How to Make a Planner Page in Canva ｜ Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners

Have you ever wanted to launch your own planner business, but you just don't know where to start? Many people are always having, making planners, starting planner businesses, but really don't make planners itself. So you have not met me. My name is Coach Tam. I am the journal queen and AKA stationary queen teaching thousands of women how to start their journal or planner business. And today I'm going to show you quick ways on how you can launch your planner with a very themed page, very clean and simple right inside of Canva. If you are a beginner, stick around because you're in for a treat. So we're going to go right into Canva and I just want to show you exactly what you need to do to get started. It is not about the 200, 300 page planner. It is about a focus planner that you can sell to your customers today. So let's get started. We are in Canva here. I am basically, I'm in what you call the journal template of Canva, which is, we'll go over here so you can see it is a eight and a half by 11, right? Eight and a half by 11. And so what you're going to do is you're going to go in here into this template, eight and a half by 11. I'm first going to just go through the basics. There's two things that make a planner extremely profitable, not just the cover, but is what you represent in your business. So for me, we've made seven figures in our stationery business, selling journal kits, supplies. I've taught thousands of women, went on tour showing all of these women exactly what they need to do. Here is the biggest issue that I see amongst people who are launching their planner business. So first of all, creating a theme. Theme planners go a long way, right? Whether you're vintage, luxury, maybe you are creating a study planner, maybe you are creating a planner for your kids' homeschool group. However, a themed planner is what really sells, all right? So I love creating themes. Let's start right now with, of course, we're in the fall. So let's go over here to elements. Elements is the basic place where you will find all of your elements right inside of Canva. I'm just going to do a quick cover just to show you exactly how you can get started. So in Canva, you can search for any element and it's just being intentional. I'm going to show you quickly how you can layer elements, which is one of my favorite things to do. I teach design in many different ways, whether it's AI or designing from scratch. I design journals from scratch with AI and also illustrations. So let's talk about that. So first of all, let's go over here. We are going to look, let's start with looking up some autumn leaves, right? If you even want to look up leaves, you type it in this search description. Very easy. I'm going to start with saying some of my favorite things to do when I'm designing is look at ways that I can design a planner, maybe just themed off of maybe a season, right? A season. So this, let's say it's a seasonal themed planner and that's just, you know, getting as basic as we can get. As you can see, Canva has so many images, so many different images that you can use. I am always going to suggest if you are going with simplicity and if you are a person who's very new to design, you want to get elements that maybe kind of shape around the border or maybe elements that you can just manipulate. So elements, regardless in art, right? So I'm an art major, but I'm a little bit, I've dabbled in art. So one of the things about art is that these elements are very abstract, so you don't have to like, you know, leaves, flowers, like sometimes I put my flowers in my journal covers, they're upside down, they're, you know, whatever. Actually, now that I'm sitting here, I love, I'm teaching literally just like off the top of my head. Actually, what I'm going to go to, we're going to go to the sunflower because that is my favorite thing for fall and that just got me in a good mood, right? So nothing like some beautiful sunflower. And because it's fall, we love sunflowers, right? But so we can also kind of like intertwine and use sunflowers, like we do sunflower border, sunflower watercolor. As you can see, Canva has beautiful watercolor elements. Sunflowers go a long way, not just for fall, but then even for summer, right? And you probably could throw them out in the spring. So sunflowers are great, great flower to use that are all season, but then it's like, you can still relaunch it in different seasons and theme it for those seasons. Okay. So for me, again, I'm not ever going to like, I'm not going to do a whole bunch of crazy, crazy designs and stuff like that, but I'm just going to show you exactly some of the things that I would do. Again, you've got all of these beautiful elements inside of Canva and one of the things that I'm going to show you right now is that you're going to just layer, right? So I'm actually going to go back up here because I saw something that I wanted to actually use. So let's click on this one here. And so again, when it comes to design, these shapes are abstract, meaning that they can be upside down, wherever you want them. What makes designing so unique is that this is your sanctuary. And so be creative and practice inside of Canva. We also, we have such an amazing community. If you are looking for a place where you absolutely are ready and wanting to start your planner business, journal