Your Day Your Way

Idea

I’ve wanted to create something digitally, that I sold physically for a long time now and the idea of making my own daily mood journal has been also been on my mind for a while too.

Most mood journals tell you what you should be doing rather than just going with the vibe of each individual day. Each day is unique, after all. 

Unfortunately, A LOT of the mood journals on Amazon are, sadly, rushed mass generated nonsense hidden behind different covers. The worst is, they’re all made in greyscale to maximise profits, which makes them quite ugly inside. The majority of them are also plagued with spelling errors which really break your immersion.

So I figured I’d design a mood journal which allows for full control over the content, allowing you to tailor it to your own preferences. It gives people full control over what they put into the 15 unique sections without telling them where they should be putting content.

I had a lot of fun making this.

Development

My main focus here is to make something cool that might help at least one person out there, anything monetary I get from this is a bonus.

I really have to give it to Amazon, they make this process a lot easier than it should be for those who have the ideas but not the manufacturing possibility. I spent weeks thinking and designing what I’d want from a mood journal that I could customise. What sections would I want? Would anyone use this section? Are the boxes big enough? Is everything too crammed together? I probably spent most of the time lining everything up to pixel perfection, not that anyone would likely notice 😅

My lovely wife suggested that I add different coloured pages, and she was right, especially after seeing all the depressing greyscale mood journals on the market so I immediately went for the rainbow effect, which is pretty awesome when you flick through it quickly! 🔴🟣🔵🟢🟡

To match the colours, I wanted something vibrant as the logo/cover:

I originally made this with 365 pages in mind to cover the whole year. I got a proof requested, printed and sent to me but it was immediately clear there were multiple issues with this approach:

  • It was way too thick, it was difficult to write anything towards the spine of the book
  • It cost a fortune to print – 3-4 times the cost!
  • As my wife put it, it was quite overwhelming having such a chunky book, it felt quite pressuring to fill in so many pages

So, I went with 130 pages, just a little over 1/3 of the year, which fixed all of these issues 🙂 I also noticed a lot of blurring, so I increased the DPI from 300 to 600, ensuring there was also no JPEG compression.

So in Amazon’s terms, what I’ve made is considered a “Low Effort Book”, which it totally is when you compare it to the novels on the market that took years of people’s lives to write. These are under a lot of scrutiny by Amazon at the moment because there’s so much junk on their site, resulting in a lot of negative experiences for Customers. Thankfully mine was approved!

Promos

Purchase

Interested in purchasing Your Day Your Way? Click one of the below Amazon stores 🙂

UK | US | IT | NL | CA | DE | FR | ES | AU | PL | SE | JP

If you do purchase this, I’d love to hear your feedback either on the review section on Amazon or via the Contact page on my site.

Good luck on your journaling journey!

Ideas and Example

The whole point of this journal is that I don’t tell you what to do, but I do understand that this could be overwhelming. Thankfully, the beauty of this design is that you don’t have to fill everything in if you don’t want to 🙂 here are some ideas you could use in your journal:

  • Rate your day and/or mood
  • Your focus of today
  • Today’s goals
  • Draw a badass doodle
  • Monitor your water intake
  • Your meals
  • Track your period
  • Make a shopping list
  • Dreams
  • Notes
  • Measurement tracking
  • Steps
  • A little emoji for your mood
  • Stress levels
  • Energy levels
  • Vitamin or medication tracking
  • Sleep tracking
  • Stickers

Reviews

I’ve been using this journal for a few days now, and it’s by far my favorite. I love the variety of options it offers. I like using it to keep track of my progress towards making better life choices. Among other things, I wanted to get a better quality of sleep, and the clock helps me keep track of my bedtime. Unlike other diaries, I find this one enjoyable and fun, not punitive. I feel comfortable entering my daily tracking.
Amazon Review

Credits

Fonts

  • Desyrel – Handwriting examples and promotional material
  • Roboto – Logo, Calendar, List and promotional materials

Resources

Software and Tools