Creating Notebook Style Post Images

I’ve had a few people ask me how I designed the blog post images in my rebuilding Wardrobe series and in this post I wanted to outline the simple process I use for doing it.

When I started the series I wanted to do it in a diary/journal format. Basically share my thoughts while building the app and have the dialog less about code and more about the decisions I’m making. Because of the journal aspect I thought it would be neat to have sketchnote style post images for each week. Of course creating these by hand would take me a lot of time and energy. Not only creating them, but also taking a nice photo.

I searched around and really didn’t find anything, but with some persistence I found a download of notebook mockups from a shady looking site. They were listed as free and maybe they were in fact open source but I didn’t want to risk it. I started searching some of the market place type sites to see if I could find a paid version.

I ended up finding a bundle that was even better:

These use Photoshop smart objects for the over-layed designs and was simple to use, even for a Photoshop newb like myself.

Now though, I needed a nice hand writing type font. I have a few installed but I wanted something different. So with more searching on Creative Market I found these:

Next I open up Sketch app and create my sketchnote¹ which I export and import into Photoshop. I prefer sketch over photoshop for all the things and this was easiest for me.

For the final images after I finish the code for the week I spend about 20 minutes finding one of the 45 included, then play with fonts and colors, and finally export it and hit publish.

I spent $50 total on the assets but I can now reuse these throughout the whole series no matter how many weeks it runs. To me what’s more important is by having all these from the same creator they will keep the same feel even though each week is different.

For the final results checkout my Wardrobe category. Hopefully you agree that they are neat for a non designer.