Notion is famous for its usage and minimal theme. The simple black and white colour pallets with minimal pastel colour option helps one to keep the dashboards organised. However, as much as I love the neat look, I also want to make my notion look colourful and aesthetic.
If you too want to turn your notion into a comfort space that matches you aesthetic, this is just for you!
- Define Aesthetic
I mean not literally google the word aesthetic and learn the definitions, just define what your aesthetic is and how you want your notion board to look like.
For example — sometimes I like to add a widgets and leave the colour theme to be black and white. Sometimes I add anime gifs to my dashboard when I want to be a little extra. Like I chose to keep my finance tracker minimal with little colours only in the calculator widget.
The best thing to go around is to list down what all you want in the dashboard- they can be pictures, gifs, widgets, videos, variant colours and what not. After we have defined what we want from the dashboard we can come to the main part.
2. Set a colour theme
If you want to stick to black and white, perfect. But if you want your dashboard to look more colourful, you can pick a colour palette and follow that throughout the board. The favourite place to do that is at coolors.co. It is the best website to get infinite colour palettes. Just press your spacebar and keep going until you find a colour palette.
3. Add a cover
For a cover photo you can either pick from the unsplash or gallery option inbuilt in notion, or upload a cover of yourself. What you can also do instead of first finding a palette and then finding images, is to first choose your cover- then pick the colours from that cover. This will be helpful in case you are not able to find a cover image matching the palette you chose.
4. Add icons
Notion is very handy that way. It not only provides you with awesome icons of all aesthetics but also allows you to choose your icons for yourself. After adding the cover you can choose any minimal image to be your icon.
Here is an example of my personal home dashboard. I added the raining gif as my cover and this pixelated totoro (anime character) as my icon.
To upload a custom image, just click on the icon -> click on the ‘Custom’ option -> upload the image that you want to add
5. Make a gallery view
If you don’t like plain looking board, you can turn your dashboard into a mood board by adding a gallery view and inserting gifs and pictures in that.
Here is how I built my university dashboard. I picked the colour ‘sage’ for my colour theme. I added an aesthetic image I found on Pinterest- the train in green so it went with my choice of colour. Next I added a quote followed by a green stripe.
The highlight of this dashboard is the anime gif gallery view. I found gifs from Ghibli anime and other animations to add to this gallery view. It makes me feel organised and adds life to my dashboard.
6. Widget
I kept this one for last because this is most important for me. I use a lot of widgets to add to my dashboard in order to make use of it. You can get enormous widgets from Gridfiti like calendars, weather widget, life bar, aura clock, flip clocks, and what not.
Sites like indify, apption, gridfiti, notionery and widgetbox can help you find the perfect widget for your board.
The best option is to open Pinterest and look for inspiration for creating a dashboard. You can also find great existing dashboards and get those templates for yourself.
Example this is a personal growth dashboard that I got for myself. It was very eye soothing and had all the options for me starting from journaling to managing my work. (I got it gridfiti)
Leaving it with a summary here:
- Colours: decide the palette for your page
- Cover: add an image on the top
- Icon: they can be custom or from the options given by notion
- Gallery: show the aesthetic covers of the cards
- Widgets: there are plenty of widgets to add in Notion
- Templates: pick from existing aesthetic Notion templates
