It doesn’t take long for the number of planners and notebooks you use to grow when you start digital planning. Be prepared to start using folders!

Custom covers are a great way to organise your digital planners, notebooks and journals. In this tutorial, we’ll look at 4 ways to use covers to our advantage.

Custom Digital Covers

Covers are more than purely aesthetic. They help you categorise, group, and identify planners, notebooks and journals at a glance.

In this tutorial, we’ll look at four ways we can use covers to help us organise and customise our PDFs.

1. Using the Same Design in Different Colours

This is a great way to categorise different areas of your life and work, or projects you are working on.

2. Using Different Solid Colours

I’ve spoken before about using a colour-coded sticker key in my digital planner. And, to get the best out of this idea, this key should ripple through everything else.

3. Using Different Designs in a Similar Style

Cover sets are often designed to work together. If you can find a set you like, this is a great way to have different covers for different PDFs, while making them work as a group.

In the tutorial, I’m using the Floral Grey covers, as they are a mix of labelled and unlabelled, so ideal for a mixed group comprising planners, notebook and journals.

4. Using Different Styles

Finally, you can use completely different styles on purpose, to help you separate work from home, or study from personal journaling, projects from ongoing work, etc.

I’ve selected a range of covers to illustrate this, but kept them all grey and yellow (not essential). So, they work well as a group and the colour connects them.

Custom Cover Ideas - Step-by-Step

Same Design in Different Colours

• In the first example, you can see I’ve chosen a notebook set of covers which are easy to tell apart.
• You need to find a set that has enough variation to fulfil your own needs.
• I like these because the colours match my planner stickers and so they fit nicely with my colour planner key.

Different Solid Colours

• In this example, it basically works the same as the example above - colours to differentiate.
• I’ve chosen solid planner covers as, again, they fit with the sticker set and my key.
• The other thing I like about solid colour covers is they are so easy to tell apart when you have a page full of them.

Different Designs in a Similar Style

• This is a set of covers, so they were originally designed to work together as a group as well as individual covers.
• This makes them ideal for grouping together a mixture of planners/notebooks/journals.
• This kit has labelled and unlabelled covers, so again this helps with the mixture in this group.
• The different designs make it easy to tell each one apart.

Different Styles

• And finally, this group uses completely different designs for each item.
• I’ve chosen yellow and black versions of each one, but it isn’t essential that the different styles are the same colour.
• It is more about using style to indicate the type of content.

Using Custom Covers on Digital Planners, Notebooks & Journals

As you can see, there’s more to digital covers than simply looking good!

If, like me, you like to keep things simple and fast when it comes to planning, using covers like this can help you take control of your burgeoning collection of planners, notebooks and journals. It can also help you group notebooks into collections, and find what you’re looking for at a glance.