Page shapes worth stealing, drawn blank. Every element here says what it is — writing, a table, a drawing, something pasted in — and never what it says, because the shape is the part worth copying and the words are yours.
Nothing here is a measurement. Every layout is proportions, so it holds at any page size and any grid spacing; to land those proportions on real dots, count the run along your own page and look it up in the dot grid divisions.
Ruling means writing. A grid means a table — anything you will want to read down a column. A dashed edge means drawn by hand, and it is dashed because that is the one edge on the page you are not going to rule. A crossed box is something pasted in: a print, a ticket, a pressed leaf. A bar down the side is a line borrowed from somewhere else, or one saved for later.
Pages you rule before you write on them. A grid is a promise about tomorrow — it decides where things go while you are still calm, so the day does not have to.
One page
The workhorse, and the one to rule first: a band for the date and everything else left open. The band matters more than it looks — it is what stops a day from starting halfway down the page, and it gives you somewhere to write the date without stealing the first line.
One page
A narrow cue column for questions and keywords, the notes beside it, and a band across the foot for the summary. The summary band is the point: reserve it before you start writing, because the whole method is having somewhere to say afterwards what the notes were supposed to add up to.
One page
A gutter down the left for the hour and the rest of the width for the entry. Keep the gutter narrow — it holds “09:00” and nothing else — so the entry column stays wide enough to write a sentence in rather than a word.
One page
Two lines, four boxes, no hierarchy. Good for anything that sorts along two axes — urgent against important, or simply four buckets to empty your head into — and good because it is the fastest layout on this page to rule: halve it, halve it again.
A spread — two pages
Seven days across two pages, which is where the awkwardness of seven goes: three days on the left, two on the right, and the weekend halved into one band because Saturday and Sunday rarely need a full day's room. Every day gets the full width of its page, so the long entries have somewhere to go.
A spread — two pages
A month grid split down the spine: Monday to Wednesday on the left page, Thursday to Sunday on the right. The fold falls inside the week rather than between two of them, which is the trade — the grid reads across the spread, but each page is still ruled on its own, in threes and in fours.
Pages you arrange. A composition decides afterwards, once you know what the page is about, and it can do the three things a grid cannot: let something run off the edge, set a block a degree or two off square, and let one thing sit on top of another.
One page
One drawing, given far more room than it needs, running off the top edge so the specimen feels bigger than the page. Everything else is subordinate to it: a narrow column of notes down the side, measurements in a small hard table, and a line at the foot for the thing you noticed that the measurements will not hold. The page is mostly the drawing, which is the point — it is a record of having looked at something.
A spread — two pages
The left page is one photograph, full bleed, with the caption sitting on top of its lower edge and a ticket tucked in at an angle — the layer order is the story, because the caption and the ticket were both added after the picture was already there. The right page is the writing, kept deliberately plainer, with the map running off the outer edge so the place continues past where the page stops.
One page
Two columns that are honestly different: a table for the things you can count, prose for the things you cannot. The dish is drawn once, at the top corner and off the edge, because a recipe page is worth keeping only if you can tell at a glance which one it is. The borrowed line near the foot is where the recipe came from — the part that makes it yours rather than a printout.
One page
A page that has to hold three incompatible things: a passage of music, numbers that only mean something in a row, and an honest sentence about how it went. So the stave gets a band of its own across the top, the numbers get a table, and the sentence gets the width of the page — with a row of small boxes at the foot for the one thing you will actually check back on, which is not the tempo but the mood.
One page
No grid at all, and much more white space than feels comfortable — a page where the emptiness is doing the work. The fragments sit apart and slightly off square, the way they come back to you, and the drawing in the middle is the one image that stayed, given the centre because it earned it. Written straight into a ruled column, the same material would read as a list of things that did not happen.
A spread — two pages
The beats step down and outward on each page — the same move, made twice — so the spread has a direction you feel before you read a word of it, and the fold is where it restarts. A drawing hangs off each outer edge, bracketing the whole thing between two images, and the closing line at the foot is the only element on either page that is level: everything above it is still moving, and that one is not.
A spread is not a third kind of thing: it is two pages, ruled or arranged one at a time, that happen to be open at once. Anything that spans the fold has to survive being read across it — a grid can, a sentence cannot, and a drawing can if it is the drawing you meant to put there.