Pelinor
Daily planning without the hustle
The short version
In 2020 everyone was suddenly home and every planner on the shelf wanted to make you better at something. Hustle culture in hardback arriving the month nobody had any hustle left.
The whole category is built on the idea that pressure is motivating, that a streak is something worth protecting, that your relationship with your own time should feel like a performance review. Pelinor was designed against that. Something that helped you slow down and move through the day with a little more intention, rather than something that measured whether you had.
I wrote it, designed it, worked with the printer, built and ran the shop it sold through.
Print doesn't iterate. You get one run of 500 copies, and whatever is wrong in it stays wrong.
Where it stands. Done. 368 copies sold online, the rest in person. 116 reviews at five stars. Learned some cool stuff but it's out of production and not coming back.
How it started
For years prior, I would sit quietly in the morning, map out the day, write down what I needed to stay level. Journaling in the evenings to clear my head. It worked. Specifically because it gave me a center to come back to when things got difficult. I'd figured that out after a period of real anxiety and had built the practice around it deliberately.
I was doing all of it on loose paper and I wanted something consolidated. Something I could build up over time instead of losing pages. I went looking for a notebook that had the structure already in it. Every option I found was organized around becoming your best self. Hustle, optimization, the aggressive self-improvement pitch. Which is a strange thing to hand someone who is trying to chill out. If anything it adds pressure, which is the opposite of the problem. So I started designing something for myself, other people found it interesting, and eventually I made a larger batch and put it out. I sold them at roughly cost. That part was never the point.
Making it
The book was broken up into themes. Ones like switching off, slowing down, accepting things as they are, a beginner's mind, letting go of worry, appreciating the ordinary, navigating loneliness, acts of kindness.
No planner in 2020 had a chapter on loneliness. Every one of them had a chapter on productivity.
There's open space every day with no prompt attached. If a book demands an answer every time it’s just one more thing to fail at. There's no January, no dated page, and no year on the cover, so a copy started in March isn't already behind.
Cloth hardback with the wordmark blind-debossed, no foil. A serif for the titles, a quiet sans for the field labels, and one rule governing the grid. Ruled lines carry the writing, dots carry everything unprompted.
The print file left my machine at 7:11 on a Sunday evening, February 21, 2021. Around it ran a full content system. Monthly themes, reading, practices, photography, launch material.
The rest of it
What I got wrong
I stopped. There was a move and a job change and a real question about what a second edition should be, and while I was deciding, it went quiet. Five hundred people had bought a first product and told me it worked, which is about as clean a signal as you get, and I treated it as an ending. The honest version is that I knew how to design and print a book and I didn't yet know what to do with a business.
What I learned
Print sends the bill for your best decision. Working in a medium with no version two changes which trade-offs you're allowed to leave unexamined.
Selling out inventory is a beginning that looks like an ending.
Where it landed
500 copies, litho printed. All sold. 368 through the Etsy shop I built and ran, the rest offline.
The reviews said the thesis back in strangers' voices. "When we miss a week or so, there isn't much guilt."
People still ask about a digital version. It's shelved. Maybe one day.
Pelinor
Daily planning without the hustle
The short version
In 2020 everyone was suddenly home and every planner on the shelf wanted to make you better at something. Hustle culture in hardback arriving the month nobody had any hustle left.
The whole category is built on the idea that pressure is motivating, that a streak is something worth protecting, that your relationship with your own time should feel like a performance review. Pelinor was designed against that. Something that helped you slow down and move through the day with a little more intention, rather than something that measured whether you had.
I wrote it, designed it, worked with the printer, built and ran the shop it sold through.
Print doesn't iterate. You get one run of 500 copies, and whatever is wrong in it stays wrong.
Where it stands. Done. 368 copies sold online, the rest in person. 116 reviews at five stars. Learned some cool stuff but it's out of production and not coming back.
How it started
For years prior, I would sit quietly in the morning, map out the day, write down what I needed to stay level. Journaling in the evenings to clear my head. It worked. Specifically because it gave me a center to come back to when things got difficult. I'd figured that out after a period of real anxiety and had built the practice around it deliberately.
I was doing all of it on loose paper and I wanted something consolidated. Something I could build up over time instead of losing pages. I went looking for a notebook that had the structure already in it. Every option I found was organized around becoming your best self. Hustle, optimization, the aggressive self-improvement pitch. Which is a strange thing to hand someone who is trying to chill out. If anything it adds pressure, which is the opposite of the problem. So I started designing something for myself, other people found it interesting, and eventually I made a larger batch and put it out. I sold them at roughly cost. That part was never the point.
Making it
The book was broken up into themes. Ones like switching off, slowing down, accepting things as they are, a beginner's mind, letting go of worry, appreciating the ordinary, navigating loneliness, acts of kindness.
No planner in 2020 had a chapter on loneliness. Every one of them had a chapter on productivity.
There's open space every day with no prompt attached. If a book demands an answer every time it’s just one more thing to fail at. There's no January, no dated page, and no year on the cover, so a copy started in March isn't already behind.
Cloth hardback with the wordmark blind-debossed, no foil. A serif for the titles, a quiet sans for the field labels, and one rule governing the grid. Ruled lines carry the writing, dots carry everything unprompted.
The print file left my machine at 7:11 on a Sunday evening, February 21, 2021. Around it ran a full content system. Monthly themes, reading, practices, photography, launch material.
The rest of it
What I got wrong
I stopped. There was a move and a job change and a real question about what a second edition should be, and while I was deciding, it went quiet. Five hundred people had bought a first product and told me it worked, which is about as clean a signal as you get, and I treated it as an ending. The honest version is that I knew how to design and print a book and I didn't yet know what to do with a business.
What I learned
Print sends the bill for your best decision. Working in a medium with no version two changes which trade-offs you're allowed to leave unexamined.
Selling out inventory is a beginning that looks like an ending.
Where it landed
500 copies, litho printed. All sold. 368 through the Etsy shop I built and ran, the rest offline.
The reviews said the thesis back in strangers' voices. "When we miss a week or so, there isn't much guilt."
People still ask about a digital version. It's shelved. Maybe one day.