How to make your Notion aesthetic in 2023

We all have to love the minimalistic look of Notion. In fact, this app is as easy to use as it looks, and making it look aesthetic is the same easy.

If you're looking for tips to make Notion look more aesthetic, make sure to follow this guide.

Here, we've complied the ultimate list of tips on how to decorate Notion.

We'll start off by designing an aesthetic Notion board, and then we'll proceed to customise the gallery block in a nicer way, and we'll also show you blocks to add in order to make your dashboard cleaner.

How to make your Notion aesthetic

The ultimate secret when it comes to making Notion aesthetic is making sure you use a small palette of colours. Colouring your page in multiple ways won't do the job, so keep it minimalistic if you want it to be aesthetic!

Now, let's get to the actual, full guide on how to make an aesthetic Notion board. Let's get going.

1. Notion Aesthetic Colour Palette

The first step to making your Notion pages look nicer is defining the colours that you want to use. If you're not sure on what colours work best with your Notion page, have a look at websites that match colour palettes.

One great website to find palettes is Coolors. This website has a library of palettes and an engine that randomly generates palettes that you can use to your Notion page.

2. User a memorisable title

The tile is pretty much the first thing that you change when starting to work on your Notion page. And so, the journey of building aesthetic Notion pages really begins!

Making a successful Notion page requires a relevant title. We always suggest for people to use a short, easy to remember title in order to keep things aesthetic.

Not only that a short title looks good because it covers only one line of text, but it also becomes memorisable.

Your users are not going to forget what your page is about if you give them relevant titles! Now don't keep it way too short either, as you also want to send a message to your users, right?

Remember the definition of a title - it's the word or phrase that represents your content, and hence suggesting whats' coming up in the body of your page.

3. Aesthetic Notion Cover

Your Notion page's cover plays a huge role for the aesthetic look.

Why? Because the cover eats most of your Notion page until users scroll on the page, and the cover is basically what they first notice when they come on your page.

For this guide, we're going to build an aesthetic Notion page with you, and the colours that we'll use are mainly going to be white, black and purple. So, these colours matter when selecting the cover!

How to find an aesthetic Notion cover picture

You can find your aesthetic Notion cover picture on Unsplash and add it directly in Notion. Upon clicking the "Add cover" button, you will notice the "Unsplash" button.

In case you didn't know already, Unsplash is a platform that provides loads of high-quality, free images that can be added as Notion covers. Moreover, we always use Unsplash to add our covers for the images that we use in the Notion tutorials.

First after clicking "Add cover", you'll see the image that Notion automatically uploads from the "Gallery". If one of these images suits your needs, feel free to use them! They're all good-looking as well.

For this guide, we're going to take the image over from Unsplash. Since we've already decided the fact that we want a white/black/purple page, we decided to look up for 'purple mountains' and select a cool-looking picture that represents our colour scheme, as you can see in the image above.

Aesthetic Notion cover picture ideas

In case you're not sure about what cover picture to add in order to make your Notion page look aesthetic, here are some unique ideas to inspire yourself from. Search these words on Unsplash to find relevant and aesthetic images:

1. Vaporwave
2. Cyberpunk
3. Arcade
4. Neons
5. Plants
6. Leaf
7. Apple wallpapers
8. Cities
9. Night sky
10. Signs
11. Minimalist
12. Abstract
13. Tower
14. Building
15. Mountains

These were just 15 examples. You can literally search for any picture that you like and consider aesthetic, and then upload it in Notion. Anyways, back to our purple mountains, here's the image that we've picked:

It looks pretty cool, right? If you want to get the image yourself, you can get it for free from this Unsplash post.

4. Add a pretty Notion icon

To continue making our Notion page look more aesthetic, we have to talk about icons. First, it's worth mentioning that if you don't want to add any icon or emoji to your Notion page, that's perfectly fine - pages look more minimalistic and aesthetic without the icon as well!

