Setting Up a Cute Digital Planner in GoodNotes or Notability
I spent about three weeks going back and forth on hyperlinks in GoodNotes before I figured out the actual workflow. Most people start by buying a pre-made cute planner, which is fine, but if you want to build one yourself or customize heavily, here is what actually works. The foundation is a multi-page PDF with a tabbed dashboard. You create each page in your design tool of choice, then export as a PDF with clickable links. The tabbed layout usually sits on pages one through four, with each tab pointing to a month section. In GoodNotes, you go to Insert > Link, select the button or icon, and set it to jump to a specific page. It takes about 45 minutes for a 12-month planner once you know the steps.
Cute Digital Planner Tutorial
Start with an iPad and Procreate or Canva for the design work. Set your canvas to 768 by 1024 pixels, which matches standard tablet dimensions and keeps the planner from looking stretched. Use a cohesive color palette. The aesthetic part is where most people lose patience, but you only need three main colors and two accent colors to carry the whole thing. I used a soft lavender, white, and a muted sage green for my first build, and that palette appeared across every weekly spread, monthly dashboard, and sticker element. After designing, export the PDF and open it in GoodNotes. Go to the links panel, draw a box over each tab or button, and assign page jumps. Do not attempt to hyperlink individual stickers. Stickers on separate PNG layers do not register as clickable areas in GoodNotes. Put all the hyperlink targets on the page itself, not on the decorative elements layered on top. For the cute stickers and washi tape elements, I found that using PNG files with transparent backgrounds works best. You drop them in as image overlays, and they sit cleanly over your notes. I learned this after wasting two days trying to embed transparent SVGs directly into the planner PDF, which GoodNotes simply ignored. Stick to PNG. Your future self will thank you.
One thing nobody warns you about is the file size problem. A fully hyperlinked planner with embedded stickers and high-resolution pages can easily balloon past 200 megabytes. GoodNotes handles it fine up to around 250 megabytes, but anything above that starts causing lag on scroll and makes linking painfully slow. I ended up compressing the PNG stickers separately before adding them, which cut my file from 310 MB down to about 120 MB without any visible quality loss on screen. Another counter-intuitive detail is the naming of your pages. GoodNotes uses the first text block it finds on a page to name it in the sidebar. If you name your January page but leave a floating text box that says "January 2025 Dashboard" at the top, the sidebar gets confused and sometimes labels the page incorrectly. I solved this by putting all page names in the very first line of text on each page, before any decorative elements or stickers. There are also some limitations you need to accept upfront. Hyperlinks in GoodNotes only go forward and backward in page order. You cannot create a link that opens a specific annotation layer or triggers an animation. If you want a "click to toggle checkbox" style interaction, you are out of luck inside the app. That kind of functionality requires a third-party tool like Keynote or a dedicated planner app with scripting, neither of which integrates cleanly with GoodNotes.
Get the Full Details
The workaround for navigation is to build a persistent home button on every single page. A small icon in the corner that jumps back to the main dashboard. It adds about ten minutes to your linking process, but it prevents the frustration of being trapped inside a deep nested section with no way back. I learned that after accidentally deleting my link layer on five different pages during a redesign. Took me an hour to fix because I had not saved a backup of the original PDF. For people who want to download a starter template, there are a few reasonable options online. Gumroad has several free cute planner templates from independent creators. My recommended approach is to grab a free one, open it in a PDF editor, and strip out the links. Then rebuild them yourself using your own page structure. The template saves you the design work, but the hyperlink setup is personal to your workflow and your preferred layout. If you are building this on Android, the experience is noticeably worse. Notability does not have an Android version, and Samsung Notes handles hyperlinks differently than GoodNotes. The link drawing interface is clunky, and the page jump accuracy drops significantly. I switched to using Xodo on my tablet for editing hyperlinks instead of trying to work natively in Samsung Notes. It took a day of trial and error to find that combination, but it is faster than fighting the native app.
The bottom line is that a cute digital planner is mostly a design project with some technical steps at the end. Pick your aesthetic first, build the pages, then worry about the links. The design takes longer than the linking. GoodNotes is the most reliable platform for this, but it is not free, and the learning curve for hyperlinks is steeper than the documentation suggests. Start small with a single month before committing to a full year.
