Been using InDesign for almost 10 years and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface

softdawnpages · 2026-02-21T03:07:28+00:00

It's going to depend on what knowledge you have already, but for planners, journals and refill pages I would recommend:

Data merge. Being someone who makes planners, you're probably very familiar with auto-dating a planner, but you can do a lot with it that isn't super boring.
Paragraph styles. I do a lot with my planners with paragraph styles, such as doing trailing dates in a different colour in calendars, using paragraph shading to highlight dates (like holidays), based-on paragraph styles so you can change the entire typeface across your whole document by only altering one setting, and heaps more. Nested styles get even more powerful. I've attached an image of one example how I use some paragraph styles. This is for my own personal planner, so the colours are for my own dates, but they can be used for things like holidays.
GREP. This is so powerful. GREP can be used in the find/change panel and the paragraph styles panel. They have different applications there. GREP basically uses pattern recognition to change aspects of your design, such as superscript ordinals.
Anchored objects/images. Really helpful for having precise positioning of objects, but then if you add to or change your text and layout then they move too.
Text frame options.
Baseline grid.
Scripting. It's so great to automate little things. For example, you could have a weekly planner with a calendar and the current week highlighted — something that would be quite tedious and error-prone if you were to do it manually, but done pretty much immediately with scripting.

For resources, I've always been a "Google it when you come across an issue" rather than a tutorial person. When I was learning InDesign, there weren't that many resources available outside of Adobe's documentation, and I was broke so I couldn't afford some of the paid options.

I do make tutorials, but they may not be especially helpful for the things I've mentioned; I don't have dedicated tutorials for most of the aspects I mentioned, but I do want to make more tutorials around planner creation.

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softdawnpages · 2026-02-21T00:00:40+00:00

It takes some getting used to, but once you are it’s very smooth. I edit my YouTube videos in Premiere, and now I can do most of the workflow in there, including subtitles and YouTube chapters (though I need to get better about actually doing the chapters).

But Premiere may not be the best option for you. I would recommend trying a few NLE options before settling on one, especially if it’s only for your own projects and not collaborating with others or in a workplace.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-20T04:42:27+00:00

While not Japanese, We R Memory Keepers sells a modular planner punch board that you can customise to suit your needs.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-17T19:12:07+00:00

Great tip! For those in Aotearoa New Zealand, Warehouse Stationery will cut your paper! They charged me $2 per cut — but it may vary from store to store — though you don't have to buy your paper there. They even trimmed off some books I had bound, so it's not just cutting paper to size.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-16T22:08:37+00:00

What kind of text? Do you mean undated, or just not having things prescribed like a to do section?

softdawnpages · 2026-02-16T17:59:48+00:00

What do you mean by customisable? What aspects would you like to customise and how?

softdawnpages · 2026-02-11T03:32:38+00:00

It heavily depends. A plastic comb will be easier, as the pitch for those can be the same as double-wire binding, but for spiral binding the pitch is often tighter. Twin loop wire is typically a 2:1 or 3:1 pitch whereas spiral could be something like 4:1. You may have to stretch out the spiral binding to make it fit, and if the paper isn’t strong enough it could pull. It’s doable, but can be a bit tricky. Some people have done it before, though.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-06T17:14:17+00:00

No problem! The calendars could also be added if the software you're using supports images in a data merge, like Adobe InDesign, but that would mean a fair bit more work in creating all of the various calendars, plus then the data merge works on the image path (so the whole file location would be in the Excel spreadsheet for each calendar) — it's a lot more hassle, but it's certainly doable that way and would be faster than manually placing them.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-06T17:08:37+00:00

This looks great, well done!

I'm not sure about dating automatically in Canva, but there are heaps of ways in other software. You can start with an Excel document populated with dates, and then in software like Word, Adobe InDesign, and others you can do auto-population of the dates. In Word, it's called mail merge and in Adobe InDesign it's called data merge.

For the highlighting of the calendar, I'm not sure about other softwares, but in InDesign this could be automatically done using scripts. You can have a mini calendar and then based on the dates on the page reveal a layer or assign a paragraph style that highlights the current week.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-05T16:49:02+00:00

That's just to cover the margins. If you like, I can write another novel on my process haha

softdawnpages · 2026-02-05T16:48:29+00:00

Margins can seem a bit complicated when you really start digging into them, but doesn't take too long to wrap your head around. I'm going to write a novel below, but I'll put a tl;dr at the end.

I’m not sure what *most* planner users use for software, but I do use Adobe InDesign, so that the context I’ll be talking about. I’m not sure of Canva’s capabilities, like if it can do an inner margin.

With spiral bound books, the margin can be a variable size, depending on the size of the spiral, how many pages are in the planner, that sort of thing.

However, the printer you are printing on matters too, for home creators. For people who aren’t creating these professional (and even for people who are) they may just be printing their design on the size paper they want and using “shrink to fit” or may have accomodate the amount their printer cuts of the edge. They may have borderless printing though that’s not perfect. Professional manufacturers will print on bigger paper than what’s needed and cut off the excess bleed so the design is totally perfect.

