Naming Your Style

& Navigating the Stationery Marketplace

January 23, 2023

This “Naming Your Style” series will explore the whys and hows of arriving at a self-defined, distinctive journaling style that reflects your personality, taste, and vision.

Part 1 is all about getting started, which includes understanding motivations and common setbacks.

Next, Part 2 will look at simple tools and fun methods (with plenty of pictures!). That exploration continues in Part 3, providing a step-by-step extended example, to illustrate this process in a practical and personal way.

Finally, this series concludes in Part 4 with strategies for keeping options open, and honoring different aspects of your personality. You may want to make room for detours, variations, and transformations in your style.

Stationery style is a big subject, and as you can see, this article covers a lot of terrain. It’s divided into parts to encourage you to explore the material and ideas at your own pace, pausing if you wish between sections to reflect or try techniques.

Find Your Compass

One decisive way to cut down on stationery “overwhelm” is by knowing and trusting your preferred style. Seek it out, give it a name. Then let it become your compass.

Making this conscious effort to define a personal aesthetic code brings certain advantages. For one thing, it is a solid starting point for sticking to a budget.

Learning to identify and understand what truly gets your creative juices flowing will provide a clear focus for guiding your artistic or planner projects through the vast ocean of desirable stationery supplies and journaling systems.

Even so, at times the waves will try to toss your little explorer boat around, this way and that. But with your trusted style “compass” in hand, you’ll gain confidence and clarity to plot out a creative course that feels authentic, and that is uniquely your own.

Getting Started: Interview Your Creative Self

“Finding” a style that feels authentically yours is a highly individual process.

It will unfold naturally in the course of time, if we’re patient (more on that later). However, we can give it a little jumpstart by asking ourselves direct questions.

These could include, for example, any of the following line(s) of questioning:

• What is it exactly that leads me to prefer certain artists/journalers/designers over others?

• What design elements am I drawn to repeatedly?

• What textures do I prefer in paper/tape/stickers (matte or shiny, rough or smooth, slick or soft)?

• What stationery ingredients instantly spark joy? Is that spark a short-lived fancy, or does it endure and grow brighter, each time I interact with certain types of items?

• What can I happily do without, for now, and feel lighter or freer?

• Do I share the stationery community’s enthusiasm for [fill in the blank]? (Think about popular categories, such as Traveler’s Notebooks, ink, letterpress, or wax seals.)

• Are certain journaling systems awkward for me, pulling “against the grain” of my nature or personality?

• What colors are my go-to favorites? (Think in general terms, such as earth tones, pastels, jewel tones, deep shades, soft tints, light neutrals, or bright primaries.)

Don’t rush yourself. It is often helpful to let such questions seep in. Create mental space. Answers may arise spontaneously, or bubble up a few insights at a time.

A Fun Exercise: What Is My Perfect Palette?
Imagine you’re a painter whose palette only holds 10-15 colors. What/how do you choose? Will it have all the basics (primary colors for mixing), or feature your favorite blends?

Take Time for Reflection and Observation

If you’ve been creating journal pages or planner spreads for a while (a year or more), you have probably already developed quite a strong general sense of your personal tastes and techniques. You’ve seen how your creative choices evolve with practice.

You may have dabbled in a range of visual styles, tried lots of materials and motifs. Perhaps you dipped into different journaling communities. There are many, such as nature journalers, urban sketchers, planner-sticker fans, Hobonichi diarists, bullet journalers, junk journalers, Bible journalers, scrapbookers/crafters, and fountain pen connoisseurs, to name just a few. (That set of hashtag searches alone yielded over 26 million Instagram results!)

You might even have assembled a private dragon’s hoard of art supplies. Some became your favorite tools, while others sit unused, looking pretty but collecting dust. Do these treasures continue to delight? Have some become reminders of false starts or “wrong” turns? Or gentle reminders of paths not taken, in your creative journey?

Define Your Style

Any time is a good time to explore your own creativity. But when is it the right time to step back and decide, define, or refine your overall approach and goals?

When you’re first starting out and not quite sure what your style is or will be, or if you have dabbled but remain undecided, it can feel intimidating—and overwhelming—to navigate all the options.

You may observe in awe the array of diverging taste cultures. They stretch across the spectrum from simple to sophisticated, from freeform to conventional, from spontaneous to meticulous. Together, a winding latticework of branches forms the vast ‘family tree’ of the ever-growing global stationery community.

I spent my early journaling years, especially after I joined Instagram, feeling like a pinball in a machine, bouncing and bumping and bumbling all around without clear direction. I tried to acquire too many skill-sets at once, a recipe for frustration. My early efforts were cluttered, choatic, cringeworthy.

First came my kawaii phase, in which I hoarded cute stickers. Wikipedia summarizes kawaii, originating out of Japan, as “the culture of cuteness” which “can refer to items, humans and non-humans that are charming, vulnerable, shy and childlike.” I submerged my planner in kawaii decor, ecstatically embracing my first stationery crushes, such as Etsy’s Happy Cutie Studio, Taiwan’s mischievous Machikko, Japanese bear Rilakkuma, and especially Korean bunny Molang, whose website affirms: “Molang is all about empathy, softness, tenderness and joy. … MOLANG cares for everyone and everything.”

When I eagerly got my first Hobonichi Techo back in 2019, my planner spreads were jam-packed with adorable stickers, bright pastels, and hand-scribbled notes. They were as far from my current monochromatic, minimalist approach as possible!

My earliest Hobonichi Techo spreads, January 2019. Note the bright pastel markers.

Quickly, I began to feel that I was imitating (awkwardly) other people’s styles. The only way forward was to stake out some territory for myself. A small plot on which to plant some seeds of my own creativity to see what might sprout.

After much experimenting, flailing about, failing, and starting over, I gradually arrived at a looser, more abstract and spontaneous art journaling style that feels authentic and comfortable—that “fits” well.

I started to home in on a particular visual style, calling it “eclectic Zen-kawaii.” This was an attempt to bridge two categories—serene + cute—that consistently captured my imagination. I hoped to unify my competing interests. I added the qualifier “eclectic” to ensure wiggle-room for experimenting with diverse cultural influences.

My recent style strives to make minimalist “Zen-kawaii” statements, such as this little memo for a friend commemorating Year of the Water Tiger, in October 2022.

That shift didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t an especially smooth transition, either. You may face similar ‘crises’ of creative identity. Certainly, mine is still unfolding and evolving in unexpected ways.

Build Your Map

Earlier this week, I received an e-mail newsletter, in which a designer named Jessica (a British jewelry brand ambassador and former lifestyle journalist) sums up her personal style in just three words: “Minimalistic, comfy and classic.”

Arriving at such a succinct formula, no doubt, took years of self-discovery and thoughtful exploration. A style takes time to cultivate. But why not start where we are?

The next part in this series will consider a variety of possible models and tools that anyone can use to design a personal style ‘map’ or ‘key.’ We’ll see a broad assortment of styles (about ten) in map form.

CONTINUE TO PART II: “Design Your Personal Taste Map”