Make your own Personal To Do pages

I've been trying to get my head around this Getting Things Done (GTD) business recently; I must say that it's proving to be a bit more complicated to get to grips with than I initially thought. So far I have decided that I'm in desperate need of more to do pages! I'm not sure whether or not this format goes against the GTD ethos, but you can never have too many to do pages as far as I'm concerned.

As with my previous personal tutorial, we need to start with a personal sized document. You can find my tutorial on how to make that here.

Platform: Mac

Software: InDesign CS5.5

Step 1: Knowing where to start
Before we can put anything on our page, we need to know where our lines start from, so drag a guide down from the horizontal ruler (rulers can be found under View > Show Rulers if you can't see them).

In the reference box, found at the top left of your screen, set the Y value to 13.7mm. Don't worry, typing it in metric and hitting enter will automatically convert the measurement into your unit of choice!

Your horizontal guide position.

Step 2: Making your lines
Using the pen tool, draw a horizontal line across your page, following your guide and within your margin box (as seen in the personal sized page tutorial). You can check that you're line is in the correct position using the reference box again.

The pen tool.

Now that you have your first line we need to make sure it has a softer presence on the page by using the stroke option box. If this isn't already on your screen use Window > Stroke to bring up the dialogue box. We're going to give our line a stroke of 0.3pt and rounded cap ends.

Your stroke box should look like this once you're done.

The next bit requires a touch of InDesign magic called step and repeat. Select your horizontal line with the black arrow and select Edit > Step and Repeat to bring up the box we want. A filofax to do page has 13 lines, including the top one, so we need another 12 with a vertical spacing of 12.6mm.

If you're following along, you should have something similar to this by now.

Before you click OK, check the preview box and make sure that the page looks right to you. This is the time to increase or decrease the line spacing, depending on your preference. As long as your line space isn't less than the size your check box; you;ll get more than a few overlaps if you do. I recommend having at least an extra 4mm on top of your desired check box size in order for your page to not appear too cramped if you go for narrow lines, e.g. 2x2mm box needs a line spacing of at least 6mm.

Now you may click OK.

Step 3: Making your check boxes
Every good to do list needs check boxes! If you prefer, you can leave these out all together and have a more free-form list style, but I like having a positive visual sign that I've completed a task and no longer have to worry about it.

Using the rectangle tool (if you would prefer circles, long click on the rectangle tool and select the ellipse tool from the list that pops up) click anywhere within your work space to bring up an option box where we can put the exact measurements we want.

The rectangle tool.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to be using 4x4mm squares, so whack that into your measurement boxes!

This will create one 4x4mm square.

Step 4: Positioning your boxes
Pop the box we've just made between line one and two. If you have smart guides on (found under View > Grids & Guides > Smart Guides) InDesign will let you know when you've positioned the box in the vertical centre. If you don't use, or trust, these to space your objects, we'll need to use the align tool to position them correctly.

Align to selection & distribute vertical centres (highlighted).

Once this is done, we have to step and repeat our boxes, as we did with the lines. While the spacing is the same, we only need 11.

Our page, now with boxes.

Step 5: Final adjustments
Just to make sure that nothing goes squiffy, all we have to do now is make sure that both our lines and boxes are:

1. Aligned to the right edges (or left if you'd prefer) of your margins.
2. All the horizontal centres of all the page objects are distributed correctly.

We can do both of these by revisiting our alignment box. Select everything on your page using the black arrow and hitting cmd and a together.

Align to margins & align right edges (highlighted).

Look familiar? Align to selection & distribute vertical centres (highlighted).

Step 6: Save and print
No that we all have something that looks similar to this (once you press W)...

Ta da!

All that's left to do is to follow this tutorial on saving and printing your pages, and punch holes in everything.

Hopefully this will help us all to Get Things Done!

Making your own narrow ruled personal pages

As requested by Mr. Anthony Hill, today's tutorial is going to be all about making your own ruled pages!

