Constructing a personalised discbound planner

Although I love creative hobbies, time is always a factor that means I don’t do them as much as I like. A few years ago, I discovered decorative planning, and this led me into into exploring the concept of making my own personalised planner (for me, that’s designing and printing my basic planner inserts, and then adding lots of stickers, washi tape and doodles, although others do full-on art in their planners).

Analog (‘paper’) planning is now partly a hobby and partly just a useful thing to help with general organisation, and, as 2022 approaches, I need to finalise the design and then print my inserts for the coming year.

Back in 2019, when I decided to make my own planner, the first thing I needed to decide on was how to bind pages together.

Using a ring binder (usually six holes for A5 planners) was one option, but opening and shutting the rings to access pages always seemed to be a faff, and I discovered how I much prefer disc binding, which works via punching mushroom-shaped holes in your page and clipping them onto discs. Discs, somehow, seem to get in the way less than rings, and it’s easy to just take a single page off the discs without all the pages escaping and cascading into your lap.

There is a large US planner brand that does ready-printed discbound planners, The Happy Planner, but they come in ‘mini’ and ‘classic’ sizes, seven and nine discs, respectively, when I prefer A5, which is eight discs; not that I’m not often tempted by buying a happy planner if I see one that’s particularly appealing!

My next step was to choose software to make the design. What you need here is software that will allow you to position elements onto a page in the locations you want and save that as a vector format, not as an rasterised image.

For a printed planner, you need to be able to set actual physical sizes. Of course, it’s easy enough to use a word-processing or a spreadsheet program for such a design, or you can make them in true publishing software. However, these programs can be pricy and hence I use the vector graphics program Inkscape, which is open source, although not without some frustration to learn to use, as well as you occasionally hitting the odd bug or two. Inkscape’s default file format is SVG.

Having decided on the style of the planner and the software, I now follow the process below to design and print my planner.

1. Set up blank pages

The purpose of having a blank starting page is to define the area you can add your custom design into.

As I discovered planning through Bullet Journalling (a method designed as a simple way to use a notebook as a personal planner; see https://bulletjournal.com), and those who use this system often use notebooks with 5 mm dot grid pages, rather than lined pages, I decided I’d also use a 5 mm dot grid as the main guide for ‘freeform’ areas. I find dot grids are great for giving some structure to pages but without being as obtrusive as lines.

To enable easy printing without worrying about margins, my Inkscape template area is a precise A4 (the standard paper size in the UK). Onto this, I set up a 2.5 mm grid in the software; I find doing this gives me the option to add 5 mm dot grids accurately but with a little flexibility when you want something to not quite be 5 mm apart.

To make my 5 mm dot grids for the blank planner sections easily, I use a plug-in extension, which James wrote for me.

Using the snap-to-grid alignment, each blank A4 page is set up with two 12.5 by 19 cm areas (26 dots by 39 dots) ready for cutting into A5 pages; these are postioned to give a little more space in the middle than at the edges, to allow for the space taken up by the punches, as well as some middle markers to aid cutting.

2. Design the custom layouts

If you are not going to buy a ready-made planner, of course you have so much flexibility to design what you want, but this can lead into an endless search for so-called ‘planner peace’ as you tweak and re-tweak the design.

My preferred planning system is to plan things weekly, over two sides of paper (called a planner spread), so it’s on that basis that I make my main planner designs. I only have a mono singled-sided printer, which is why all my layouts are black-and-white.

Planner layout

My main planning layout, after going through several iterations, is currently a to-do and shopping list left page, and dated right page. I’m right-handed, so having the right page as the main page means you can easily make a new note without removing the page. There’s a 1.5 cm header space at the top. I don’t have many day-specific tasks, so four slots is plenty! This leaves room for washi at the bottom of the A5 pages. Standard decorative kit box stickers are 1.5 inches across so, to allow those to fit well, the main space is 6.75 cm (to have dividing lines between days extend past the dots - which I just feel has more asthetic appeal) with decorative and sticker space on the edge of 4 cm.

Journalling layout

I also use my planner as my journal, although I’m very freeform with it, and a filled in page turns out as half planning and half journalling. For this layout, after the planner layout each week I have another spread for journalling. This is made a ‘horizontal’ format, and for me, demonstrating the advantages of designing your own layout, has more space, and not less on the weekends. The weekends are also designed to fit a happy planner box sticker (Sunday’s are 6.5 cm tall).

3. Add dates

I used to go ahead and adjust the files with my layouts directly, and re-type the dates 52 (or maybe 53) times for each year, re-saving each time, but that quickly gets old. So now, there’s another script to modify each page and automatically add the dates (this script is specific to my files, but the basis of it can be thought of as a find-and-replace). This saves the pages with a numbered file name to keep them in order.

4. Make a single PDF

When all the pages for a year are ready, I convert them from SVGs into PDFs and combine them together as one file in the correct order for printing. This does require some thought as you want to minimise the number of paper sheets you waste, and with extra planner pages for monthly overviews, for me this doesn’t work out so you can do it exactly with no waste, and I have a spare A5 page every month.

5. Print and punch

To stand up well to disc binding, the paper needs to be at least 100 gsm and non-recycled. When making your own planner, you can of course choose your preferred paper. I use 160 gsm Clairefontaine dcp; it’s very thick, although definitely paper and not card stock - in fact any heavier and my printer wouldn’t cope with it. Printing is quite time-consuming in a home set-up as you can’t just set it going and leave it. If you have a true double-sided printer, it would no doubt go a lot quicker.

Printing tips:

• Remember inkjet ink is water soluble - especially if you want to use any wet art media in your planner.
• When printing small pastel dots (mine are grey), then they won’t look like perfect circles on home printers, which use halftoning or dither to make the paler colours. You might need to fiddle with your printer’s quality setting, but bear in mind that what you notice when closely examining your planner pages, you don’t notice on a filled in sheet.
• If you are printing a single side at the time, note what side way round to load the pages by noting which side comes out as the top; then you are sure to load your paper in the correct way for the second side.
• Your print outs just won’t line up exactly between front and back, even from a double-sided printer. I check I am not too off, and don’t need to re-print a page, by holding up the paper and noting the alignment of the middle markers. Anything within a few mm won’t be noticeable when you make up the journal.

When you have your stack of printed A4 sheets, it’s time to chop it into the A5 pages. There are print shops that will cut it for you, but as those aren’t local to me, I next have the tedious job of using a paper trimmer. These aren’t the cheapest of gadgets, but are useful for all sorts of papercraft hobbies. I did quickly find that one with a rotary cutter is your friend for this process; blades in portable trimmers blunt very quickly.

Then it’s on to punching. Not all discbound punches are created equal; although all of the systems are interchangeable to some extent, as the spacing between the mushrooms is always the same, the actual cut outs made vary.

The punch that is most talked about as being ‘the best’ is made by Levenger, but it has a really hefty price tag to go with it. I’m using an Arc by Staples punch; the main criticism of this punch is that the stem on the holes are shorter than those in other systems, but with my paper it really does work well. This punch does have a stop, so lining up your paper is easy. You can also get disc punches that only do single sheets quite cheaply.

6. Enjoy

So after the work, here we are. Get out all the stickers, the washi, the coloured pens and get filling in your plans!

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Extra shots

• The invention and patenting of disc binding
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc-binding
• On paper planners
  https://medium.com/swlh/go-analog-the-benefits-of-paper-planners-a2ffa0755a4e
• Website of Heather Kell, a well-known decorative planner influencer (see the YouTube videos)
  https://kellofaplan.com