When it comes to OneNote, most of us know about its wonderful notetaking abilities on an infinite canvas. But here's a hidden secret use of OneNote: it's perfect for making beautiful aesthetic planners accessible from all your devices!
PS: free pink marble weekly planner is available in the freebie-stash!
Steps to Building a OneNote Aesthetic Planner
Build your rough planner with simple OneNote tables, shapes and tags. This is just a rough and plain design of what you want to include in your planner.
Choose a theme that you really like. If you're feeling lost, I suggest going onto Pinterest and just looking at existing planner layouts.
Search for notebook assets that match your theme: fonts, background image, colour palette, stickers. (NOTE: OneNote does have limited colour options, so do check out what is available first)
Decorate your planner with your new fonts, images, colours and stickers!
Video Tutorial: Pink Marble Weekly Planner
Join our private attic's freebie stash to get access to weekly free templates!
Adding Fonts
To customise the headings, you can replace them with any fonts that you downloaded online. Currently, my favourite go-to font for cursive writing is hello honey! Do note that this font is only for personal use only, so if you want to make these planners to sell, you will need a commercial license for it.
While OneNote supports installation of new fonts, this is not applicable to all fonts out there. (hello honey is one of them) So, to make them visible throughout your devices, I recommend keying the headings into a Microsoft Word document and taking a screenshot of them to paste in your OneNote page.
Adding Background Image
To add a background image, insert an image of your chosen pattern into the page that you am working on. After changing the orientation and size, simply right click and select 'Set Picture as Background'.
Now you can select any part of the planner without worrying about clicking on your background image!
Customising Tables
A good way to make your tables look aesthetically-pleasing is through the colours of your table and fonts! OneNote tables are also super customisable in their sizes, and you can stretch them as big or small as you want.
Bonus tip: make use of OneNote tags so that your contents become searchable!
Downloading & Importing the Free Template
You will need a desktop to do the importation before syncing this across your devices.
Step 1: Download the 'OneNote Aesthetic Tutorial' zip file from the freebie stash. Unzip the file in your computer.
Step 2: Using Google Chrome, go to OneNote Notebook Importer. Sign in to your OneDrive account for importation. Clear your cache if you encounter any error about signing in too many times.
Step 3: Click 'Import' and select the unzipped notebook folder. (DO NOT select on the individual contents)
Step 4: When done, click on 'View Notebook' then on 'Open in Desktop App' to open in your OneNote desktop app.
We would love to see your designs! Tag us on Instagram @theprivateattic to be featured!