up with this grid in this case. Rather than, moving the grid around, I'm just going to eyeball it. I've got like half a square between the bottom and the first line. I'm going to mimic that on this one. It looks like I've hit my layer limit. I'm going to go ahead and merge some of this stuff together. I could merge my circles together. I can merge my buttons together because I know I'm not going to move those. That gives me a lot more leeway. So with these larger size files that we're using, you will run into a layer limit. But that's no problem. Just be sure that the layers that you are merging are not things that you might want to edit later on. That's the only thing to keep in mind. Now I need to create some lines for my weekends. I'm noticing that this plant is in the way. I'm going to go to my Plant Layer. I'm going to click Freehand selection. I'm going to select that tool, that leaf and just pull this over. It doesn't have to be all the way off the page, but I just want it to not be obstructing my box so much. I think on a new layer, I'll go ahead and start creating my lines for the weekend. I'm going to move my grid paper down a little bit because I want my lines to start just below that circle. I'm going to create a new layer and I've got my black gel pen. Then duplicate that layer and do the same process with the two weekend days. Now I have all of those lines created. I'm just going to merge everything that's in black. All my lines and all my borders merging those go to Hue saturation, brightness and let's remove my grid, so I can really see what I'm doing here. I increase the hue. I think I actually went a little too bright, so let's go tiny bit darker. That looks good. Just zoom out and double-check everything. I could put some lines in here. But I think I'm actually going to leave this open on this one so I can put any note in there, could be a picture, a sketch, or a chart or anything at all. One last thing I want to do on this piece is, add some letters to show the days of the week. I'm going to do this in pages just like we did the last text. I'm just going to type in caps M for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I like to do an R, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I'm going to do the same process that we did before. I'm going to take a screenshot of this and bring it into procreate. Insert a photo and then for each text layer, I'm going to do this separately. But the first thing I want to do is with my magnetic move tool selected is go ahead and size these correctly. I'm making the image a little bit transparent so I can really see it and I'm going to bring it over to my circle. You can see exactly what a good size would be. I'm doing this before I separate them onto layers because I want them to all be the exact same size. I like that size. That looks good to me. Now I'm going to bring up the size again and click selection automatic. Then I can select my M and it looks like I need to bring up my threshold there down just a little bit. That looks good. Then I'm going to click the duplicate button. Now I've got one layer with just the M on it. I'm going to go through and do that with all of these letters. Now I can delete my screenshot and then I have all of those letters. I can just get my move tool and put them in place. That looks good. Let's merge all of those letters together. Get the hue saturation brightness tool and it's probably easier to zoom in a little bit. Totally reduce the saturation, so we're working with a pure gray and then try to match that gray that we have. That looks good.
10. Monthly Page: Let's go ahead and work on the month view. I'm going to go ahead and I've duplicated my grid layer again, so I'm going to open up a duplicate grid layer and I've got my pink color with the gel pen and I'm just going to sketch out how I want this box to show up. I need to have six weeks from top to bottom. Some months will fit on four or five weeks, whereas some months will take all six weeks. Just because of the way the days are spaced, for me I like to just go ahead and make one month view that has six weeks in it that will fit every single month of the year. Let's see if we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, I think that would be perfect. We could do our boxes could be three by four for each one. That would be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then we could just have six of those, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 that's perfect. I think I am going to scrunch this a little bit. We'll do three by three squares, three across and three vertically. Then we'll have a whole section here for notes. Let's do that. I'll go ahead and make this small, create a new layer with black and I've got my gel pen and, just like I did with a week view, I'm just going to draw out this monthly section. I'm just going to make a few adjustments to make this fit a little bit better on the page, I'm going to move to botanical elements. First, I'm going to move this month's star because I need some space to put my days of the week on the top there, and also I need to move this flower over here. I like how this is laid out. I want to go ahead and add some little sections to add the date and I think