Design a notebook using Pitch Or Honey Font Trio

Hey everyone!

Recently, a friend contacted me to design them a custom notebook. Their idea was to have a dictionary-style notebook, where they could write a foreign word on one side and their translation on the other, creating a vocabulary handbook.

We discussed color options and the organization of the pages and decided on Pitch Or Honey for the letters and page numbers and accents. They were quite happy with the result, so I thought I would share the design with you (with their permission!), in case you like to make your own vocabulary notebook.

The inside pages

I will leave the cover up to you, but for the inside pages, it was important to have: the two columns, a divider, the letter of the alphabet and the page number.

1) Start by creating a new document, in the right size (A5 - in Photoshop, you can find it in the Print presets) and color mode (make sure you select CMYK, for printing).

2) Select the background color, by selecting Layer >> New Fill Layer >> Solid Color and selecting the color of your choice. We decided on a minty green.

3) Add the columns and the divider. Using the line tool, make the first column and then duplicate it. Change the line style to a dotted line to make it softer, in a contrasting dark green color. Then, add a divider in a solid line between the columns. Here's what we have so far:

4) Add the font. Use Pitch Or Honey Slant for the letter on top of the divider, Pitch Or Honey Sans for the page number, and for a little floral accent on top of the page number, you can use Pitch Or Honey Floral. The good thing about using one font family for the entire page design is that the styles are consistent, as well as the line widths. Plus, with just one font family, you don't have to worry about whether or not your fonts "pair well". It can save you a lot of time, headache and money! Here's what our page is looking like:

5) Optional: add a little extra visual interest. If you would like to make the background a little more interesting, in a very subtle way, you can add a handmade splatter or drawing element of your choice in white. With the light mint green, it looks very subtle and will not distract or interfere with your handwriting. Here's our final inside page design.

For our notebook, we were aiming at a total of 40 pages, including the cover. So that leaves 36 pages for the writing (minus two for an optional quote page, see below). Considering we have a different number of letters (26 in our case), some letters were duplicated (we chose the letters we thought would be used more often). You can obviously aim at a different number of pages, but just keep in mind if you are doing a dictionary-style notebook, it might be useful to have more pages for certain letters.

On a more practical note: I made each page separately and merged all the pages together in the final PDF, by clicking File >> Automate >> PDF Presentation then select Add Open Files. You need to make sure the order is correct, and I would consider flattening the images in each file first in order to keep the final file size manageable (especially if you have more pages).

Bonus: a quote page

If you are making a notebook for a particular purpose, you might have a quote or saying that is an inspiration, that you might want to have as your first page (or page zero) of your notebook. For my friend, they had a quote from their grandmother that they wanted to include. They wanted a typewriter vintage look, and we decided on Thesis Typewriter, which worked perfectly with the floral from Pitch Or Honey Floral and the splatters (that are actually packaged with Thesis Typewriter!). Here's what it looks like: