Campus vs Traveler's blank monthly calendars (size comparison)
Sep. 1st, 2025 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Back to school! As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve decided to use September as my “new year” because it works well with my kid’s school stuff. So it’s time to bid farewell to last year’s calendar, and set up a fresh one! I’m moving from the Traveler’s Notebook free monthly calendar to the KOKUYO Campus one, mostly because the latter is a bit bigger. (Spoiler: the squares are about 18% bigger.)
Last year’s calendar was a Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar. I love the idea of the system of inexpensive refill notebooks and accessories in a planner cover that stays with you, but I wasn’t sure the slimmer form factor was going to work for me.

Overall, I thought it was a great little calendar. I liked the textured cardstock cover, and I liked the whole setup even more when I picked up the zippered pouch that I have attached to the back cover and use for stickers.

I particularly liked this format when travelling this summer, when I decided to use the blank back pages I hadn’t used for testing pens as the place for travel journal entries rather than dragging my regular A5 journal around with me. The tall-thin format is pleasantly easy to pull out of a bag.

But when I’m *not* out of the house (which is most of the time) the calendar is just a little small. I use my monthly calendars for tracking a bunch of things, and while some days there’s enough space, that’s not true of all days when I have more stuff I want to record. I’ve also found that a lot of my favourite “small” stickers that I use as habit trackers take up a lot of space. (The dogs below were marking days that I’d spent time writing.)

Since I already use an A5 notebook for my journal, I decided I might as well match it for the calendar this year. Honestly I wanted to do that last year but a lot of the A5 options are Monday start and I thought that might be annoying when Sunday start is the more common format around here. The Traveler’s refill lets you fill in your own days of week. But this year I’m just gonna lean into Monday start. I conceptually like it better so I’ve changed my phone and stuff and we’ll see if I start having off-by-one errors.
So my new calendar for the 2025-2026 school year is a KOKUYO Campus Diary Free Schedule monthly calendar. I should note that although this is a blank calendar, the year overview pages are Jan-Dec still so … I dunno, I guess I could cover the labels or just start in the middle, but I apparently barely used those overview pages last year so I’m guessing it’ll just remain blank or I’ll doodle on it or something. While the book itself is clearly bigger, the layout is such that each day’s square is a bit shorter but wider.
Here’s some size comparisons:

I did some measuring too:

- Traveler’s Calendar: 27mm wide by 33mm tall (total 891mm squared)
- Campus calendar: 34mm wide by 31mm tall (total 1054mm squared)
So the Campus notebook squares are about 18% bigger, I guess. I don’t know yet if that’ll be enough, but I’m unlikely to start carrying around anything bigger than an A5 notebook so if this doesn’t work out I’ll likely have switch to a weekly planner for at least some of my tracking. My calendar seldom leaves the house but I carry it from room to room and into the backyard in my knitting bag, and A5 is my preferred size for that.
The Campus notebook is cheap enough that it won’t be a tragedy if I bail on it part way through the year. It looks like I paid $5.50 for the Campus one and $11 for the Traveler’s one, so it’s half the cost but also neither of them is exactly going to break the bank. And yes, I did intentionally buy this earlier in the year to help me resist getting too curious about fall planner launches.
The cover is considerably less nice (thin enough that I will need a flat surface or pencil board to write in this, no pleasant texture) but I have a cover for A5 notebooks that should compensate for the thin cover, and I already own several pencil boards that I use with my current journal, so neither of those is deal breakers at this moment.

I’m also curious to see how I like the Campus paper. It’s supposedly decent enough for fountain pens, and although I only use those for date numbers currently, I’ll be using the pages in the back of the calendar for ink testing. I’m curious to see how I like it, mostly for the fun of testing a different paper. Although they do have a lot of other cute paper products geared at students that are quite reasonably priced, and I’m never sad to have options.
Some things that did work well this year:
- Thin washi tape for marking longer blocks of vacation and events. I love the way it looks even if it takes up a few precious mm of space.
- Sticker “rewards” for habits. I’m amused by how much more rewarding these are than drawing tracking icons.
- Switching to pencil for calendar writing. I tried pen for a while but didn’t love it.
- Getting a pen shaped eraser so it fits in my pencil case better.
- Getting a pencil board and using it also as a bookmark so my calendar always opened to the right page.
- The zipper pouch for stickers.
I may keep the zipper pouch for stickers even though it won’t be stuck on a notebook any more (I mean, I could, but I’m going to try having both A5 notebooks in a single cover so it would be kind of in the way).
I haven’t actually written in the new calendar yet (I’ll be setting it up on labour day and I’m writing this the night before it posts) but I’m excited to try it out!