I'm going to use circles for this. I'm going to use our same process for making circles, I'm going to select that, duplicate it, and then I can delete that layer that had two circles on it. Now, I've got seven nice circles that fit perfectly across my grid, so I'm going to merge all those circles together, duplicate, and then I can fill this out on the rest of the calendar. I like how that looks, I'm going to go ahead and go back to my border layer and fix the gray on that one, that looks good. I'm going to remove my grid and just take a look. At this point, I think I'm just going to add a few more lines and then we can start putting the months of the year. Let's bring back our grid. Now, we've got the month pretty much covered, all we need to do is add some text. I'm going to open pages and I'll just write the months of the year and then take a screenshot. I'm going to insert that photo and I'm going to reduce the opacity a little bit so that I can size these months. I'm using February as a gauge here. I think that looks good, I'm going to leave it like that for now. I do want to go ahead and set the size and color of these before I duplicate them. Because these are going to be on separate layers unlike the last one which was all on the same layer, these are going to be on separate layers because they're different days of the week. I need a little bit of a guide here to make sure my colors are right. I'm going to bring this over by this other leaf so I can look at that color as I adjust the letters. That looks good, I like that. Now, I'll go ahead and do that same selection process that we did before, I'm going to click select, click Automatic, make sure I'm on that layer, and I'm going to have to probably reduce the threshold a little bit here, and then select, there we go. Let's increase the threshold a little bit because I don't want this to be fuzzy. I don't want to go too far, I want to go just far enough. That looks perfect. I'm going to select January and duplicate that layer and I'm going to do that for every month of the year. Now, I can make that screenshot invisible. One at a time, I'm going to take these, put them at the top of the document and since they're on separate layers, I will make each one invisible after I put it there. This is just a really easy way for us to export every month of the year from procreate, but we're going to have each word on a separate layer. We only need one document, but we're actually going to create 12 documents out of this one document. It's just a timesaver here. Now, I have every month of the year, all I have to do is make the layer visible. The only thing I want to add is the days of the week on the top of this month and I'm just going to steal that from another document. On this document, we've got the days of the week so I'm just going to click the move tool, swipe down three fingers, copy that, swipe down three fingers and paste. Then I can zoom in here and just put that on the top of the month. There is Monday, I'll select Tuesday and move it up here and I'll do the same for every day that week. I think that flower is encroaching on my space here a little bit, so I'm just going to scooch it over and that's better. There we have every month of the year.
11. Yearly Page: Now I'm ready to make my month view, and I'm actually just going to use this existing grid. I'm going to go back to my gallery, select that, and duplicate it. I'm just duplicating the month view that we just created. Then I'm going to open that new duplicated file. What I want to use is just, I'm going to use a five week section, so I'm actually going to delete, remove everything below here. I'm going to remove this bottom row and I'm going to remove all that text. Let's just erase that to start with. I need to make sure I'm on the layer that has that. Now I've just got this nice grid, and I'm just going to select it. Three fingers down, copy and paste, so I want to just paste that onto a new layer. It looks like I've hit my layer limit, so let's go ahead and delete some layers that we don't need. Now we can click paste. Now I just have this nice grid, and I can go ahead and remove these dots too because I don't need those. I'm going to get the magnetic tool with this grid, and just figure out a nice placement for this. I'm going to have three of these. I want to have enough space that I can fit all three. I think that means I need to make this a little bit smaller. That way I could fit one, two, three of those, so that looks good. I'm not actually going to use this because I want my lines to be a little bit thicker. I'm just going to draw over it. Let's get that gray color by just going to a button, clicking and holding. Then I'm going to go to this grid, and I think that's a good size to use. You can see if I just used what I had, it's pretty thin. It really wouldn't look that good on a full page, so what I'm doing is just going through and thickening this a little bit. Okay, that looks great, I want to bring back my grid, so I'm being sure to place this exactly as I want it to be. Let's put down one of these. Duplicate it and let's see what happens if we put these one column apart. I think that's going to be enough. Yeah, I think that looks good, one column apart. I think