Diary and Wellness Journal Design

Details on the design

The project included a style consult and design, typesetting and layout of all pages, customised drawings for the entire publication, design of 4 different covers, ISBN barcoding, 3 sets of revisions for minor tweaks, and a set of print ready end files.

Each month of the diary follows a loose theme, which helps to create interest and continued engagement throughout the year. The beginning of each month starts with a colour-in title page, followed by a monthly to do list, health and finance tracker and a general tracker. Weekly page spreads are separated by a different weekly writing prompt. The end of each month has room for notes and a self-development exercise.

Because Hayley wanted something different, and to avoid copyright infringement by using images from Canva, licensing fees from stock sites, or (God forbid), design theft from Google or Pinterest – all the drawings in the journal were custom drawn (by myself) with full usage rights transferred to Hayley for use in her journal.

The image style was kept extremely simple: plain drawings that looked as if the user could have drawn them personally. They were also in black outline which meant that users could colour them in or add further details as preferred. This styling was kept consistent throughout the entire book. Typefaces used were a loose hand script and a neat handwriting font, again to give the diary a personalised look as if the user could have written the headings and prompts themselves.

Four different cover designs were custom created to appeal to different personality types: a plain black cover, a black cover with a pattern built from graphics inside the diary, a bright abstract botanical cover, and a neutral geometric design.

Images above and below show three of the cover design patterns, a page spread with monthly title page, mockups of the different covers and spines, a spread showing the weekly pages.

Parts of this project that I enjoyed the most was the spread out timeline because it allowed me to really put short bursts of focus time into the work instead of trying to rush everything in a couple of months – which often causes design exhaustion and a creativity dip, resulting in not doing my best work. I also enjoyed working on the drawings which were a bit different from my usual style.

End files supplied were print files for the 4 individual covers, a print file for the entire inner section, and an SVG of the black diary pattern for Hayley to use in promotional pieces. No mockups were supplied because Hayley had professional photos taken for advertising.

The only downside of creating a diary like this is that, because it’s limited to a specific time period (2024 in this case), you really need to be on top of sales to ensure you sell enough copies to cover the expenses because it’s not a cheap exercise, especially when it comes to printing a quality end product.

You can connect with Hayley on her website: hayleywhitehornpsychologist.co.uk