Nine journals and counting

So that’s nine journals filled since 2020. You can see some early enthousiasm in the number of journals per year! At the same time, still doing these four years later, so the habit sticks.

Building journals

The main success factor is making the barriers to create and fill these as low as possible:

• Standard dimensions
• Fill sections, not books
• Have a ’this always works’ format for filling a page

These journals are A5 size: 21 centimeters high, about 15 centimeters wide. I create 16-page sections by folding four A4-sized sheets once. Four sheets of A4 paper makes for a 16-page section. These sections are not bound together yet. This allows for shuffling pages around while the sections are being filled. You can see three sections lying next to the journals in the photo.

Fill eight sections and another 128 page journal is ready for binding. I select two prints on heavier paper for the back and the front, then ask Melanie to turn it all into a book.

So have low barriers to starting one, and outsource the final stage of assembling it. Having a bound journal delivered back to you is a fun and valuable gift to self.

Journal contents

A journal is a private space, a safe environment to think, explore, write and draw your mind. Mine have quick life drawings, left-over (mono-)prints, abstract doodles, writing and a lot of mind-mappy breakdowns and sketches of whatever I’m trying to figure out at that time. To-do lists not so much, those would get lost in the shuffle.

Materials used most often: fountain pen, pencil and our large collection of Posca markers.

This always works to get a page filled: Lynda Barry’s daily journal format, sometimes in my modest extension of it (a post in Dutch).

I could still do a lot better in reviewing them and pull out the interesting ideas and combine things across multiple journals. My Bildung 1 zine consists mostly of selections for the first four zines. There’s enough material to do another one like that for sure.