is perfect. Let's go ahead and merge these three together. We just need four rows of this, so I'm doing them one column apart, vertically and one column apart horizontally. Actually I'm going to space them out two columns apart, vertically because I want to leave space for my text. I just want to get a zoomed out view so I can be sure I like this. I'm going to merge them all together. I think I'm just going to bring the whole, I missed one. Merge them all together, bring the whole thing down a little bit. That looks good. If you knew this was going to be for a certain year, you could go ahead and put the year up here. Totally up to you. I think what I'm just going to do is put the months of the year. I'm going to use that same screenshot that we had from before, so insert a photo. I've got the months of the year right here. Make this semi-transparent, and come up to my first month, and set these at a size I like. I want to really look at the month here because, I want to make sure these look good in-between the squares. I like this smaller size, so I think I'm going to stick with that. I'm going to do our same text copying process. Click select, on automatic, and I'm going to increase the threshold, quite a bit to about 97. Okay, that looks good, and then I'll just copy each month to a new layer. Now I can delete that screenshot, and I can place each of these on top of the boxes. I think I'm going to remove the grid. It's distracting me a little bit and I think it's making it hard to see where to put the months so, sometimes it's good to use the grid and then other times it's fine to just free hand, or just eyeball it because this is handwritten text. I think it's really fine for it to be a little bit off. Whereas, if you're using a really tight style and tight texts then you probably do want to use the grid a little bit more. But I like adding this a little bit of loose style into my planners. Now that I like the way all of those months look, I'm going to go ahead and merge them onto a single layer, so that I can adjust my color. I like how that looks. I'm happy with the layout and everything, so I think we can call the month view, and the year view finished.
12. Exporting Your Files & Using Keynote: Now that we have all of the planner pages complete, we can go ahead and start exporting those and putting them in keynote. Keynote is the program that I use to add all of the links and to make it into a PDF. It's a free program and it's really easy to use. I'm just going to start at the beginning and export each one from procreate. The first one is the cover, I'll click the tool symbol, share and I think you could use a PDF or a JPEG, I always just tend to use a JPEG and then I click save image. Now we're saving this to your photos. For the cover, you just have to export that one file, that's simple. But let's say for our monthly view, we need to export each month of the year. I've got January, the January layer showing right now. I'm going to click share, JPEG, save image. Then I'm going to hide January, reveal February, same thing, share, JPEG. I'm going to do that for each month of the year. I'm just going to export all the other pages of my planner and then we'll move into keynote. Now that we have all of the files exported, let's go ahead and open keynote. This is a free app, you can download this in the app store. I'm going to click the plus symbol to make a new presentation. I just choose the first one, it doesn't really matter which one you choose, because we're going to totally change the setup. The first thing you'll do is click the three little dots on the top and click documents set up. Then on the bottom here you'll see slide size. I'm going to click slide size and there's some preset options, but we're going to choose custom. Then it asks you to input the pixel dimensions that you want. We need to figure out the pixel dimensions of our planner. Our planner's saved at 300 dpi. Our planner is 8.5 inches times 300 pixels per inch and then it's 11 inches tall times 300 pixels per inch. Let me do that math here. It's 2550 and 3300. That's the pixel dimensions, width and height and then click done. Now we have a file that's the perfect size for our images. If I click done up here and click the plus sign and click all photos, I can find my cover and there's my cover, it fits perfectly on this new slide. When you add a new slide, it'll automatically be the right size, you don't have to change the size every single time you open a new document or create a new slide. Now I'm just going to go through and add every single page of my planner and it doesn't have to be in the perfect order because you can always reorder these. Just take some time, go through everything you exported and just drop it into the keynote slide. I think that's everything. I've got my cover, my month view, one slide for each month, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, November. I didn't see December, let me go back and do December. There we go. I always double check this as I'm working because you really don't want to get through this whole process and then realize you miss something because it will cause you a lot of extra work. Take some time to check over everything after you finish each step.