business, stickers, notepads, I want you to go to the link in the description and join our free elite club. It's going to be free for seven days and $20 after, right? So you get seven free days access. This is amazing. This is for the month of October only, right? Get your seven free days, all right? Come in there. We've been doing giveaways. We're doing giveaways every week for our relaunch. We relaunched, we launched it back in 2022, have always had 500 members. I took a break, had to work on me, get myself better. Now we relaunched it, all right? So go to the description, join, seven free days and $20 after that. So affordable to be a part of this community. And the women up in there, you're going to love them. They're amazing. So many women from different countries, different backgrounds, and they all are amazing. So I'm going to just push this right here in the corner. You can see this here. I'm just going to simply push this around the corner and I'm just going to pull it out. Again, this is what makes design so, I love designing journal covers. Anything I love designing is journal covers. And then, you know, you learn to layer stuff. So, you know, let's just say if I wanted to layer this, I could layer it. Let me see here. Let's say if I wanted to just throw these up here in the background, we could do that. Let me just pull one over here. And I'm just going to, like, pull these in the background. I'm going to duplicate. And again, I'm going to turn this. And this is me designing from scratch. No practice, y'all. I'd just be up here doing this, right? I'm going to just kind of shove it over here. And again, that gives that feel of those sunflowers. I love designing. It's so much fun. Hold tight because we're going to go into making an actual focus-based layout. And we're going to still theme it off of the sunflower. This is how you really make a profitable planner, all right? So, now we want to find, like, a label, right? We want to find, like, a label. And what I mean by a label is we're going to put a label over in the middle that is going to give us our for our title, okay? Because we don't want our design to overpower our title. So, we want to just throw, like, a box in here, like a label box style. Not that one. Maybe we can change the colors of that one. Let's see. Yes, we can change the color. So, as you can see, sometimes some of the elements, you can actually change the colors, which is so amazing. I love that about Canva. So, we see here, we've got this. Now, if you wanted to add a label, you could do that, right? To add a label like that, right? I'm taking that one out because I don't think I like that one that much. I'm going to do this one, right? I'm going to do this one. And I'll show you exactly how we're going to kind of fix that to make it work for our cover, right? I'm also going to go run here and I'm going to find and I'm going to, like, turn it up a little bit of a notch. We're going to find a gold gradient. I'm going to show you how you can just take elements and layer stuff. Layering is just really fun. I love layering my designs. It's, like, so fun. I'm going to take this. Gradient is just great because it gives that scale from the color and then it kind of blends out. That is always something you can use behind the scenes of, you know, designing. So, I'm going to pull that back. I'm going to pull this up here as much as I can. And then, guess what I'm going to do? Now, I'm going to go to position and I'm going to send it to the back. All right. Oh, so beautiful. Look at how pretty that is, right? Position allows you to send stuff to the back. Don't worry about these squares here. That is for, let's say, if you wanted to print this, like, with Canva. This is what happens. You get a little preview, right? You get a little preview. So, that's what that's for. This is when you decide to actually fully print your product. Like, that's where that is at there, all right? Sorry, kind of clicking on a bunch of stuff. Got stuff moving around here. Okay. So, we got that. Now, we're going to go over to font. I love staying with some very slick, clean font, right? We're going to stay with clean font. This Senzel is one of my favorite fonts. It's light. Reason being is because of this, you know, the thing is because of this style. And I'm going to take the box out. I'm changing my mind, y'all. I'm going to show you something. I'm going to take the box out because what I'm going to do is I'm going to add another gradient behind there to lighten it up. Did you see that? You see how that just lightened that up? If you wanted to double it again, you could do that just to light it up. And I'm going to do that because I feel more comfortable with that. I'm looking at my other screen so I can see it clearly. I just wanted to just light that up there. So, let's just say we're going, this is going to be a gratitude planner, right? And hopefully I spell gratitude right. If I don't, please don't judge me because y'all know sometimes how it'd be when you just like start typing something. You'd be like, is that, it's just like, is that word, is that how you spell that? I promise you, it's like, that's adult, adult life. All right. So, we're going to change the text to the color of the text to match this here. I'm going to go over to effects. I'm going to go to shadows. Shadows is my favorite thing. I'm going to do full transparency and then I'm going to do halfway blur. I'm going to pull back