Somebody drew the first one
We make an Android app that draws this grid, so you should read the rest of this knowing that. It is also why the page exists: we spent a year building on somebody else’s idea and could not find one place that said clearly whose idea it was.
The Year in Pixels turns up now the way weather does. It is on Pinterest boards, in a dozen apps, on printable sheets sold by people who did not make it, in January posts that call it “a popular bullet journal trend” and leave it there. Old enough to have no author, apparently. It is ten years old and it has one.
A Year in Pixels is a single page holding an entire year: twelve columns for the months, up to thirty-one rows for the days, and a short key saying what each colour means. You colour one square a day. It was created in December 2015 by Camille, a French bullet journalist who writes as Passion Carnets, and she gave it that name herself.
The timeline, with dates that can be checked
Every row below comes from a page you can open yourself; the full list is at the bottom. Where the two primary sources word something differently, that is said rather than smoothed over.
| When | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 18 August 2013 | Ryder Carroll publishes bulletjournal.com with a tutorial video, and the Bullet Journal method has a public home. Every tracker in this story is drawn inside that container. | Bullet Journal, About |
| 7 May 2014 | Tim Urban publishes Your Life in Weeks on Wait But Why: a 90-year life drawn as 4,680 boxes, one per week, on a single page. | Wait But Why |
| July 2015 | Camille, a French bullet journalist writing as Passion Carnets, starts keeping a Bullet Journal. | Bullet Journal, Deep Dive |
| December 2015 | She reads Your Life in Weeks, asks herself how many days in a year she is actually happy, and draws a grid of one square per day for 2016. She calls it the Year in Pixels. Five colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue. | Both primary sources |
| 5 January 2017 | Camille publishes her own account of it in French. By then the grid has been repinned more than 187,000 times on Pinterest. | Passion Carnets |
| 1 July 2017 | The Bullet Journal site runs a deep dive on the spread, with Camille explaining it in her own words. The method's own publication has now documented it. | Bullet Journal, Deep Dive |
| 28 December 2020 | She is still drawing the sheet each year and giving it away as a free printable. | Passion Carnets |
What she actually changed
Tim Urban’s Your Life in Weeks is a grid of a whole life, one box per week, and its argument is arithmetic: here is the number, it is smaller than you think. You do not fill it in. It is a thing to look at once and feel something about.
Camille kept the shape and changed the unit, and that one move turned a picture into a practice. A week is too long to have a colour. A day is exactly short enough to have one, and it comes back tomorrow. Her own question was not how much time is left but something more ordinary and harder to answer: across a whole year, how many of the days were actually good ones? A grid of 365 squares is the only honest way to find out, because the alternative is remembering, and nobody remembers a year fairly.
Five colours, from the beginning
She used five: red, orange, yellow, green, blue — warm for the good end, cool for the bad. Not a design decision that got lucky. It is the reason the thing survives December, and every version of this grid that has failed since has usually failed by adding colours until choosing one became work.
Ten years of people rediscovering that independently is its own small piece of evidence. We say five to seven on our own page and we did not arrive there first.
Pinterest is where it went
By early January 2017, about a year after she drew it, Camille recorded more than 187,000 repins. That is the number in her own post, and it explains the shape of what happened next: the grid spread as an image rather than as an article, which is exactly how something ends up everywhere with its author left behind on the first pin.
Six months later the Bullet Journal site published a deep dive with her in it. So the method’s own publication documented the spread and its creator in the summer of 2017, which is worth knowing the next time you read that nobody is sure where it came from.
The credit that stayed
One of the older Year in Pixels apps is Teo Vogel’s Pixels, on Android. Its Google Play package name is ar.teovogel.yip — yip, for Year in Pixels — and its store listing still names the feature as “an idea by @PassionCarnets”.
A line of credit in a store listing, carried for years by a developer who owed nobody anything. We noticed it while writing this page, and we would rather point at it than at ourselves.
What the Year in Pixels is not
- Not a mood mandala. The mandala is a circle divided into days and coloured outward from the centre. Same idea, different geometry, and it is a drawing exercise as much as a record.
