font ideas for your journal

i’m the type of person who likes my journal pages to stand out and be different from each other, but sometimes i feel like i fall into a groove and only use the same font or two between pages. usually i’ll flip back a couple weeks or months in my journal and that’ll spark font ideas. i decided for my 2024 journal, i want a little cheat sheet somewhere near the front - a page that gives basic ideas where i pick and choose something from each category.

i recorded myself making this page for youtube, if you’re interested in that. i started out strong by explaining my process and then fairly quickly focused and stopped talking, so within a couple minutes i started doing a voice over to chat and explain what i was doing.

i started by gathering all my favorite writing utensils - pentel energel clean 0.4 mm, pilot g2 0.5 mm, tombow fudenosuke hard & soft tips, white gelly roll 1.0 mm, and a tombow dual brush pen (the color doesn’t matter for this).

you can write anything, but i started out writing ‘regular handwriting’ to get a visual on how my handwriting changes depending on the pen i use.

next i thought of different variations to make to my lettering - do i want to go over my regular handwriting a couple times to give it a messy/scribbly look? do i want to give the letters square or rounded ends? do i want bold block letters? maybe add serifs or write in cursive?

i also wanted to remind myself there is always something to experiment with - letter weight and height, upper/lower case or a mix? i can mix letter weights as well within the same word.

then i gave myself some examples i could use without giving too much thought to it.

i always love playing around with letters and seeing how i can make them work together. sometimes i don’t love the combination and that’s fine - i’ll leave my experiments in my journal and not replicate them. i think it’s important to document your journey because it shows you’re experimenting and later on, it could spark other ideas.

natasha <3

and a fun little extension on font ideas for my paid friends: