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Why ink colour deserves a place in your planning

Most of us own more pens than we could ever justify, yet we write with the same one every day — usually whichever black or blue rollerball is closest to hand. Colour is treated as decoration, something reserved for birthday cards and revision posters. In practice, ink colour is one of the cheapest and most effective note-taking tools available. A page written in a single colour asks you to read every word to find what matters. A page with a small, consistent palette lets your eye jump straight to the deadline, the unfinished task or the idea you flagged as important. Colour also makes long writing sessions more pleasant. Filling three sides of A4 feels far less of a slog when the ink is a colour you actually enjoy looking at, and that small pleasure is often what keeps a daily journal or planner going past February.

Start with two dependable base colours

Before you buy anything new, decide on a base ink: the colour that carries the bulk of your writing. Blue and black are the traditional choices, and both are practical for good reasons. Black is high contrast, scans cleanly and suits formal notes, minutes and anything you might need to photocopy. Blue stands out beautifully against printed black text, which makes it the natural choice for annotating handouts, proofreading drafts and adding your own comments to documents. If you keep a fountain pen, blue is also the more rewarding ink to write with — many blues shade, meaning the ink pools slightly darker where your stroke slows, giving handwriting an easy, calligraphic finish. Choose one base ink and stick with it for at least a month. The accents only work because the background is predictable.

Using colour to separate subjects and flag actions

This is where a second and third colour start earning their place. In a planner, or a single notebook covering several parts of your life, a colour per subject turns a wall of text into something you can navigate at a glance. A workable scheme:

• Blue or black — general notes, meeting minutes and anything you'll type up later.
• Green — personal, household and family items.
• Red — deadlines, appointments and anything with a date attached.
• Orange or amber — actions waiting on somebody else, so you can spot what needs chasing.

Keep the meanings fixed. If red means deadlines this week, it must still mean deadlines next week, or the system collapses into noise. Write your key on the inside cover of the notebook — future you will not remember why that line was written in purple.

Accent colours that earn their keep

Accents should be used sparingly: a dot, an arrow, a single underlined word. A bright colour loses its power the moment it covers half the page. Red and orange are the classic attention-grabbers, best kept for genuine urgency. Pink and coral make excellent highlighters when you're marking up revision notes, because they lift text without the visual shout of a neon marker. Purple is the quiet workhorse of the palette — distinct from blue and black, but calm enough to use for headings, dates and margin notes. If you're left-handed, test a bright ink before committing: wetter colours can smudge under a resting hand, and a fine, fast-drying nib will serve you better than a broad, generous one.

Journaling: where colour can be pure pleasure

A journal has a different job from a notebook. It isn't optimised for speed, it's kept for the long term, so it's worth choosing inks you love rather than inks that are merely practical. Two approaches work well. The first is a monthly rotation: one ink per month, so a flick through the finished book shows the year passing as a band of colours. The second is thematic — one colour for daily entries, another for reflections, a third for lists and quotes. Either way, resist the temptation to use six colours on one page; a little restraint is what makes a journal look considered rather than chaotic. If you sketch or paste in tickets and cuttings, choose a pigment-based or water-resistant ink so your handwriting doesn't bleed when glue or a wet brush passes nearby.

Choosing inks that behave, and building a system that lasts

Good colour choices are useless if the ink misbehaves. Dye-based inks are the standard for fountain pens: free-flowing, easy to clean out and available in every shade imaginable, but generally not water-resistant. Pigment inks are more permanent and suit fineliners, technical pens and archival work, though they need more careful maintenance. On thin paper, a wet ink in a broad nib will ghost or bleed through; keep wet inks for thicker, coated paper and finer nibs for cheaper notebooks. Finally, limit yourself to four colours in any one notebook — a base plus three accents — and carry only the two you need most on any given day. A palette you can remember without checking is a palette you'll still be using come December.