Have you seen all those pretty planning pages on Instagram?  Bullet journal pages that look like works of art?  If you’re like me, you’re thinking there’s no way your pages could ever look like that without making bullet journaling your full-time job.  The Journal Guide from We R Memory Keepers is awesome, because this all-in-one tool makes a variety of trackers, checklists, banners, etc. doable.

Journal Guide

The concept behind the Journal Guide is pretty simple, but that’s the beauty of it.  It combines a number of “template”-type tools into one, so you can do as much marking as possible using the one single guide.

It’s a little bulkier than I’d expected.  I think I was expecting the ruler portion to be about the width of a regular ruler, but it’s extra-wide.  When you take it out of the package, it’s accompanied by a sort of pamphlet-y thing that shows you the options.  There are no extensive instructions or anything, just examples.

Bottom of the Journal Guide – The Ruler Portion

Most of this ruler portion is pretty self-explanatory.  You can see what you’re able to do with it.

• The side edges have rulers — one for metric, one for imperial.
• The bottom-left corner is a rounded corner, enabling you to create rounded corners for boxes.
• The bottom-right corner is a 45-degree angle, enabling you to create angled corners for boxes, or to bisect checkboxes on the diagonal.
• The angle brackets at the top of the center column are useful for “ribbons” and banners.
• This is followed by a trio of lines for making checklists.
• After that are trios of round and square checkboxes (and check circles?).

The checkboxes (and circles) are spaced to match the lines, and all of these are lined up along a solid line that helps you keep them aligned if you’re using them more than once in a row.

I have some examples here of elements I drew to test it out.  They’re a bit sloppy because I was just trying to get a feel for this.  One thing I did learn from this process is that there’s a little bit of a learning curve to lining up the ends of the template where you want them, because of the way a writing implement doesn’t go quite to the end/edge. I’d recommend using this with a pencil and then going over your lines as needed.

They say you can also create small pockets by folding paper around this portion, but I found that a little awkward, personally, because the center of the ruler is slightly raised; it isn’t perfectly flat all the way across.  It’s nice to know it’s a possibility, but it isn’t a primary feature I’d depend on this for.

Top of the Journal Guide – Round Portion

The upper portion of the guide is a bit less self-explanatory.  It still isn’t difficult to use — in fact, it’s surprisingly easy — but you’re less likely to just look at it and know what to draw.  It’s more about drawing what you already know you want to draw that’s based on symmetry around a point.

This upper portion spins.  So you hold the ruler in place, put the point of your pen or pencil in one of the holes, and you can rotate it all the way around.  You can see what I mean by looking at the series of (sloppy) concentric circles I drew in the picture above.

There are two sets of holes.  One is a row of “dots.” You would just put a pencil in here and spin the disc all the way around to draw a circle.  That’s what I used for the circles shown above, and you can see how they’re spaced because I used all of them here.

In addition to the row of “dots,” you’ll find a series of twelve slits, evenly spaced around the outer portion of the circle.  These are perfect for making trackers.

Obviously, if you use them exactly as they’re spaced, you’ll get twelve sections.  Spin them around so one of the lines aligns with the row of dots, and create a second set of slits to get twenty-four sections.  You can space them any way you want if you measure the location first and then use slits only for drawing the actual lines.  It’s pretty flexible.

Summing Up

This is a pretty hand tool — and makes a great gift!  It’s also small enough to be workable as a stocking stuffer.   (It’s bizarrely difficult to find on Amazon via search, though, so save the link!)

How would you use the tool?  Do you have ideas for markings that aren’t so readily obvious?