After writing a post to help those looking into Designing and Producing a Journal, I wrote a follow-up article about how to Produce a Journal in a Small Quantity. I got a response to those posts from an American creator who is planning a journal and needed to know how to prepare his ideas and files for me to format for printing. This post will share with you what I shared with him, so that it’s easy to work with a professional book designer to get your journal into print.
Photo by Hope House Press - Leather Diary Studio on Unsplash
Your book designer needs two or three files from you to begin to design and lay out your journal, and this is what they should contain.
File 1: Main content of the journal - just one copy of each page
Journals are unlike most other books in that they have a lot of repeating pages. In your file, you may have repeated the pages multiple times to see how they look when repeated. But before sending the journal to your designer for design and layout, you should just include one copy of each unique page or each piece of content. For example, maybe you want to have 50 pages with grid lines, or 20 notes pages in the back. Your designer just needs to see one of each kind of page, otherwise it can be unclear if there are differences between different pages.
File 2: Journal outline
Next, prepare a text file with an outline listing all the planned page numbers or page ranges, and what should appear on each page. This is a very simple example, but this gives you the idea:
Title page (page 1)
Copyright page (page 2)
Intro letter (page 3)
Background Story (pages 4-5)
How to use this Journal (page 6-7)
Habit tracking page (page 8)
Monthly goals page (pages 9)
Daily pages (pages 10-40)
REPEAT pages 8-40 five more times (41-200)
Summary goals pages (page 201-202)
Order page (page 203)
Closing page (page 204)
Of course, every journal is different, and your content might be more complex. But an outline like this is invaluable, both in your planning and for your book designer to know which pages should repeat, when and how!
Remember that if your book is printing digitally, the final page count should be a multiple of four, and if it’s printing on a traditional offset press, it should (probably) be a multiple of sixteen — double check with your printer if you’re not sure how your journal will be printed.
File 3: Other filler material
Although many pages in a journal may be similar, they may have different quotations or decorations or something to differentiate each repeated page a tiny bit. If you want, for example, a different quotation on each of the daily pages (in the example above, that would be 30 x 6 = 180 quotations) it’s best to just list these 180 quotations in a separate simple text file in the order in which they should appear.
What else to tell your journal designer
Your book designer also needs to know about your style and/or your brand, to give visual direction to your journal project. For pages that are more complex visually, sharing a picture of a rough sketch you’ve made or a screenshot of a similar page gives your designer a starting point to understand what you’re wanting to achieve! If there are any other journals that you like or want your journal to sell next to, screenshots or links to similar journals are useful for your designer to see the kind of final product you’re picturing. You can share this visual direction in a document file with graphics in it, or through a folder with jpegs in it.
I hope this article has aided you in your journal design journey! I’d be happy to work on more journal cover designs and interior layouts. If you’re my type, let’s talk about your journal and get it into your audience’s hands! Or go ahead and book a one-hour brainstorming session with me to get a head start on your journal planning and production! I’ll save you a lot of trouble by sharing what I’ve learned through trial and error with my journal design clients, sharing which printer we have used most successfully, and whatever else you want to know!