Platform: Mac

Software: InDesign CS5.5

Step 1: A small change
To start with, we must do something similar to my previous tutorial on making a personal sized page, except this time we need to make it three times as wide. As you can comfortably fit three personal pages onto an A4, tripping the width of our original file to 285mm will reduce the amount of paper wasted by our final product. Don't forget to include 3mm of bleed for possible movement during printing.

285 x 171 mm. Make sure that your document is set to landscape.

By pressing Cmd 1 you will be able to set your document to "actual size". Don't worry, this isn't really actual size (unless you have a huge screen) it just allows you to see the whole of your document.

This view allows you to see everything you are working on.

Step 2: The top line.
Feel free to use your own measurements for this next bit; I've opted to appropriate mine from the narrow ruled filofax pages I already own. Using the Pen Tool and holding down Shift, draw a straight line horizontally across the page, touching even the edges of your bleed marks.

the pen tool.

Your page so far.

This top line needs to be low enough to allow for the large top margin that is common on mined pages. I make it to be around 23mm from the top. Select your line with the black arrow, and adjust its Y Height on the page using the input box at the top left of your screen (that's where mine lives anyway).

The black arrow.

Est. Y height of your first line.

Step 3: More of the same.
Now comes the fun bit; adding the rest of the lines to your page. To do this we are going to use something called Step and Repeat.

How to find step and Repeat.

Give it a click and a dialogue box should pop up, giving you options on what to do next. We want to have around 30 lines on our page with a vertical spacing of 4.7mm between each. Selecting the preview box will allow you to see what we're going to do before committing to it.

Be sure to remove any value you may have in the horizontal box

Now we have our lines!

Step 4: Saving with crop marks
We've covered this in a previous post but just in case you missed it: File > Export > Save as a Adobe PDF (Print) > Click "Marks and Bleeds" > Select "Crop Marks" > Select "Bleed Marks" > Finally click Export.

Now with Bleed Marks!

Step 5: Our A4 page
Now we need to make the A4 page we are going to print form and import our three page PDF onto it.

We're after an A4 landscape and we're not goingto worry about all the extra bits and bobs. We just want a page.

All we have to do now is place our PDF. To do this we need to go through File > Place > find your file > select your file > then click anywhere on your screen to place the document.

You should have a stripy mess, not dissimilar to this one.

Step 6: Custom cutting marks.
This is where things get creative! So that we know where to cut our three pages, we need to make small marks of our own as guides.

Centre your PDF to the A4 page using the alignment tools, which can be found in the drop down Window menu, or you can use Shift F7.

 Select your PDF align it to your page using the Align Horizontal Centres (highlighted left) and Align Vertical Centres (highlighted right).

Photoshop magic was used to make this image.

Your page should now look like this...

Everything nice and middle-ey...

We need to make some vertical guides this time, using our old friend the Pen Tool. Make 4 of them, as we are going to need 3 pages. Align one to the left hand side of your PDF, one to the right hand side, finally select all your vertical lines and Distribute Horizontal Centres with the Alignment box. Remember to select Align to Selection in the Alignment box, otherwise things might go a bit squiffy. 

The end result should be something like this...

More lines.

Finally (Yes, finally!) we need to cut these lines so that they will not be visible after cutting out. Use the Scissors Tool in order to cut the middle of our two middle lines out.

Scissors Tool (C)

Click the lines just below and above the outside of our PDF page and delete the middle.

The final Result!

Step 7: Double sided printing
This part all depends on your printer. As we have centred our PDF to the A4 page, if you can re-feed your paper into your printer correctly, you should be left with a double sided page which you can window-cut out and hole punch to your hearts content!

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Any problems with this tutorial, please let me know. It wasn't the easiest thing to make, which could mean that it's not the easiest thing to follow. Pop any questions you have in the comments and I will respond and edit this post accordingly.

Good luck planer-ers!

How to print a custom page

Following on from my post on making a personal sized page, here's how to print your work of art.

While there are other ways to print our pages, I feel it is important to cover this method as it will make future designs that require it easier to cover.