- Not a habit tracker. A habit tracker answers yes or no, did you do the thing. This answers how the day was, on a scale, with no verb in it.
- Not Your Life in Weeks. That grid is a life and you do not fill it in. This one is a year and it is empty until you do.
- Not a clinical instrument. It has been drawn by hundreds of thousands of people because it is quick and pretty, not because it was validated for anything. Ours is a journal too. If you are tracking something that matters medically, a doctor beats a colouring grid.
What we could not verify
Written down so that the next person does not have to repeat the search, and so you know where this page stops being sourced.
- The first release date of the Pixels app. Secondary listings say April 2017, and we could not confirm it against the Play listing or the developer’s own site, so it is not in the timeline above.
- Whether anyone drew a day-per-square year grid before December 2015. Quantified-self charts and Nicholas Felton’s annual reports predate it by years, and we found nothing that is this spread, under any name, before Camille. Absence of evidence, and we will say so.
- How it travelled from her blog into the wider community. Pinterest is documented by her own count. Whatever happened on Reddit, Instagram and YouTube in 2016 is real but we could not source it, so we have not described it.
If you can source any of the above, or we have got something wrong, tell us. A history page that cannot be corrected is just a longer rumour.
Sources
All opened and read on 6 September 2026. The two marked primary are Camille’s own words.
- Year In Pixels : un an pour devenir heureux (primary) — Passion Carnets, 5 January 2017. Camille's own account, in French. The origin, the five colours, the Wait But Why post that set it off, and the Pinterest figure.
- Deep Dive: Year in Pixels (primary) — Bullet Journal, 1 July 2017. Camille interviewed in English on the Bullet Journal method's own site. Confirms December 2015 and that she named the spread.
- Your Life in Weeks — Wait But Why, 7 May 2014. Tim Urban's grid of a 90-year life, one box per week. The thing Camille read.
- About the Bullet Journal method — Bullet Journal, 18 August 2013. Ryder Carroll's own timeline. Dates the launch of bulletjournal.com, the container all of this appeared inside.
- Mood Tracker by Pixels on Google Play — Google Play. Teo Vogel's Android app. Its store listing still credits the idea to @PassionCarnets, and its package name is ar.teovogel.yip.
- Year in Pixels 2021: free printable — Passion Carnets, 28 December 2020. Five years on, Camille was still drawing the sheet and giving it away.
Questions we are asked
Who invented the Year in Pixels?
Camille, a French bullet journalist who writes as Passion Carnets (@passioncarnets on Instagram). She drew the first one in December 2015, for the year 2016, and named it herself. Both her own blog and the Bullet Journal method's official site say so, the second with her explaining it in her own words.
When was the Year in Pixels created?
December 2015. Her English account on bulletjournal.com dates it to that month; her French post dates the inspiration to late 2015 and the finished grid to the year 2016. The two agree.
What inspired the Year in Pixels?
Tim Urban's post Your Life in Weeks, published on Wait But Why on 7 May 2014, which draws a 90-year life as 4,680 boxes on one page. Camille names it directly in both accounts. She kept the idea of a life as a grid and changed the unit from a week to a day.
Is the Year in Pixels the same as a mood tracker?
Not quite. A mood tracker is any record of how you felt; the Year in Pixels is one specific shape, a whole year of days on a single page, coloured from a short key. Most mood trackers are monthly and many are written. This one is annual and has no words in it at all.
Can I use the Year in Pixels idea myself?
People have been drawing it in their own notebooks since 2016, and Camille has published free printable versions of it herself. If you are writing about it or building something with it, credit her — she is easy to find, still publishing, and the reason any of us have the grid at all.
If you came here to make one
Then the history has done its job and you can go and colour something. There are free sheets to print here, with no email asked for, or you can colour a grid in this tab to see whether the shape suits you before committing a year to it. Camille publishes her own printables too, and hers came first.
And if you write about the Year in Pixels anywhere — a blog, a roundup, a store listing — put her name in it. That is the whole ask of this page.