Though, if you want to add an icon and to keep your Notion dashboard aesthetic, you then have to respect the colour scheme that you chose for the page, and you don't necessarily need to add an emoji that has something to do with your page's content.

Keep in mind that there are loads of emojis that work good with any sort of Notion page, regardless of your content. Choose the one that you like the most!

For our mock aesthetic Notion page, we've decided to add the crystal ball emoji 🔮 because it's purple, it looks cool, and it perfectly suits our needs.

If you want to read more on how Notion icons work, make sure to read the tutorial for Notion icons, where we explain how to add any icon that you want to your Notion page.

Aesthetic icons for Notion

We've also got a library of almost infinite Notion icons where we've displayed an almost infinite amount of icons that free to use, and they're dedicated to working in Notion. Check it out - you might your next favourite Notion icons there!

Maybe you've got an aesthetic image that you want to add and act as your page's icon, because that works perfectly too!

5. Turning images into beautiful galleries

Images are an essential step for an aesthetic Notion setup.

If you've used Notion before, you might've heard about the Gallery block. In case you didn't, the name is pretty self-explanatory.

The Gallery block is a set of cards that are clickable and that expand into new Notion pages. It's basically making a block of subpages for your main Notion page.

You can also use this block just to display your images.

In this tutorial, we've also cared about the Gallery block, because a simple Gallery block can eat up a large portion of your Notion pages, so we have to mind the way that these blocks look as well.

This image above shows you how to make a Gallery block. Simply type "/gallery" and then select "Gallery database - Inline" from the dropdown, if you want to add a Gallery block to your already-built Notion page.

If you want a full page Gallery, simply type "/gallery" and then select the second option show in the image above.

Steps to make the Gallery block look cleaner

Here's what you need to do if you want to have aesthetic Gallery blocks in Notion:

1. Write short titles for the cards
2. Add emojis that respect your page's colour scheme
3. Use covers that also respect the palette
4. Set your Gallery block to display the card's cover pictures

Once you've built your Notion Gallery block, you'll have your block looking just like this:

The very first step to making an aesthetic Gallery block in Notion is deleting the first page. Why? Because that page is also acting as a to-do list, and that's not really what we need right now.

After that, you want to add relevant pictures that act as covers for each of your page. To do so, just click on the card of a page, and select "Add cover" - this works the same as the main Notion pages' cover.

Done adding an aesthetic cover for your Gallery block's pages? Cool!

After that, you need to make sure that the covers are actually displayed in each card. To do so, click the three dot icon in the top-right corner of the Gallery block, and hit "Properties".

Upon clicking that button, you will see multiple settings for your block. The one that you now care abut is "Card preview". Hit the button next to that text, and you will see the following options:

• None
• Page cover
• Page content

In order to display the cover pictures of each card, you want to select the second option - "Page cover".

After doing so, you will be able to see the cover picture of each card in the gallery, just like in the image above. Make sure that you also use covers which respect the colour palette of your Notion page for the Gallery block as well!

6. Respect your paragraphs

While this is related more to the way in which you write your paragraphs generally, we're here to also give a tip on how to make your writing look more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read.

In the image above, you can see multiple phrases that are written continuously, without any break - except for the spaces.

To make your writing look better and to make it easier understanding what you read, make sure to leave a paragraph in-between each of your phrases, like so:

Look at that! Isn't it more refreshing and airy than the text in the previous image?

7. Arrange your blocks side-by-side

The seventh to making successful and aesthetic Notion pages is making sure that you add blocks side-by-side.

Not sure how to add blocks side-by-side? Don't worry, we've got you covered with our guide dedicated to moving things side-by-side in Notion.

Adding blocks side-by-side in Notion is lethal when you want to make an aesthetic-looking page, and the best example for this are images.

Look at how good the picture in that Notion page above looks next to the text, and then image if we'd have the text from the left edge to the right edge, and then if we'd have the image either above or below the text. Not aesthetic at all, right?