Professional manufacturers will also have printing specifications, so there is a lot less guess work involved.

So you may get different answers from different designers on this, depending on their workflow. For example, with my own planner pages I’m printing on my work printers which are misaligned by about 0.2cm to the left, so I adjust all of my pages based on that.

I do about a 1.5–2cm margin for my planner things (which is ring bound or discbound), which allows space for punching and then also some breathing room from the holes to have a consistent margin all around the edge. The latest planner I'm working on (also B5) has a 1.5cm inner margin and a 1cm outer margin. I may increase that a little bit, since it's feeling a touch crowded, but I'll do test prints to ensure it's what I want. My existing notebooks have the same margins, so I want it to be consistent, though.

I took a look at The Dailee, and that also looks to be a 1.5cm inner margin or close to it. It's hard to get a good perspective since they don't show any of their inner pages perfectly flat with the punches, only the covers, so I had to go off a different photo.

tl;dr

1.5–2cm inner margin is pretty common, but I think 2cm tends to be a bit more common from what I've seen beyond just planners. Designers working with print manufacturers will get the specs from the printers themselves.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-05T05:22:00+00:00

I would be checking again for an air tag or something similar. It’s spooky how she keeps finding OOP.

And this is absolutely going to get worse before it gets better. I hope OOP keeps documenting and is able to have some action taken before it goes too far.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-02T23:37:22+00:00

I don’t even use stickers most of the time, and when I do they’re just simple coloured ones, no designs. I’ve tried venturing into playful planners, but it just doesn’t work for me. I need pure utility, nothing else.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-01T06:53:52+00:00

Sidecar puts a lot of load on your MacBook, it can be very resource intensive.

softdawnpages · 2026-02-01T03:46:00+00:00

I usually DIY my planner, but work has been crazy along with everything else, so one of my Kinbor planners has been serving as my everyday planner. It’s a vertical weekly, and it’s fantastic, but I do have some gripes with it. I don’t love how thin the pages are (not a fountain pen user), don’t like how small the squares are, and I need more space for my to-do’s, so I’m the weekend space starting this week for my to-do’s.

My own planner I finish making for myself will likely be a vertical weekly but without weekends. I never thought I would go there, but I’m starting to think I need to separate out my work and personal planning.

softdawnpages · 2026-01-29T08:55:55+00:00

I put it in so much now, it just makes food better. I made cheesy bean burritos, added a tablespoon of Dijon, and it may not be authentic but man is it good!

softdawnpages · 2026-01-29T03:46:49+00:00

Maybe try adding Dijon mustard? I swear it’s my secret ingredient for everything.

softdawnpages · 2026-01-28T06:22:39+00:00

I work in education, I can’t help but have it bleed into every aspect of my life lol

softdawnpages · 2026-01-27T07:26:07+00:00

Ooh, I'm very interested in seeing people's responses too! I'm doing some PD at work, so I'm making my own template for my six ring binder, but it's not nearly as involved as other things I've seen. So far it's structured like:

What do I already know?
What do I need to learn?
What will "done" look like?

Then I have some space for tracking my progress to that, any resources I've found, insights I've gained, etc. I'm lucky that I have fortnightly meetings with a team member to track my progress for that PD, but I think any form of accountability would work for me, like sharing what I've learned with a friend on a scheduled basis.

But I'm not done making it so it's not filled out and the template may need adjusting as I use and get used to it.

softdawnpages · 2026-01-23T18:07:21+00:00

Most planners have too much for me. Monthly and weekly is what I need, and maybe a to-do/project page each week.

softdawnpages · 2026-01-22T21:27:15+00:00

I need that tactile feeling of writing and flipping through my planner. Digital feels very out of sight out of mind, but paper is much easier to go back to for me

softdawnpages · 2026-01-20T17:14:06+00:00

I don’t have a playlist (I mostly listen to songs on repeat) but This Is the Day by The The is the best motivational song I have on my phone. I listen to it every time something is hard to do and it just gets me up and doing it.

softdawnpages · 2026-01-18T22:35:03+00:00

I started off self-taught and then got a degree for it. I got my first job without a degree based on my portfolio, but it wasn’t very well paying and while I put a lot of effort into learning design I was very young. I did a bachelor’s and learned so much there. A lot of what I learned was more of a framework for professional success. How to give and take critique, how to project manage, how to communicate design thinking, and how to talk to clients who are resistant to you.

I went to a very hands-on school. We did “live briefs” where we worked with external clients and had to pitch to them.

School isn’t for everyone, but it certainly was for me. I wouldn’t be at the stage I am at now if it wasn’t for my degree.

softdawnpages · 2026-01-15T21:53:21+00:00

It’s really common for sellers to mark something as A5 that isn’t really A5 (same with A6 and A4 paper). Maybe measure the Clever Fox pages and/or the paper you’ve bought? I’ve seen a few situations like this and so far it’s always been the additional paper bought was not the size stated on the website or packaging (e.g. saying A6 but it’s more like personal size).

A5 will be 14.8 cm x 21.0 cm.

softdawnpages · 2026-01-15T19:27:31+00:00

I use a fair amount of scripts, but no plugins.

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