How to Create a Vision Board for 2023

Welcome back to Diary of a Small-Town Girl! Today’s post is all about how to create a vision board for 2023! I absolutely love vision boards and have been making them for several years now, sometimes multiple times a year! So, I thought I’d share how I go about making my vision boards, and some tips for how to display them. Let’s get into it!

What Is a Vision Board?

Some of you may be wondering, “What even is a vision board?”

Vision boards (also known as dream boards) are great visual and physical reminders of your goals, aspirations, and dreams. Some people get really specific with their vision boards, and some people (like me!) prefer to keep them a little broader, while still having a reminder of things that I want to do or accomplish in my future.

In August of 2022, I made a new vision board because that was a big time of transition in my life (I was moving to college for the first time!). This vision board stayed with me for the rest of 2022, and while a lot of my goals for 2023 are based on or continuations of goals from 2022, I wanted an updated vision board that fits my goals and my aesthetic for 2023.

Here’s my 2022 Vision Board:

How to Create a Vision Board

Creating a vision board may seem a bit daunting at first, but it’s actually pretty easy! Plus, there are a couple of different ways you can go about making your vision board, so I’ll lay out both of them here.

Vision Board Type #1: A Physical Board

Way to create a vision board #1 is to make a physical vision board that you can hang up in your bedroom, dorm room, or anywhere else in your home. Here are the steps to make this type of vision board:

1. Gather Your Materials

The main materials you’ll need to make this board are cardstock, a corkboard, or something else to place the photos on; tape, glue, or push pins, and scissors.

2. Find Photos, Quotes, and Other Inspiration

After you have your materials, it’s time to get inspired. This is definitely my favorite part of the process. You can be really specific about what you’re looking for, or you can pick out everything that speaks to you! For this step, you can either find magazines and cut out photos and quotes you love, or you can use a computer or phone to find photos (I recommend Pinterest for this!). Once you have your inspiration, cut it out to the size and shape that you want each photo.

3. Organize Your Photos and Stick Them On!

This is my other favorite part of the process – organizing the photos! I personally enjoy doing a sort of collage of photos, but you can also make it more or less organized. However you want to set up your vision board is perfect, as long as it inspires and motivates you!

4. Hang It Up and Look at It Often

Finally, decide where you’ll hang up your vision board and look at it often. I often prefer to keep my vision boards somewhat private, but I also like to have them in a space that is visible to me, which is why I prefer to keep mine online (more on that later), but wherever you put it, just make sure you love it and look at it often!

Vision Board #2: An Online Board

This is the second way to create a vision board: an online one! This is my preferred version of a vision board, because I find it much easier and more customizable than a physical vision board. It also allows me to put it in multiple places at once (more on that later!) So, here’s how to create your online vision board!

1. Open Up Pinterest and Find Some Inspiration

Time to get motivated and find some great inspiration! As I said earlier, this is my favorite part of the process, and Pinterest is by far my favorite place to find my inspiration. You can get really specific with your searches, and all the photos are so gorgeous, which is a plus. If you’re on a laptop or computer, it’s easy to save the images to your computer or One Drive, which is what I did when creating my 2023 vision board.

2. Organize Your Photos, Quotes, Etc.

Once you’ve gathered all your inspiration and saved it to your device, it’s time to organize it! My favorite platform for this is Canva (not sponsored!), which is free to use and super easy to operate. I just uploaded all my photos, and I could get to organizing, resizing, and cropping to get the perfect arrangement of photos. I used the Jamboard Background template for this, uploaded my photos, and made a collage. You can also make it more organized, making each photo the same size, or adding whatever you want to the vision board. It’s your space to play and be creative!

3. Choose Where to Display Your Vision Board

Having your vision board online gives you so many different places that you can display it. You can print it out and hang it up, put it as your phone or computer background and lock screen, put it in a Notion template, or any number of other things that you can discover! On Canva, it’s super easy to download a copy of your creation, which then allows you to do whatever you want with it!

As for what I do with my vision board, I put it as the background on my laptop, which means that I see it every single day. I love that it’s in a place that is visible to me, but not everyone sees my background, so it is still somewhat private. I also put it as a header in one of my Notion templates, 1) because it looks cool, and 2) because I like displaying it in multiple locations. Another benefit to making it online is that you can create a Pinterest board with your photos and always have them to look at, even if they’re not organized like they are on a board. (Here’s my Pinterest Vision Board if you’re looking for some inspiration!)

Final Vision Board Tips and Advice

Creating a vision board should be a fun and inspiring process. While vision boards work for me and so many other people, they might not be the best tool for you. As always with everything I share on DSTG, take the things that serve you and leave what doesn’t! If you have other ideas for your vision board that I don’t share, do it that way! Or if you want to remember and display your goals in a different way, do it that way!

Also, while a vision board is a great tool for goal setting and manifestation, it’s not a way to reach your goals. For me, this means writing and breaking down my goals, and taking action on them. My vision board is a nice visual reminder of what I’m working for and towards. We cannot achieve our goals without the hard work that goes into the process too. So, while a vision board is a great tool, it is not the only thing you should do this new year if you’re setting goals and targets to reach.

My 2023 Vision Board

Finally, before I forget, I want to share with you my 2023 vision board in full! When creating it, I went directly off of the goals and areas of life that I had written down to focus on this year. Some of the things on the board are things that I know will come with this year, while others are much more aspirational and longer-term goals. I also love putting quotes on my vision boards, because, as you can probably tell, I’m a word person!

I also ended up with a much more neutral vision board this year than last, completely unintentionally! While I absolutely love 2022’s vision board, I think this one fits me and my 2023 goals much better, and I’m so excited to get to work on them!

So, without further ado, here’s my 2023 vision board!

Wrap Up

And that’s how to create a vision board for 2023!

I hope you all enjoyed reading this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you’ve made a vision board already or if you’re planning on making one, share it in the comments! I’d love to see them and support you all in your goals and dreams. As always, thank you so much for being here and I’ll see you next week!