September 2019

Journal your Uni life

Tell your story with photography from Venture Studios…

Have you noticed the growing trend for journaling? Particularly popular is “bullet journaling” which has seen a 112% spike in Pinterest searches this year. If you type in the hashtags #bulletjournal or #bujo on Instagram you will now see over 7 million photographs of bullet journals.

Bullet journaling – known as BuJo by its fans – can best be described as a combination of daily log and longer term to-do list. Journals are organised by indexes, future logs and monthly logs as well as the daily log, so that you can keep track of goals, events and tasks and link everything together.

Individual pages usually contain a mixture of symbols, calendars, shorthand writing and images. The symbols and shorthand writing help users with a process called rapid logging. BuJo stresses the importance of handwriting and the evidence of the benefits of writing by hand. But because writing everything by hand can be too time consuming for many of us, rapid logging is a way of capturing information as bulleted lists.

The bullet journal was created by New York designer Ryder Carroll, and the official Bullet Journal website describes it as “the analog method for the digital age”. The key principle behind BuJo is that it is “the art of intentional living” that enables you to “track the past, order the present, design the future”.

These laudable aims are backed up by many BuJo users. For example, some have used their journals to help them get on top of their finances to the extent of being able to buy their first home. Others have poured their energies into the designs of their journal, which they have then publicised online – using Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and YouTube – to seek artistic commissions from businesses.

Many BuJo users also incorporate photography into their journals.

There are various ways of doing this:

• Add photos to your daily logs. This can help to create a visual memory timeline which you will treasure looking back on in future.
• Create separate montages of photographs to accompany your journal. Depending on the size and nature of these, they could either be shared online, mounted on your wall or used as mood boards within the journal for particular projects and dreams.
• Create a cover page for your journal and also a new starting page for each month. The monthly photography can reflect special things that have happened the previous month, progress that has been made towards certain goals and your hopes for the following month.

If you are about to start Uni then maybe now is the time to consider some kind of journaling? It’s totally up to you whether you go for a bullet journal, or just do your own thing and have a book that you write in occasionally. But in years to come you will be glad that you kept a record of your Uni days.

When you start Uni it feels like you will be there forever, but like anything else the time soon passes and before you know it these early days will become just distant memories. But if you have a journal with all the details of your life at this significant time it can be both nostalgic and informative to look back on.

Photography is another key way to capture these memories for the future, and to tell your story. Make sure you include plenty of selfies in your journal: check out our article here for some great selfie tips.

And as you are about to start Uni, why not get the family together and organise a family photography session? What a great send off that would be, and by the time you come home for a break (and food and laundry top up!) that fabulous family photograph will be taking pride of place on the wall.

To arrange a photography experience with Venture Studios you can either contact any of our 16 Venture Studios, book online or call us on 0845 121 1085.

Good luck with Uni! We hope that it is everything you want it to be. Enjoy every moment and remember to use the art of photography to create #memoriesforever.