Update (11/9/19): We now have JIYU BK Planner available on our website (hooray!!!!) You can find the item here!
I feel lucky that I can experience and witness the importance of how a planner/journal plays in someone's life every day through the work of Baum-kuchen. When I hear our community talk about planners and journals, the tangible artifact is so much more than the physical presence of a bounded paper. I hear that a planner with a beautifully designed layout can help you feel organized. A tactile paper inside the notebook can nurture meditative moments when your flowing ink from the fountain pen touches the paper. Open-ended pages can become the most forgiving and kind container for your deepest thoughts both hopes and dreams as well as sorrows and griefs. Flipping through past daily pages can trigger your visual reminder of how accountable you were to live the day fully. I know this because I, too, have experienced personal growth through these pages. These notebooks have true purpose in our lives.
So when Frido and I started tossing the idea of designing the original BK planner to celebrate the BK 10th anniversary, the project quickly became our personal investment. "With limited real estate we have inside of the Traveler's Notebook size refill, what can we do?" became our constant question. We wanted to create a layout that allowed maximum freedom to customize what goes on each page while creating a sense of serenity and calmness that came with gentle order. As these pages get filled with life, we wanted the layout to fall back as a background. Each dotted grid important yet harmonious with the rest of the design. Frido painstakingly plotted every page of the planner using a pencil during his prototype phase. He was penciling in and erasing these tiny dots so many times; I thought he would disappear into the page. We wanted Tomoe River Paper to represent our design. Figuring out the paper size and quantity to import from Japan, which might be a familiar business to a printing professional, filled our memo pad pages with calculation. While we waited for Tomoe River Paper to arrive from Japan, we continued to test and tweak the design, moving a dot a millimeter this way and that way.
The result is our "JIYU" planner.
The planner pages are Tomoe River Paper (cream) and come with the below pages.
- 6 months overview page
- Goal setting page (which can be used for various long-term lists you would like to keep track of such as your reading list)
- Monthly pages (6 months)
- Weekly pages (6 months)
- Blank dot pages
Our current production schedule is pointing our launch date to be somewhere in November.
We are so thankful for all the support and encouragement we received from our community through our process. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!! We can't wait to share this baby with you when we are ready!
