Design Your Own Weekly Planner

Being productive and able to manage time effectively is essential for designers, programmers, entrepreneurs… You carefully plan everything for the week, but you never know when a new task can unexpectedly come up and ruin your planning. 

With this new Freepik Academy tutorial, we’ll teach you a good way to plan your week out, allowing you to check all your tasks at a glance. In other words, you’ll learn how to design your own weekly planner and how to customize it to suit your needs.

To create the weekly planner, we’re going to use a pack of doodles from Freepik. Doodles can be useful to represent concepts and ideas in a funny manner, so find the ones that fit your theme. For this time of year, the “back to school” concept is perfect, so I’ll use some doodles about it. Here’s the link.

Before we start, we should determine the size of the document. To avoid any issue when printing, we suggest that you choose a standard format, such as A3 or A4. For this tutorial, we’ll choose A4 with a landscape orientation (297×210 mm). Since we’re going to work with vectors, changing the size of the document wouldn’t be a problem if we needed to do so later on. 

We’re ready to start. Open Adobe Illustrator and click Create new. 

Choose the A4 preset on the Print tab and set the orientation to landscape. Make sure the size is correct (297×210 mm) and the color mode is set to CMYK, since we’re going to print this work. 

Download the resource from Freepik and open it. 

Copy the resources by pressing Ctrl + C (or Cmd + C in Mac) and return to the new document. Press Ctrl + V (or Cmd + V in Mac) to paste them and place them next to the canvas so you can freely select the doodles that you want. 

Note: If you’re a Freepik premium user, you’re allowed to remove the Freepik signature from the design.

Now select the Rectangle tool (M) and create a 45×150 mm rectangle. Place it where the first day of the week will be.

Select the rectangle with the Selection tool (V) and, while holding Alt, drag it to make a copy. If you also hold Shift, you’ll be able to move it on one axis only. Once you have the copy, press Ctrl + D (or Cmd + D in Mac) several times until you have five or seven copies, depending on your planning.

Let’s assign a color to each rectangle. In our case, we’ll use the color palette that comes with the doodles. You may use your own palette or one from Coolors or Adobe Color.

Align all the rectangles so they are at the same distance. The distance from the green rectangle to the right border of the canvas should be the same than the distance from the yellow rectangle to the left border. Once you’ve done that, select all the rectangles and go to the Align panel (if you can’t see it, go to Window → Align). Make sure that you choose Align to Selection (so that the elements don’t align to the artboard) and click Horizontal Distribute Center. All the rectangles will align leaving the same distance between them.

Now, to give more dynamism to the shapes, try to deform the rectangles. To do this, grab the Direct Selection tool (A), select the corner nodes and move them around. 

You should have something similar to this:

Let’s place the text. For this design, we’ve chosen a handwritten font, Indie Flower, which fits the back to school theme perfectly. You’ll find this free font here.

Create a text box over the rectangles and type “Weekly Planner” using this font and a size of 55 pt. 

Create more text boxes, one for each day of the week. Use a size of 24 pt and white fill. 

Now you need to distribute the resources that you like in the composition. To do so, just drag them to wherever you want. If the elements end up behind the rectangles, select them, right-click → Arrange → Bring to Front.

You can also add icons to the composition. 

Our work is pretty much done. However, since the doodle pack came with a background full of notebook lines, let’s include that detail in our background.

Our weekly planner is done! We hope this tutorial will help you get inspired to create your own designs using our vectors. Thanks a lot! If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments.