Most of my visual notebooks are in actual notebooks, like this spiral-bound gridded version. I have filled five of them. I also work in composition notebooks and Moleskines.
Have you ever run across something—a book, a piece of worn ledger paper, a magazine photograph of a room you would want to be in—and felt an emotion so viscerally that you wanted to make it tangible, own it, and preserve it somehow? That’s how I feel about the ephemera I keep in a visual notebook. Even the act of creating a page is a satisfying escape; I could spend hours with torn bits of paper or carefully trimmed cutouts and glue.
My grandmother first introduced me (when I was about 10 years old) to scrapbooking, in the old-school way. Or at least old-school as it was during the early 1980s—putting down printed photos and arranging airplane tickets from our trips onto sticky cardstock under a clear sheet protector. My nostalgic memories felt safely preserved in those three-ring binders, even as the glue gave way over the years and the photos would inevitably spill out of the pages.
Beginning in my mid-30s, I was traveling more for work as a magazine editor and collected inspiration and nostalgia along the way—a cocktail napkin from the Algonquin in New York, a bookmark from Heirloom Book Company in Charleston, South Carolina, part of the dinner menu from Cochon in New Orleans. Instead of letting the papers pile up, I began keeping visual diaries of my trips, but soon I wanted the notebooks to be more than just visual travelogue. I wanted the pages to evoke a mood and seem like a room I had made with layers of visual inspiration. I’d tear out pages in magazines and puzzle everything together onto a page in my Moleskine then date-stamp it and move on. The goal wasn’t perfection. It was messy, worn, and stuffed until sometimes the binding broke free, I’d hold it together with a big red rubber band.
“Scrapbooks have been in my life forever. They are visible manifestations of my parents’ desire to create memories, order them, and bind them into actual decorative objects—objects by which they desired to be surrounded.”
Among others who contain their inspiration inside the pages of a journal is legendary interior designer Charlotte Moss. I have several of her books, but one that I refer to often is A Visual Life: Scrapbooks, Collages, and Inspirations. In it, Charlotte recounts a quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson, “There are no new ideas in the world, only new arrangements of things.” She writes she’s been long influenced by strong women throughout history. “I’ve studied their lives and taken bits and pieces from each, collecting them in my own personal handbook of women who had flair for living and lived it with flair. Some of these thoughts and visuals have been physically collected and collaged in my scrapbooks—working documents that have been essential in my evolution as a designer.”
Alongside images, I like to collect inspirational quotes and missives.
Another benefit to keeping visual journals is as reference material. I’m often amazed that when I feel like I need some extra inspiration or a creative spark, a dip into some of my completed journals—even ones that are now 15 years old—leaves me with a new idea or insight. It’s like paging through magazine that that was created just for me. Sometimes creating a room of your own is just a notebook and a good glue stick away.