Pouch Issue 3: Call for Submissions

Be a part of our upcoming issue!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, everyone!!

The Call for Submissions is now OPEN for Pouch Issue #3!! 🥳🥳🥳

We are looking for submissions to the Planner and Journal Layout Gallery of Pouch Issue 3. Share one of your favorite journaling layouts or planner spreads with Pouch, and we may include it in the layout gallery for the issue!

As an example, here’s a brilliant layout from @shuyawns that kicked off our Journal Layout Gallery for Issue #2:

Call for Submission categories

We’re seeking Planner and Journal Layout submissions for these two categories:

🌱 Good for a beginner

Send us your planner or journal layouts that you think might be good for beginners to try!

These are layouts you might recommend to:

• Someone who is about to try out journaling or planning for the very first time.

• Someone who has had a tough time using their journals or planners in the past.

• Anyone who is looking for journaling or planner ideas that are easy to follow yet still interesting to look back on after the year is over.

🌲 Good for the experienced

Send us your planner or journal layouts that you think would interest experienced analog lovers! These are layouts you might recommend to someone who has used a planner or journal for years.

Here are some ideas:

• Maybe you’ve got an intricate journal layout that takes more time commitment to do regularly, but the pay off is worth it.

• Maybe you have a fairly straightforward planner system, but it has “just worked” for you and you think a fellow planner nerd would appreciate hearing about it.

• Or maybe you have a weird & experimental layout that would inspire analog veterans to switch things up!

How to submit

Interested in contributing? Head to our Pouch #3 Submissions Page!

There you’ll find our submission criteria and a link to the submission form.

• Submissions will close on February 9, 2026 11:59pm Pacific Time, and results will be emailed out around late March.

• If your submission is accepted for Pouch Issue 3, you will get a free digital and physical copy of the magazine!

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A few behind-the-scenes details…

…because I can’t write a newsletter that’s short and to the point! 😆

I wanted to use my Substack to elaborate on two other aspects of submissions, also covered in the submissions page, but expounded upon a bit here~

🧐 How to select layouts when they’re literally all perfect??

If you’ve been a long-time reader of this newsletter, you might remember I had a small blessing-slash-crisis when reviewing Pouch Issue #2’s submissions. In short, I hadn’t specified any criteria for how we were selecting layouts in Pouch #2 lol 😂 and sooooo after much agonizing, I just included them all hahahahaha. (And there was barely enough space to do so!)

This time around, I want to be prepared in case we get more submissions than we can print! Hence we’ve got submission criteria now.

The criteria was really hard for me to write. One of the things I worry about most with Pouch: I never want Pouch to accidentally discourage people from journaling, planning, or being creative with paper. People’s journals and planners are so personal, and I truly believe that each one is uniquely beautiful in its own right. People are often so hard on themselves when it comes to their creations, and when they submit their journal or planner to Pouch, they’re really putting themselves out there! These pages are their solace, and to share them is an act of vulnerability and trust. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It’s an honor to be trusted in this way, and I feel a responsibility to respect that trust.

I never want someone to submit a spread of their precious journal to Pouch, learn that their submission won’t be published in the issue, then feel like they did something wrong. Like their spread “wasn’t good enough,” or wasn’t perfect enough, or wasn’t pretty enough, etc. etc. So much about having a journaling practice is about embracing imperfections and making systems that truly work for you, and I never want the “Pouch Submissions Process” to embody the opposite message.

Similarly, I don’t want Pouch to publish only the most elaborate, difficult-for-mere-mortals-to-recreate sort of layouts. I want readers to read Pouch and think:

✅ “That’s so cool, I want to try that!”

and NOT

❌ “That’s so cool, I could never do that.”

So how do we handle the problem of submissions?

Could we just include them all?!

Well, that’s what I did for Issue 2 😂 but I don’t think that’s the long-term solution. This too is addressed in the blessing-slash-crisis newsletter:

With 1000 submissions, I simply couldn’t print them all. Or even if I did — imagine I printed a giant book with 1000 journal layouts in it — it’s just a very different thing. As a reader, you don’t have the same relationship with 1000 journals as you do with a curated selection of 10. At a certain point, if you include everything, you’re kinda including none of them.

The beauty of print is that it’s finite. There is no infinite scroll; there is no continuous update; you don’t get notifications; you read through the pages and you’re done.

I want to respect this aspect of Pouch Magazine as well. The layout gallery should be a curated set, something that is easy to digest. If we have more layouts that we can print, we should select a thoughtful subset of the submissions rather than find a way to always print them all.

The unscientific review process for the Pouch Layout Gallery

With all that in mind, how will Pouch Team select layouts for the gallery!? I worked with my editor JM to come up with this:

When we select which submissions will be published in an issue of Pouch, it’s like we’re arranging a lovely bouquet of flowers. And to take the metaphor a step further: it’s a flower bouquet, not a flower competition.

In other words, when reviewing submissions, Pouch is not trying to assess what are “the best” layouts we’ve received; we don’t believe in that premise. A glimpse into a person’s journal is a glimpse into their inner world — how could such a thing be ranked? Every single submission we get is beautiful, moving, and absolutely worthy of inclusion in Pouch.

Ah, but we have a magazine to publish! And a magazine requires curation in order to be coherent for its readers. For Pouch Issue 3, we probably can’t publish all submissions, so how will we select what gets published?

Of course, we will be following the submission criteria outlined above, but beyond that: It is a vague and imprecise science to find a set of layouts that we think work well together within the issue. We’ll put submissions next to each other, move them around, and see what emerges. The final selection will be just one arrangement of beautiful flowers, out of all the other equally beautiful permutations possible.

I hope this conveys our love and respect for every submission we get!! 💞

📖 A nerdier crisis: What’s the difference between a planner and a journal?

This time around, we’re asking folks to categorize their layout as either a “Journal” layout or a “Planner” layout!

In Pouch Issue 1 & 2, I called the layout gallery the “Journal Layout Gallery,” but I didn’t intend to omit planners. I thought the word “journal” captured both “planners” and “journals,” and I had attempted to welcome planners in the fine print:

My original attempt to include planners in Pouch #2 Call for Submissions, but it was really subtle and easy to miss.

I’m making Pouch Issue 3 in a team, and so in December, we had a team meeting about submissions. In the meeting, Carolyn and Nikki astutely pointed out that calling it a “Journal Layout Gallery” was a bit confusing! That was reflected in the Pouch Issue #2 submission results, too: Almost all our layouts were journal layouts, with just 2 planner layouts out of 21.

So for Issue 3, we’re going with the clunkier-but-clearer language of “Planner and Journal Layout Gallery,” and we’re asking folks to classify their layout as one or the other in their submission.

We know there’s a ton of ambiguity around the two terms, so we’re going to be using these definitions for Issue 3:

• Planner layout = This layout is primarily for managing your schedule and tasks, i.e. planning for the future.

• Journal layout = This layout is primarily for memory-keeping, i.e. documenting the past.

…and even still we came up with edge cases around this 😂

For lots more detail on the Is my layout a ‘journal’ or a ‘planner’? debate, check out the Q&A on the submissions page!

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OK, now that’s it!

Head to the submission page and send us your beautiful layouts!!

If you have any questions, leave a comment below, DM me on Instagram at @pouch.studio, or send an email to victoriakirst@gmail.com.

THANK YOUUU and we can’t wait to see all your wonderful submissions!!! 🫶📖

💖 The Pouch Team