The Magic of GoodNotes Color-Changing Stickers
I began drafting this post in my first digital planner, which I purchased after working with GoodNotes for several years and window shopping for said digital planner for nearly as long. I finally found and miraculously settled on the DashPlanner, which hit the sweet spot of price, design, and features. But that’s another post!
On July 2, I received a newsletter from Megan Dillard, the designer-entrepreneur behind DashPlanner, with the coolest sheet of color-changing stickers. I immediately played with them, checked if this was a new GoodNotes feature (it was not), tweeted about them, and set about replicating them. I tried changing the color of existing transparent stickers I had created from PNGs, but was unsuccessful. My text stickers changed color, but that was nothing new.
I traced over a couple of my aforementioned image-based transparent stickers with the pen tool in GoodNotes and, for a solid sticker, colored it in. The results were, uh, fine, I guess? But it was certainly time intensive and not as slick as the lovely options shared by Megan. At this point, though, it was 3 AM, my hand was a little sore, and insomnia tugged me elsewhere for another hour until I fell asleep.
Then, last night, during yet another bout of insomnia, I found a GoodNotes user similarly enchanted with these magical, color-changing stickers. /u/StefyF documented a similar attempt at replication to my own and linked to the GoodNotes July Round-Up that included several premium sets of color-changing stickers by WidescreenEducation. /u/ShrkB8ter noted that only certain features within the application can use the color-changing editor: writing (the pen tool), the highlighter, and, as I’d previously noted but dismissed as boring, the text tool. Apologies for the backstory, I know everyone just wants the instructions, but credit goes where credit is due.
The text tool is key to creating color-changing stickers, and here’s an easy way to do it. What you need:
AnyFont ($2.99) or your preferred method to install custom fonts on your iPad
Font Awesome for the Desktop (Free with a premium version available but unnecessary)
There are many other icon fonts available! See also IcoFont or anything you like from the Dingbats category from Dafont. This tutorial will proceed using the Font Awesome font, since it has many icons available and is a little different to use from traditional fonts.
If you have not used AnyFont to install a font before, here is a short video from the developer. It was filmed on an iPhone, but the process is the same on an iPad:
Once you install the font, you’ll go back to GoodNotes and enter the name of the icon wrapped in single colons. You can see this demonstrated in this video:
You will note that the icon did not convert from text to icon until I changed it from Font Awesome Regular to Font Awesome Brand. You can check which font each icon uses through the facets available on the Font Awesome website: Solid, Regular, Brand; there are categories and a search function to find what you’re looking for.
I will cover creating a custom font in a future post, since that’s rather more complicated and because, well, I mentioned at the beginning that I started drafting this post in GoodNotes. I didn’t finish drafting it there because my beloved iPad had to go in for service; it was being finicky about charging. I’m so lonesome.
