Hi everyone! This is Bea, from the Archer & Olive Ambassador Team. You can find me as @bealettering on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Monthly recaps don’t always have to be long, written reflections. If you enjoy working visually, a creative monthly recap can be a much more fun way to look back on each month.
By combining different lettering styles and a few simple doodles, you can summarize and highlight what really mattered without feeling the pressure to write a lot. These pages are not about perfection: they are about capturing moments, emotions, and highlights in a creative and personal way.
In this post, I’ll share why I started creating this kind of recaps, the lettering styles you can try and how to organize them on the page, as well as how to use doodles to support your lettering. You’ll also find a printable with 20 lettering styles to help you practice and get inspired.
I’ll be using an Archer & Olive A5 dot grid notebook, a pencil and eraser for sketching, pens from the Calliograph and Acrylograph collections, and fineliners to add outlines and smaller detail
1. Supplies I used to create my monthly recap
- A5 journal. I normally use the last double-page of each month in my bullet journal. For this recap, I’m using the A5 Keeper of Bees notebook from the Everyday Collection.
- Small and large brush and acrylic pens, such as Calliographs and Acrylographs.
- 0.5 mm black fineliners.
- An A5 stencil from the Everday Collection.
- Optional: A pocket size notebook or notepad to make a list of items for your recap.
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2. What Is a Creative Monthly Recap and why use lettering and doodles?
A creative monthly recap is a visual summary of your month, created using lettering, simple illustrations, and short words or phrases. Instead of writing full paragraphs, you focus on key moments, emotions, important events, and small details you don’t want to forget. For me, it’s a creative break from the everyday routine that helps me reflect on what happened during the month. It often makes me realize that even when time goes by and it feels like nothing especially exciting or out of the ordinary happened, I actually accomplished a lot.
Creative monthly recaps work especially well in bullet journals, art journals, and creative notebooks, but they can be adapted to any format.
Using different lettering styles allows you to give different importance to different memories. A bold, large, and decorative word can represent a strong emotion, while smaller lettering helps support other memories with short notes or details.
Doodles add a playful element to the page. They help fill empty spaces, reinforce the meaning of the words, and guide the eye using simple frames or arrows. And the best part? You don’t need advanced drawing skills to include them.
Using lettering and doodles together makes the recap process less intimidating than writing, more creative and expressive (perfect for creative minds!), and easier to keep up with month after month. Plus, it’s always a joy to find these creative pages among the notes, events, and tasks that usually fill your planner.
Keep in mind that this kind of recaps work for many different situations beyond monthly reflections: you can also use it for yearly recaps, travel memories, or even study notes.
3. Lettering Styles for Creative Monthly Recaps
To keep your monthly recap clear and visually balanced, it’s helpful to work with three levels of lettering styles, each with a different role on the page
Primary Lettering Styles
Primary styles are the most eye-catching ones. They use large letters, usually created with thick brush pens, and often include more decoration, such as shadows or outlines. I usually work with script lettering styles or fun, bold serif or sans serif letters.
These styles are perfect for the month title, the most important events or achievements, or strong emotions that describe how the month made you feel. Think of them as the visual headline of your recap.
Secondary Lettering Styles
Secondary styles support the main lettering without competing with it. I write them in a medium size, often using fine brush pens, and they are not heavily decorated. I normally use basic script lettering or simple sans serif styles.
These styles work well for secondary events and memories, such as meetings with friends, walks, longer notes, supporting ideas, secondary projects, songs I enjoyed, or books I read during the month. They help structure the page and connect the main elements together.
Auxiliary Lettering Styles
Auxiliary styles are simple and functional. They are usually created with fineliners and kept very clean and minimal. I personally use all-caps sans serif lettering for this level.
These styles are ideal for dates, small notes, and extra details that don’t need to stand out visually. They help keep everything organized and easy to read, while still allowing you to include as much information as you want on the page.
4. Simple Doodles That Support Your Lettering
Doodles in a monthly recap don’t need to be complicated. Their role is to support the lettering, not to draw attention away from it.
Depending on your drawing skills, you can add simple doodles next to words to represent some of the most important events, as well as frames, arrows, or decorative lines. I always like to finish the page by adding small dots and stars here and there.
These small elements help highlight important parts of the page and add a personal touch to your layout.
5. The Creative Process: From Sketch to Final Page
A simple planning process can make a big difference in how balanced your page feels, and it can also take away the fear that the page won’t look nice or that everything won’t fit.
The first thing you’ll want to do is make a list of everything you’d like to include in your recap. These can be events, projects, books, movies, feelings, songs, meetings with friends, thoughts, quotes, dates… You might feel like you didn’t do much last month, but once you start writing things down, more and more will come to mind. And, suddenly, two pages won’t feel like that much space after all. Group these items by level of importance (primary, secondary, and auxiliary) to help you decide which lettering style to use for each one.
Start by sketching the name of the month and the year at the top of the left-hand page. Then, place the main words first. This ensures they fit well on the page and get the space they need. If you want to add larger doodles, sketch them after the main words, or at least mark their space with a rough shape.
Once those elements are in place, add the secondary lettering for the secondary items on your list. Remember that these should be smaller in size and simpler in style. It’s also a good idea to leave some space around the elements so you can later add decorative lines to divide the different sections of the page.
Finally, fill the remaining spaces with auxiliary lettering and small doodles. This step helps tie everything together and gives the page a finished look without feeling overcrowded.
Once your sketch is ready and you’re happy with it, it’s time to bring it to life with some color. I recommend sticking to a limited color palette: three or four colors plus black are usually enough and will help create a more cohesive look. Start by coloring the main words or the doodles you want to highlight, and then move on to the rest, making sure the colors are evenly distributed across the spread.
Use black or neutral colors for auxiliary words, so they don't overpower the rest of the lettering.
6. Watch the video and download your free templates
To help you get started, I’ve created a printable with 20 lettering styles that you can practice and use directly in your creative monthly recaps. The styles are grouped by level of importance, making it easy to combine them on the same page.
Feel free to download the printable, try a few styles, and make the process your own.
And last but not least, head over to our YouTube channel to watch some of my past monthly recaps and draw along as I create last month’s recap, while I share a few additional tips along the way.
I’d love to see your creative recaps! Share your pages on social media and tag @archerandolive and @bealettering using the hashtags #AOShare and #archerandolive.
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