How to make a hand-bound bullet journal

I wanted to be able to draw grid-based dungeons and hex-based overland maps with the same pages, so I knew I needed to have two sets of dots, one for grids and one for hexes. Initially, I was planning to have the hexes and grids be 2 distinct dot sets, but every iteration I did looked worse than the last, so I started investigating what I could do with math. When I was in elementary school, I used to make hex maps on graph paper with 1x2 angles and 2 unit sides, which was terribly out of scale, but I was 10 and it worked.

Now, an older and wiser me took advantage of geometry and scaled out every rise/run combination from 1 to 10, and found 4x7 which is less than 1 degree off from the 60° of a perfect hexagon and a hypotenuse of 8.06 units. That was certainly close enough, but in order to get more than 2-3 on a page, I’d have to have my dots ridiculously close together, since a single hexagon would be 14 squares tall and 16 squares wide. I then took a stab at reducing it by half, and having extra dots for the wide corners. This worked perfectly, but I was having a hell of a time freehanding the dots that wern’t obvious, so I made the hex-dots a different shade of grey, which brought everything together.

With my hexes handled, I had to figure out my grid spacing. I’d recently obtained some 5/inch grid paper, and even that seemed sparse to me, so I figured I’d try 6, but given that I was working in metric, I opted for 0.4 cm, which is just over 6 squares per inch.

I settled on 33x50 dots, which gave me a 32x49 square grid and 5x7 hex grid. I’d have liked to get 7x9 or better, but again, the grid was getting too dense.

Once all my math was done, I wrote the code, which is available here, or if you’re happy reusing my work, here’s a 2-page pdf for double-sided printing.

I ended up going with 50 sheets per journal, which results in 200 page journals (each sheet has 4 pages) which seemed like it could hold a campaign of reasonable size, even with my garbage huge handwriting.

I’m lucky to have a laser printer at home, but you can always get your pages printed at the…​ oh right, the world is closed still. If you live in a civilized country, your library may be open, so you can get it printed there for ~10c a page, which kinda sucks, but oh well.

If you look at a high quality (or old) hardcover book, you’ll likely be able to see that the print is broken into chunks if you look close to the spine. These are called "Signatures" and are the core of bookbinding. When doing commercial printing, they print on extrawide paper, fold larger signatures, then cut off the excess. Since I don’t have "extra-long" A4, I have to balance "fit" (how much the page width varies) against convenience and stability. Having signatures of 1 or 2 would have almost perfect fit, but I would have dozens of signatures, and each signature would be rather weak, since it’s just 2 pieces of paper, and could result in pages tearing out. Having signatures of 10+ would mean that I only had a few signatures, but then the fit wouldn’t be great. I’ve found that 5 pages is a generally accepted size for hand-bound signatures, so that’s what I’m using here.

So we need to group our 50 pages into 10 5-page groups.

This is pretty easy, just fold the 5 pages in half and score the spine with something firm and round. I used the handle off of a foam paintbrush I used for applying woodglue to another project, but a bladeless pen-knife, or a smooth pen body would work as well.

Once the signatures are folded, we need to punch holes. These holes need to line up with one another, so it’s important to measure where these holes will go. I ended up doing holes every 3cm with 1.5 cm margins at the top & bottom. Measure and mark the crease on each signature

I don’t have my own sewing stuff (yet) so I borrowed my wife’s largest needle for this project. If you aren’t using someone elses nice tools, you can probably get away with just using the needle to punch the holes, but I’m not, so I got my tools for this job.

Using a piece of scrap wood as a buffer, I drove a nail just through the paper for each of the holes. I found these nails in my garage when I moved here, in a coffee can labeled "Nails" so I don’t know exactly what they are.

It’s important to keep the holes as perfectly spaced as possible, since this will affect the up/down spacing of the signatures. Since this is my journal, I’m not to worried about it.