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Year in pixels — free online mood tracker

A year in pixels is a 365-cell grid where each day gets one colored square, usually for mood, so a whole year of feeling fits on one page. Pick a color for today below and the grid fills in as you go. It saves to this browser on this device, so nothing is uploaded and no account is needed, and you can export the finished year as a PNG at any time.

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Year in pixels

in your browser

Pick a color, then color a day

Loading your grid

Keyboard: tab to the grid, then use the arrow keys to move between days and Enter or Space to color the day you are on. The 5 colors above choose what Enter paints.

Your grid is saved in this browser on this device. Nothing is uploaded, so clearing your site data erases it and another browser starts you at a blank year. Download the PNG for a copy you keep.

How it works

One square a day, and the year draws itself.

The whole practice is a single decision made once a day, which is why it survives when longer journalling habits do not.

01
Pick a color
Five levels, best to worst. Rename them to words you actually use, because "Flat" and "Fine" mean different things and only you know which one Tuesday was. The names you type are the names printed in the exported legend.
02
Color today
One click on today's square, which is the one with the ring around it. Click it again with the same color selected and it clears. That is the whole daily interaction, and it takes about two seconds.
03
Come back tomorrow
The grid saves to this browser as you go, so it is waiting the next time you open the page. When you want to keep it or post it, download the PNG: it carries the year, the day count, and your legend.

The reason one pixel a day works is arithmetic. A written journal entry costs a few minutes and some willingness to sit with the day. A pixel costs one click, about two seconds, which adds up to roughly twelve minutes for an entire year. That is cheap enough that you keep doing it in the weeks when you least feel like recording anything, and those are exactly the weeks worth having on the grid.

The payoff comes later. Three hundred and sixty-five numbers in a list are unreadable. The same 365 days as colored squares are one glance: you see the run of good weeks in May, the month that went dark, the fact that most of the year was ordinary. A year in pixels is a compression format for a year, and the compression is the feature.

The practice

It shows you the shape of a year, not its causes.

Worth knowing before you spend twelve months on one.

The year-in-pixels spread comes out of bullet journalling, where hand-drawn versions spread through the community in the mid-2010s and became a standard page at the front of a new notebook. The format barely changed on the way to a screen, because there was not much to change: twelve rows, up to 31 columns, a legend, and a rule that you fill in one square a day and do not go back and tidy it.

What it is genuinely good at is shape. Runs show up as bands of one color. Seasons show up as a change in the average tone between the top of the grid and the bottom. A single bad week looks like a single bad week rather than the whole year, which is a useful correction when you are in it. None of that requires you to remember anything, and that is the point: the grid remembers instead of you.

What it cannot do is explain itself. A year in pixels can tell you October was rough. It cannot tell you that October was when you stopped sleeping, or started a job, or got sick. It also flattens a day: a morning that went well and a night that went badly come out as one color, and which color you pick is decided by whichever end of the day you are standing in when you click. And because human beings are extremely good at seeing patterns, a stretch of random variation will look meaningful if you stare at it long enough. The grid is a record, not a diagnosis.

The honest limit

A year in pixels shows correlation with the calendar and nothing else. If you want to know why a month went the way it did, you have to record something alongside it: how you slept, what time you got up, whether you trained, who you saw. One column of colors is a picture. Two columns are the start of an answer.

Year in pixels ideas beyond mood

Sleep quality

Five levels from slept great to barely slept. Easier to keep up than logging hours, and the pattern is usually just as clear.

Energy

Not mood. How much you actually had in the tank. The two look different across a year more often than people expect.

Training

Rest, easy, moderate, hard, race. A year of training load in one block, without a spreadsheet.

One habit

Two colors instead of five: did it, did not. A year in pixels turns into a plain streak calendar and reads even faster.

Pain or symptoms

A flare calendar. The runs and the seasons are the point, and a year is long enough for both to show.

Time outside

None, a little, an hour, most of the day. It tends to correlate with everything else you might have tracked instead.

The grid shows you the shape. The columns next to it show you why.

This page holds one thing, in one browser, on one device. Habit Pocket keeps a color-coded mood list like this one in sync between iPhone and the web, in the same grid as the sleep times, step counts, and workouts that usually explain a rough stretch. There is no year-in-pixels view in the app. There is the grid, and a chart that lays two rows on top of each other.

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FAQ

Year in pixels — common questions

A year in pixels is a grid of 365 squares, one per day, where you color each square to record how the day went. Most people use it for mood, with three to five colors running from good to bad. Twelve rows of up to 31 squares put a whole year on one page, so a year of feeling becomes something you can take in at a glance. It began as a hand-drawn bullet journal spread and works the same way on paper or on a screen.

The colors mean whatever you decide they mean, which is why every year in pixels needs a legend. The usual setup is a five-point scale from great to rough with one color each, so a year of days sorts into five buckets instead of a hundred adjectives. Fewer levels are easier to keep consistent: three makes you decide quickly, seven makes you second-guess an ordinary Tuesday. This page gives you five and lets you rename them.

Yes, and this page is one. An online version keeps the squares even, lets you fix a day you got wrong, and exports the finished year as an image you can share. What it gives up is the small ritual of picking up a pen, which for some people is the part that makes the habit stick. Nothing here is uploaded: the grid is stored in this browser on this device, and clearing your site data erases it.

Pick your scale first, color today, then do it again tomorrow. Three to five levels with a color each is enough, and naming them in your own words matters more than which colors you choose. Do not try to backfill January from memory in June, because a remembered month is mostly the story you now tell about it. If you miss a week, leave it blank and carry on, since blank days are information too.

Anything that fits a short scale and describes a whole day. Sleep quality, energy, pain, how hard you trained, time spent outside, and whether you did one specific habit all work, because each collapses cleanly into three to five levels. What does not work is anything with a real number attached, like weight or step count, since a five-color scale throws away most of what the number was telling you.

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