Here we go! 

Platform: Mac

Software: InDesign CS5.5

Where we left off...

Step 1: Save as a PDF
In order to make our page printable and cut-out-able, we need to place it onto a page that our home printers can handle. The simplest way to do this is to save our document as a PDF. To do this go to File, then Export and save it where you like, making sure the file format is Adobe PDF (Print) by using the drop down menu at the bottom of the window.

File > Export

File Format

Step 2: Marks and Bleeds

So that we know where to cut once we've printed our pages, we need to include something called Crop Marks in our PDF. After clicking the save button, you should have a new dialogue box on your screen titled "Export Adobe PDF".

Saving with Crop Marks

All you have to do is click Marks and Bleeds, then select the box next to Crop Marks. Doing this adds marks to your PDF that allow you to cut it to the right size... as long as you cut it out like a window and not right to the edge of your A4 piece of paper.

Step 3: Placing on a page
Now we need somewhere to put our personal page. Make a new A4 landscape document, not worrying about all the fancy bleed and margin stuff we played with last time.

No need to be fancy here.

This should give you a blank A4 page on which we will be able to fit two personal sized pages!

Step 4: Placing our page

In order to place our personal page onto our new A4, we have to follow a pretty obvious sequence: File, Place, then find the document you want and click Open! You should be left with something like this...

Page-ception!

If you think this looks odd, try hitting "W" for a print preview.

Our page to print, minus the margins and boundary boxes.

How's that for weird?

It's up to you whether you print your page now or play Tetris and try to fit as many personals onto your A4 page as possible.

Step 5: Printing
All that's left for us to do is print by following another exceptionally obvious path: File, Print!

It really couldn't be any easier :)

The dialogue box that follows isn't important to us right now, so make sure that your printer is on and click print again!

Your lovely pages should be with you soon after.

Step 6: Spend far too long punching holes in your pages...
I highly recommend using a filofax hole punch of the relevant size, or carefully punching them with what ever jiggery-pokery you use to get your pages to fit into your binder.

If there is enough interest, I will cover how to mark out where the holes should go, in a future post.

Happy printing! :)

Making a Personal sized page

As this is my first tutorial on making bespoke inserts for your filofax I'm going to go over the basics and try to be as detailed, and as straight forward, as I can.

Platform: Mac

Software: InDesign CS5.5

Step 1: Page Size
Before we do anything we need to know what size page we are going to be working with, so start by choosing the organiser you want to use and find the right paper size for it using the official filofax size guide, shown below.

Official filofax paper sizes.

I'm going to be making a page for my Personal sizes filofax, so it needs to be 95mm (9.5cm) wide by 171mm (17.1cm) high. If you're using the US site the measurements are given in inches; due to the nature of the imperial measuring system, the sizes are not 100% correct. I recommend using millimetres and centimetres as a more accurate alternative.

Be sure to set your orientation to portrait, if you're following along.

Step 2: Margins
The margins of the page will help up make sure that our content is correctly placed on the page. This means that we shouldn't lose any content in the centre margin where the rings live or come uncomfortably close to the outer edges of the page, though it does appear that filofax likes to run its lines right to the edge on its note paper.

Feel free to measure your own existing pages for spacing. For now I'm going to use my own readings from a filofax address page.

Remember to 'break the link' between the measurements.

As this is for a right hand page, the left margin needs to be bigger. If we were to make a left hand page, the left and right measurements would have to be swapped.

Step 3: Bleed
Adding a bleed to our page allows us to add features, designs or colour, that extend right to the very edge of the page by letting it print beyond it for us to cut off later. 3mm should be enough for us to work with and not waste too much ink or paper. You can ignore the Slug.

Leave that slug to its lettuce!

Step 4: Click OK!
Give that friendly looking OK button a slap, we're ready to make our page!

You should be left with something that looks a bit like this...

Black = page. Purple = margin box. Red = bleed.

That's how to make a personal sized page in InDesign!

I will show you how to print this later on this week because this post is already far too long :)