the offset on here and then the back of this, I'm going to turn black because black is just, baby, look at that. It's going to make it pop. If this is just, this is the basic steps I would give for beginners because many people are like in the beginning stages and they're so stressed out. How do I make a plan? So, this is just like a very themed style, right? Let's just say if I duplicated this and I wanted to just add a little bit more to this, I'm going to, I could throw it over here, right? Throw it over here, shrink it. I'm going to shrink it down. I'm just layering this on top and then I'm going to take this, but I'm going to fade it out just a little bit, right? Because we don't want it to be overpowering. So, I'm going to move this one here and just fade that out there. Again, you can do so many different things or whatever you want to do. You can also, this element allows you to change the color. Like, if you want to change the color of it, it looks like it, you know, you could change the color. Like, you could do that as well. I'm liking this without this. I think I'm going to pull that out of there. Sometimes I do that, y'all. I'm just like, this is the part about designing. As you're looking and you're eyeing your design, you kind of start getting a feel like, okay, I like this. I'm feeling that. I'm feeling this, right? I could go back to Sunflower and I could say, maybe I want to swap the colors out. If you want to do that, I always say you should follow what you feel, play around with the elements. The more I played around with the elements in Canva, the better I got. And so, that was like big for me. Like, I just played around with the elements, right? So, let's just stay there. Gratitude. If I wanted to make a back cover for printing, I would take this out of here. I duplicated that. I'm going to take that middle gradient. I'm going to just take that stuff I did for the cover and take that out of there because I don't want the text on the back. And let's just say if I wanted to just make the cover, the back cover just a little bit more different, boom, there we go. This is like the fun part about doing this. You can do that and move stuff around however you feel. This is what it's like to design a beautiful gratitude cover. Now, let's move really fast here. I'm just going to show you exactly how you can get started with, let's say we're going to do a weekly layout. We just want to do a very simply weekly layout, right? So, I'm going to go over here and I'm going to find a box, okay? So, I'm going to find like a box. I'm going to actually say square, not box. Of course, you know, I try to make sure I make that make sense. I'm going to get that one out of there. It definitely depends on like some of these boxes. The box that I'm looking for actually has like all the corners in there. So, sometimes they, y'all have to like look. Again, I like, I'm doing this like by like just like making up stuff. I'm actually, I'm trying to see if I can use this one here. I like just making like these boxes. So, let me see if I can do this. If this works out, then we're going to stick with this. Ta-da! So, we've got that. I'm going to group it together. Group. Boom, boom. All right. Now, we are going to duplicate this, okay? We're going to duplicate it and stack these, right? As you can see, Canva is lovely for the stack. So, we've got eight of these. I'm going to go back and group it again, all right? And now, it's there. It's all together, all right? Look at that. Awesome, awesome, awesome. All right. So, now, this is just a weekly planner. So, I would also say I love like looking for a little, there's so much stuff inside of Canva that you can use for this. So, let's just go over here and look at, I'm actually, you know what? I'm actually just going to take my text box. I'm going to blow this up a little bit, right? Blow this up. And I am excited. I want you to run to the link in the comments as well because if you are ready to launch your planner business, our Planner Super Bowl is happening. I am so excited. October 23rd and 24th, right? It's going to be amazing. I am literally putting this in here. So, we're going to start with, we're going to start with like a Monday. So, we're going to do Monday and we're just going to put that there, right? Again, just being creative with like whatever you feel you want to do. You can stack it at the bottom, top, at the corner. You can just put the Monday like M-O-N, you know, Monday, Tuesday, where just like the acronyms or whatever, you know, they call it and you can use it that way. Or you can write the full word out, right? So, I'm just going to throw this in here and we're just going to create that really quick. I love, this is actually almost duplicate of a layout that we actually sell and print. I'm just looking at this. This is reminds me of a layout that we sell a lot, but I'm just actually making it from scratch and it's just pretty cool. I love it. So, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Okay. However you want to put your days in there, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, making sure that it's centered, right? I'm going to design it. Don't worry. I want you to run to the description because I don't want you to miss the seven-day access and joining the Planner Superbowl because the Planner Superbowl is going to be so amazing. If you have been looking to get started with your planner business and you are