13. Creating Links: I've got all my months of the year. I've got a weekly layout, my ideas page, my lined page, and my graph page. I'm going to take my weekly page and I want to drag it, to be right under January, so that I have my monthly view, my weekly view, and then I have a week page. What I'm going to do is have a monthly view and then five week pages and then the next monthly view and then five more week pages. But before we make any more changes, we've got one of each page in our plan, we haven't duplicated anything yet. I'm going to go to the main page and set up all of my links. It's important to get one page of each kind of planner page, and then you can start adding in your links. Let's add in the first link on the word January. I wanted to be able to click on January, and go to that page. I'm going to click Plus, and I'm going to choose the little shape tool over here. Then I'm going to choose the best shape for that, so when I do my buttons, I'll use a circle. When I do this one, I'm going to use the rounded rectangle tool. It goes ahead and drops a tool for me, and I'm going to, oops. I realized recently that the Apple pencil doesn't work very well in Keynote. I'm going to put that down, and I'm going to let it cover January completely, so that anywhere around there that I click, it's going to open up the January page. Then I want to adjust this a little bit, so I'm going to click the paint symbol. For fill, what do I want to fill that box? No Fill, I want that to be a transparent box. That's literally just a link. It doesn't actually show up on the planner at all. When you look at it now, you can see a little gray box and you can see all those little blue dots, but that's not going to show up on your final planner. This is to help you as a guide when you're working in Keynote. Now that we have that little transparent box created, we can click on it one time, and click the Link. Where do you want to link this to? You want to link it to a Slide. That's selected by default. Then what slide do you want to link it to? I never use any of these down here. I just enter the exact slide that I want it to link to. I want this to link to side 3, so I'm going to enter three. Now that I have one of those created, it's really easy to click it, Copy it, click again and Paste. There's February's, click it, click Link. What do you want to link to? A slide, which slide? Slide 5. I'm going to go through and do this for every month of the year, just copying and pasting this little box. Actually you don't have to click copy each time. Once you click copy one time, you can really go through and paste. I could go through and add all of these at once. I'm clicking one time to bring up that paste menu. I could go through for the first time, bringing these all into place and then set the links next. That might be a little bit more efficient. I'm going to double check those and make sure all of my numbers are right. You can do that by going to that page and clicking the Play button. Then you can actually click on each box and make sure it takes you to the right place. March, looks good. I'm going to do this with each just to double check and make sure I have these right. I did have one of those wrong and I went back and fixed them. Now they all link to the correct page, and you can see this is how it's going to look in GoodNote. Someone can just click on that month and it takes them right to December. I'm now going to do the same thing with the buttons. I'm going to click and move this button down here. Make it a little bit bigger but not too big, and go to my fill section and click No Fill. I'm going to make sure it's right on that button. I'm actually going to let it go outside the button just a little bit, so it really covers that whole area. I want this button to actually link to this page. It's going to ask what page do you want to link to? I want to link to page 2, because I want it to be the same on all of these documents. Now I can copy this circle and paste it. Now I can paste all four of those buttons down here, and choose where each one links to. For the second one, I want that to link to my Ideas page, which is page 16. I'm going to click on that, choose page 16 and then I'll do the same thing for all of my buttons. Then I'm going to check all of these before I do any duplicating. This one should keep me at this page. This one should take me to my Ideas section. This one should take me to my writing page section. That looks good, and this one should take me to my grid section. All of those look good. That means I can go ahead and copy these to all of the other pages. What I'm going to do is click on one, and then click on the other three. Now I have all of those selected, I'm going to click copy. Now when I go to each new page, and I click paste, they'll already be in the right spot because our buttons are on the same spot, on every page that we created. I'll just paste this onto every page of my planner. Now every single page has these little links at the bottom that will help me navigate to the different sections of my planner. At this point I'm ready to start duplicating pages. I have January and then the next slide is the week view. I want to have five of those week views after every month. I'm going to click on that slide. Click Copy, click again, click Paste 2,3, 4, and 5, so now I have five week views. I'm going to click one, hold it, and click the others. Now I have all of those selected, I can click Copy. Now I can go to each month, so there's February, click Paste and that pastes five weeks after February. I'm going to do that for each day of the month. There's all of my months and weeks taken care of. Now I may also want to copy some of my idea pages, so I can click Copy, and then let's paste that, let's do five times 4, 5. I'm going to click Copy to copy all five of those, and then I'm going to paste that. Depends on how many pages you want for your idea's section, if you even do that section. Now I'm going to do that same process with the pages section, and the grid sections. You may want 20 or 40 pages of each, this part is totally up to you. Now that my planner has all of those pages duplicated, it's about 164 pages long, so you can make yours much longer if you'd like to do a lot of writing, you may want to have a much bigger writing section. It's really up to you here, based on how you like to work. Now that I have all of that finished, I can go ahead and export this so we can open it up in GoodNote.
