I designed my own diary for 2013

Having settled on my ideal layout for my diary, my mind turned to 2013.

My preferred layout (it now turns out) is to have a week to view, but with a to-do list in the view, as well as the days. Having browsed around on Filofax (why DON’T they have all their products available on all of their sites??????) I saw this layout:

(taken from the French Filofax site)

Well, I have no problem having my diary in French, but it would be nice to reclaim some of the real estate taken up by the calendar in the right hand page and to make the right-hand page have to-do instead of lines.

So, armed with Steve and Ray’s source files (see here or here) and a Word file I created myself, I set about designing a diary for 2013.

I can’t quite work out the printing on both sides of an A4 set-up and I am quite happy to print direct onto pre-sized paper, so my Word file was designed around printing on personal-sized paper.

I’ve also considered printing onto plain cotton cream paper and like the cotton-cream diary being in brown type/ink rather than black, so I incorporated that and made mine brown too. I sent an early version to my friend Gerard who gave me good feedback and also sent me some nice fonts. A bit more fiddling with it all followed and…

…ta da!!

This is the final version:

The diary has appointment times (I have small enough handwriting to cope with the line spacing of 0.4cm); Saturday and Sunday are the same size; the right-hand page has to-do checklists; the type-face is clean and modern (thank you Gerard!!) and the brown lines and type give a softer effect than black/grey. I printed this out on straightforward filofax plain paper as I don’t have any cotton-cream, but I will probably used cotton-cream ultimately.

What do people think?