looking for a place where you can just really grow, I want you to go. I just want you to do it. There's a QR code that's on the screen. You're going to see that as well. And that is going to help you enroll in the Planner Superbowl masterclass. I am so excited. Two days with me, I'm going to show you how to design, make, and sell a planner before you even create it or print it, right? We're going to start there. People are buying planners and you do not want to miss it, right? So, Friday, Saturday, and then we're going to leave this other box here. This is going to be our notes box, right? It's going to be a notes box. So, we're going to duplicate that and we're going to do notes. Now, this ain't like perfect, y'all, but this is just a little bit of something, something, something, all right? So, weekly planner. Now, what am I going to do to make it even more beautiful? Of course, we've got to add some extra stuff. So, I'm going to go and grab a line here. And this is just a weekly. You will find that, and I think it just depends on the person, but you will find that, you know, some people, depending on what they're looking for, they may want weekly. But again, start somewhere. And the reason why we're starting like this, we want to keep it simple, right? I'm speaking to like some people who are like beginners and like, I want to make a planner. I think we're, sometimes we're just focused on like trying to make this planner and then we're spending so much time making all these pages and we're never getting it done. I had a couple of clients that I was dealing with and they just like, some people just like, I've been working on a planner for a year. Like, just get it up there. Start with a weekly undated, start with a monthly undated and just go from there. We also sell undated, we're getting ready to actually relaunch our pages and you can actually buy the paper, like, buy the paper. This layout is actually a layout that I sell. It doesn't look like this totally, but we do have a layout like this. So, this is notes, right? We just said the week of, this is plain and simple for beginners who are ready to start their planner business. And you're just like, you know what? I need to just do something. I need to quit playing around and I need to stop trying to be perfect and thinking that it has to be perfect to launch it. No, just get started, right? So, I'm going to do that. I'm also going to, even if like, let's say if it was like a digital planner, you could definitely, and I love digital plans. So, digital planners allow you to just like do all types of stuff, right? But let's just say if you wanted to add some cute, you know, designs to it, you want to like put some stuff at the corner. I like putting stuff at the corner, like maybe if we even did this here, okay? And maybe it can overlap, but not overlap too much, however you want to do it like that. So many different ways, take that out or move this over here in the corner. Another really amazing way is you could transparently place this in the back, enlarge it like this, and then what you would do is you'd bring it back where, as you can see, this is a full, like, you can just vaguely see it in the back of the planner, right? Which is super cute. Like, I think we should leave it like that, right? So, what you're going to do, you're not going to do anything else. And if you want to like, add more to it, you could do that. Let me move this back here. All right. Uh-oh. I moved it too far back, y'all. All right. We don't want to move it too far back. All right. So, we moved it back just a little bit. If you wanted to, you know, add color to your boxes, let's just say if we added a square, a filled square like this, right? Let's close this here. Here's another way to add a little bit of more cuteness to your planner, right? Your weekly planner. So, then we're going to do this. Let's go here in the middle. And now I'm going to send it to the back. Let me just position it. And now, what do we do? We just created this so that it would just like be like a colored tab if you wanted to do that. You could do that to your planner, right? So cute. Easiest ways to get started. Now, I don't have mine totally centered correctly, but you know, you understand the basics of like getting it started. Once you start creating, moving stuff around, this is just like some basic beginner stuff. This ain't the heavy stuff that I teach. This is like fast, beginner, like just get started, sis, okay? Excuse me. Just get started, sis. Like you got to learn how to just get started and quit procrastinating. And so, again, the Planner Super Bowl is coming up, and I don't want you to miss it. I don't want you to miss it because I'm going to be, you're going to get two hours each day with me, and I'm going, we're going to rock it out. We're going to rock it out. You're also going to get the replay as well, and you have the Planner Super Bowl templates that come with that as well. So this is going to be a gem dropping class. I'm going to really step you through like how to get started. We're going to push this up just a little bit. Well, of course, you know, Wednesday is like a longer word, right? So, you know, this is the tedious stuff, and this is why I say it's like so imperative to like just get started because so many people are like still stuck at this stage, right? Don't get stuck at the stages of, oh, I'm just, I'm still designing it. I'm still designing it. Like go