14. Using Your Planner: Now that you have all of these pages created, you could go ahead and test this in Keynote and just play around with it a little bit, make sure all of your links work, make sure this is taking you to the sections that it should. You're saving this violin keynote, so you can always go back and double-check it later on, but this is a good point to go ahead and check everything. Now that we have that done, we can go ahead and export this file into GoodNotes, so I'm going to click the three dots on the top and click "Export," and then I'm going to choose a PDF file. Then I'm going to scroll over, and you could save this to Dropbox or e-mail this to a friend, what I'm going to do is just copy this to GoodNotes because I want to go ahead and use it in the GoodNotes program. It's asking me if I want to import it into my existing planner, but I want to create a new document and put it into uncategorized, I don't have any categories yet, so that's fine with me. Then here is our new planner. Now we can scroll through and we can double-check that all of our links work and are taking us to the right place, we can check our month views, and we can go ahead and start using this. What I like to do is choose a custom pen, I click "Custom," bring it all the way up and then choose a color, and then I like to just write the letters in here, so I can't remember when June starts, but let's zoom in just a little bit more here. You could go ahead and do this for the whole year, or you could do this month by month, however you like to work. Another cool thing we can do with GoodNotes is make sure your note pen tool is selected, and click the grid section, and then click the shape builder with the pen, and we can create new boxes on our grid paper, so if you want to do some organization, maybe you want to write a list or plan something out, GoodNotes is a great program for that. We can also create circles, let me make sure my shape tool is selected, we can create circles, we could do a chart where we're planning something out. I think GoodNotes is a great program, but there are a lot of other programs you could use your planner with, so if you're selling this or you're using it for some other purpose, this is a PDF file so you could use it in any of the planning apps.
15. Using Fonts in Your Planner: So one last thing I want to show you that's really a nice feature that you can use with good notes. Let's put the letters 2018 on the front of the cover. So I'm going to use the app called Over. This is a really easy app to use and you can use a lot of different free fonts that come with the program. The app is free, and when you open it, you just scroll down to the bottom here and click any of the Canvas sizes. Then I'm going to click Text and type 2018. Then I can scroll through here and choose a font that I like. Some of them are paid, but a lot of them are free. So I'm just going to use this free font. It looks good to me. Then we can change the color. I'm going to change the color to black. We can change the size. I'm going to make it pretty large. There are a few other options that you can add here to make your text look nice, so you could use that as well. Click Okay and then the little share button up here. If we click Save to photos that goes into your photos. But the nice thing is it doesn't save the file with a background. So if we open good notes and we click Plus, Image, Photos, that 2018 that I just saved. It looks black here in the image. But when you click it, it's actually a really nice PNG file that does not have a background. So you can use this to create titles in your planner or divide sections in your planner. So this is just a really nice feature to use with good notes. So I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start designing your own planner. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to draw on your iPad and how to paint realistic watercolors using the free downloadable brushes I created. So check those out on my profile if you want to see more classes like this one. I also share a lot of free downloads on my site. So if you want to get more downloads like the one you got for this class, check out my website. If you want to share your planner with the class, I think we could all benefit from seeing each other's planners and it would be inspiring to see how other people lay out their planners and bullet journals. So please share what you make. You can share an image of a planner page, or you could upload your whole planner to Dropbox and just share a link so we could all play around with your planner in good notes. Either way, I would love to see what you make. So you can do that here on Skillshare or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook or contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching this class and I hope to see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
