Corona diary - Parts 1 & 2
A visual record of living in lockdown created 5 years ago
I have moved my lockdown journal pages here to my new The JOTT Reportage section. I always intended for The JOTT to include my explorations of Visual Reportage skills and so I’m not sure why i didn’t post them here in the first place. If you don’t want to receive this extra content, I think you can opt out of The JOTT Reportage section and revert to just receiving The JOTT’s weekly visual note.
If you’ve already read these you can scroll on by and the new Week 3 post will appear shortly. So here are the first two installments originally posted on the 9th March and the 17th March 2025.
9th March 2025
Today is Covid day of reflection here in the UK.
A couple of months ago I thought it would be interesting to see the visual journal pages of everyone who kept one at that time. My ambition was to group them into a collection that showed how individuals experienced those surreal days, weeks and months differently. But life and work gets in the way of best laid plans so here I am… sharing my first pages. If you kept a visual record of this time I’d love to see your first pages, please add them here.
I love the fact that I thought to do a front page - The optimism of a serial visual journal starter! I certainly found a lot of comfort in keeping this journal for the first few months of lockdown.
Week 1 - This was a scary week for many reasons, but as a self employed person who makes their living as a graphic recorder drawing at live events it was the week that our business fell off a cliff. £20k of booked work was cancelled. We are a 2 adult household who both work in our business, so in one tv broadcast we went from doing okay, to zero income for the foreseeable future. I can still feel that feeling.
Week 2 - In the UK this was the week it all got really serious. We were ‘socially distancing’ already, but this week Lockdown went into force and travel outside your immediate area was banned.
I was so very lucky to live in a house, a house with a garden, with a person I love, and yet it’s still hard to express how surreal that time felt. How stressed we all were. Of course you know because you were somewhere too, going through your own version of this. Meanwhile the sun was warm and the skies, without planes, were a perfectly clear vibrant blue.
Hi - I’m Cara, a Graphic Recorder and Illustrator working in the UK.
If you like visual journaling I share a weekly post at The JOTT and I also write: The Visual Edit, a monthly newsletter for Graphic Recorders.
My book, Draw a Better Business is a visual thinking toolkit for creative thinking small business owners.
Thanks for finding me here, do say hi x