get you some templates, right? We sell, now you can go, every link is in the description. We sell templates galore, and that is the shortcut to building your business. When I started, that's what I was doing. Like when I started my business, that's what I was doing. I was using templates. And then my, I had my team, they actually built out all these templates, hundreds of templates, and I now like, I don't, I don't have to make templates. I could just teach you. I could just teach people, and now like I don't have to make templates. That's the golden thing, you know, that I learned in this, you know, having a team and was able to get all of this stuff done. Like I am not making no more templates, especially when it comes to this, because this is the part that actually takes the most time. And most people like, you know, I can always say like many women actually don't have time. They're busy moms. They're working a nine to five, and they're like, I am really just trying to figure out how to get started, how to build, how to build their generational wealth in their planner business, and how to do it, you know, without stress. So without the stress and overwhelm. So, you know, you got to resize this stuff. Once you get it though, this is what I say, you build it once and you make money daily. So you learn after you've built it, right? After you've built it, now you can keep this as like your template. And then what you do is you eventually move on to recreating more layouts like this. But now you've actually built an asset. If you're in real estate, if you know anything about real estate, I teach this with the with the digital products, digital products are like investing. And so once you build this, now you actually have an asset. And now that you actually have an asset, this asset now can be repurposed multiple times, right? So again, we just made a cute layout, don't focus on like, this could be just a full weekly planner, and you could just duplicate the pages, right? If you just wanted to do that, you could do that. Just duplicate the pages. And let's see, there's 52 weeks in a year. So you could make 52 of these. And you would still it would just be a weekly planner. And then let's just say for the for the last thing is that maybe you want to create something that is maybe you want to create an insert, right? So if I were to insert, I could take that here. Let's say I wanted to add a quote. Let's do this text here. I'm just going to do a quick quote page, right? These are your inserts. Okay. Grateful. All right, we're going to say grateful. We're going to duplicate it, I'm going to go to Sendzill. Let's see, I have the other one that I use. I don't see it. So let me type in here. Decorative. The Sendzill decorative. So we're going to use that one. All right, grateful for the little things, right? And there's a reason why we're doing this like this. I'm going to add an image. All right. No, maybe I don't like that font. Maybe I don't like that font with it. This happens y'all. This happens. This is a part of designing, right? I started designing stuff and I'm like, no, I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. And then I like got to run around here to try to figure out if I'm going to add another one. Moontime is good too, but I might just go back to that one. I'm grateful for the little things. Let's just do that and then I'll play around to see if I want to do anything else. I'm going to go back to sunflower. So we're going to look up any images that have like a sunflower. I spelled sunflower wrong. Y'all don't judge me. So let's do this like a really cute sunflower pot, right? And I'm going to take that out. I'm going to say it's the little things, right? It's the little things. This is what is going to make it really cool, right? Really, really cool. And I'm just going to move that up so that it is right there. So again, sticking in this, this is for the beginners. Stick to the basic, don't overwhelm yourself. If you're like, I don't know how to get started. This is where you're always going to be stopped because you're worried about every little special part. Just get it out there. You never know who wants to buy it until you put it out on the market, right? And then you go back, you fine tune and you tweak. Every guru will tell you that you don't waste time on creating the perfect product because while you're wasting time, someone else is running off with your idea and you're losing money. All right. So that is an insert there. As you can see, we just did a full insert sunflower, super cute. I love it. I love it. I love it as usual. And so I am so excited. This was amazing. I am. I don't know about you. If you love this tutorial, I want you to go to the comments and tell me how you love this tutorial. I also want you to go in the comments and look at our supplies. We have on sale. We have the QR code for you to join the planner, Superbowl and the elite club. If you are a DIY crafter and you are ready to take it to the next level, seven days, free access, $20. After that, we got the best membership in the game, rebuilding it, but it's the best. The women are loving it. All of the tutorials, everything inside of there. This is your time. This is your season. I cannot wait to see you launch your planner business. Thank you for joining flipping with coach Tam. I want you to like, and subscribe. We will see you soon. And as usual building once bank daily. See you later. Bye.