That's why we're adding images and other blocks side-by-side with our paragraphs that are full of text.

8. Set boundaries for your blocks

As we go deeper into the guide, we also go deeper into the little details that make Notion pages look more aesthetic. For the eighth factor of making Notion more aesthetic, we have to del with separators for blocks.

Therefore, we have two major types of separators in Notion:

1. The Divider block
2. The Quote block, or the vertical divider alternative

Setting boundaries - The Divider block

If you've looked at the image from the previous step, then you've noticed how the text is raw. Meaning? There's really no divider in-between any paragraph.

Now, look at this image below and see what kind of aesthetic difference does it make when you add a Divider block in-between two paragraphs. It makes so much of a change that we've added the block twice!

To add a divider in your Notion pages, all you have to do is type "/divider" and select the first option. Then, you'll get this thin grey line in-between two blocks. Such a little detail that makes a change, right?

Setting boundaries - The Quote block

Notice how the Divider block can only used horizontally. So, what if you need an aesthetically-pleasing vertical block? Well, in such a case, Notion works just perfect with the Quote block.

Here's what the Quote block looks like in Notion:

While we didn't really use the Quote block as a divider in the image above, you can see how it really makes an aesthetic change to the Notion page if we just add a black bar to the left of the screen.

If you want to use the Quote block as a vertical divider and you're not sure how to do that, peep our guide on how to use vertical dividers, as we explain this in-depth in that post.

9. Give life to your text

Another trick up the sleeve when it comes to making Notion pages look more aesthetic is colouring the text that we have in Notion. This works as much with headings as it works with paragraphs!

For this example, we decided to colour some of the text in purple in order to respect the colours used along the document.

To colour your page's text, simply select the portion of text that you want to colour, hit the "A" icon in the pop-up toolbar above the text, and then select the colour that you want to assign for your text.

Notice how Notion has two options:

1. Color
2. Background

If you want go give colour to a letter or a word, select what's shown in the "COLOR" section.

Though, if you want the letters or words to remain black and to change the colour of what's behind the letters, select what's show in the "BACKGROUND" section.

10. Aesthetic widgets for Notion

You can always enhance Notion to make it look better with widgets. In fact, if you want to see what widgets you can add to Notion, feel free to check out the Notion Widget App Store that we've made. Over 95% of the widgets are free to use!

The widget used in the image below can be found right here and you can get it yourself. It's 100% free!

In the library of widgets, we've got stuff like weather widgets, time widgets, crypto widgets and so on.

Pick your favourite widget, read the tutorial, and then embed the widget in Notion! None of the widgets take longer than 5 minutes to embed in Notion.

11. Many aesthetic Notion templates

Finally, the eleventh and the last tip on how to make an aesthetic Notion board is related to... Aesthetic Notion templates!

We've got a library full of aesthetic & free Notion templates that you can access today. Go ahead, find your favourite template and duplicate it!

In the image above you can see what our library of 100% free Notion templates looks like. We've got plenty of Notion website building templates that are waiting for you!

Aesthetic Notion Tips (Easy)

We understand that you may not have enough time to read the full story on how to make Notion pretty. That's why we've compressed all of the information into this list of 11 steps to make your Notion pages aesthetic:

1. Colour scheme: decide the colours for your page
2. Title: use a short, memorisable word or phrase
3. Cover: add a minimalistic image
4. Icon: representative icons work best
5. Gallery: show the aesthetic covers of the cards
6. Writing: always leave blanks in-between paragraphs
7. Side-by-side: add blocks one next to the other (especially images)
8. Dividers: freshen a page with Divide/Quote blocks
9. Text colour: change the text's colour (respect the colour palette)
10. Widgets: there are plenty of widgets to add in Notion
11. Templates: loads of already-made aesthetic Notion templates

That's it with the tutorial on how to decorate Notion aesthetically! If you want to see more guides like this, be sure to browse our library of Notion guides.

Thanks a lot for stopping by!