“Notion is for big tech companies doing complicated things, and it’s definitely out of my league as a/n [insert you here].”
Notion is for everyone!
(Well, maybe not everyone, but you catch my drift)
In issue #2 of Notion in the Wild, I’m gonna show you how regular degular people use Notion and also how you can build something similar yourself 😉
Fran of The Passions Collective created this cute and functional homepage for their business
Okay, so like, I know I just said Notion isn’t for big businesses but hear me out.
Fran is a solopreneur — they’re doing (almost) everything alone — so I decided to feature them in this issue. What I love about their revamped Notion homepage is that they brought in their brand colours and style to really make their page visually appealing.
And it’s not gaudy, or so overly stylized as to be barely functional 😗
A lot of Notion newbies think they have to get suuuuuper complicated to have a beautiful build, but you can see Fran simply added a custom header for their page, as well as some cover art for their pages database.
I also see some hyperlinked callout boxes as bookmarks, which is another way to make links accessible without getting too complicated.
Another thing you’ll notice are those custom, coloured headers for each section on this page. Now, I’m not sure if this is a LaTeX equation thing, or if Fran made images and placed them in there, but I’ll show you how to do both.
Now let’s break down each bit so that you can bring your own style to your dashboards 🪄
custom covers
Adding covers to your Notion pages is an easy way to bring some ✨aesthetic✨ to your Notion space. You don’t even have to create them yourself.
At the top of every Notion page is a button called Add cover. From here, you can upload a cover from your computer, from an image link on the web, or use images from Unsplash.
You can also reposition the image so that just the right frame is visible 🤩
I made a quick video tutorial to show you how this works ▶️
For the page covers in databases, there are a few more steps.
After you’ve added your covers to all your pages, you have to change your database to a gallery type. Click the 3 dot menu next to the New button on your database, click Layout, and select Gallery.
Once you hit Gallery, you’ll see Card preview. Click page cover and you’re done!
You can customize your gallery view to show page content or no card preview as well. Try them all out and see how you feel!
Notion prefers covers to be at least 1500px long, but they don’t have to be. Just make sure that your covers are at least 2-3 times longer than they are wide, and Notion will do the rest. If you find that your covers end up looking blurry and pixelated, you’ll need to use a larger image with better resolution.
cute callout boxes
Callout boxes are a subtle way to highlight information and bring a bit of ✨ to your Notion space. Here’s an example from one of my templates (and my earliest aesthetic work!)
Callout boxes come in all 10 colours of the Notion rainbow, so feel free to get creative!
But let’s talk about how Fran does theirs.
At first glance, Fran’s bookmarks don’t quite look like callout boxes, and that’s because they’re in the default colour.
The default colour is basically a white callout box with a grey outline. Fran goes a little further to hyperlink the text to create a button of sorts. I talk in depth about how to make custom buttons from callout boxes in this video ➡️
The TL;DR:
create a callout box using
/callouttype in your text
copy your link
highlight your text
paste your link directly onto your text
🎉 you now have a hyperlinked callout button!
I love using this trick for creating back buttons because my neurodiverse ass lives in databases and I almost never use Notion’s native breadcrumbs to navigate.
Fran does the same thing here — putting their most important pages front and center and making them cute to boot.
They also use the default colour callout boxes to create a subtle separation for their pages and active clients sections.
HOT TIP: you can drag and drop almost anything into a callout box 🤯
Use the given space of the callout box to type in your ‘header’, then drag and drop text blocks, images, databases, directly underneath the ‘header’. Now you have things inside a callout box!
custom coloured headings
So there are 3 ways you can do a custom coloured heading:
Use Notion’s native heading block and add a background
Insert an image
Equations
I’m only gonna talk about the first two because, admittedly, I’m not very familiar with equations. In my personal builds, and in my coaching, I recommend the simplest way of getting things done.
Equations break for the dumbest reasons (🙄) and it can be hard to get back in the zone of working when you’re trying to figure out how to fix something like this.
I won’t leave yall hanging though. If you want to use equations to customize your Notion space, here’s an article that breaks it down real simple for you.
If you use equations to customize your workspace, I wanna see 👁️👄👁️ drop some screenshot links in the comments!
Now back to the simpler methods ➡️
native Notion header
Start by adding a header using /header. Type what you want in the header, and then we’ll change the colour.
Click the menu on the left hand side of your header, hover over colour, then choose your background colour. You can change the colour of most Notion blocks this way!
Notion’s native background colours are subtle for that little pop of visual interest. If you want something more striking like Fran’s set up, you can insert your own image.
custom image header
This one is a bit trickier if you’re using columns like Fran does in their build. You might not be able to get just the right size for the column you’re working in because Notion tends to adjust the sizes of things when you adjust the column width.
This won’t be a huge problem if you’re at the end stage of creating your build and not at the beginning where you’d be making a lot of adjustments.
But this kind of header is otherwise pretty simple! Insert an image using /image and go!
What you can do is create a long skinny image in Canva (or other image maker of choice), and put the words all the way on the left hand side. With Notion’s new image cropping, you’ll be able to crop the header to just the right size to fit your column!
that’s all for now 💫
Now you can customize your Notion space and look like a Notion PRO! I’d love to see how yall are using these tips to customize your Notion space, so send me a DM or drop some image links in the comments! 💜
Ready to build your own Notion dashboard from scratch but not sure where to begin?
I gotchu, bestie! 🫶🏾
I don't ascribe to neurotypical, cis-hetero, white male standards of productivity, so you'll never find me pushing my clients into boxes that obviously don't fit them.
I'm always gonna encourage you to be a little delulu, and experiment with different ways of being productive.
Together, we'll transform your Frankenstein-ed Notion dashboard into a beautiful workspace that you'll want to use every day!
Did you know that up to 40% of neurodiverse beings are under- or unemployed?
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I LOVE Notion; here's a screenshot of part of my dashboard, which you can't see the entirety of because there's a lot to it. Love your Substack and your enthusiasm for Notion: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/06idcmejlxojm1or577tx/notion-dashboard.png?rlkey=70u2nthqm6ldf14ulf58loacx&dl=0