Colour for Feelings, Not Scores
Journaling · 2026-09-03 · 5 min read
In HushNotes every entry is a block in its feeling’s colour. Why there are eight feelings with no ranking, no good-to-bad ramp, no red, and nothing to keep up.
A colour can say “this is how it felt” or “this is how well you did”. We wanted the first and worked hard to avoid the second.
In HushNotes, each entry is a block in the colour of the feeling you chose for it. A month becomes a wall of colour; once you have written for more than a year, each year gets its own row. You can see at a glance how much you wrote and how it felt, without reading a word. That is the whole idea, and it only works if the colours are honest.
Eight feelings, in a fixed order
HushNotes has eight feelings: calm, content, joyful, grateful, tender, tired, anxious and heavy. They always appear in that order, and the order is not a ranking. Tender isn’t worse than joyful. Tired isn’t a failure. Heavy is simply what some days are.
Many mood trackers ask you to rate a day on a scale from awful to great. That is useful for some purposes, but in a journal it quietly turns every entry into a grade. Over a few weeks, the chart starts to look like a report card, and a run of hard days can feel like something you did wrong.
No good-to-bad ramp, and no red
Colour can rank things even when the labels don’t. If the pleasant feelings were all bright and the hard ones all dark, a glance at the wall would read as “good month” or “bad month”. So the palette, which we call Mist & Jewel, spreads lightness across the set instead of lining it up. Joyful is a bright gold, but heavy, content, tender and tired sit at similar depths, and calm and anxious share a middle tone.
There is no red anywhere, for feelings or for warnings. Most of us read red as alarm, error or danger, and none of the eight feelings is an error. Even the button that deletes everything is amber, paired with an icon.
Colour is never the only clue
Some people see colour differently, and a design that relies only on colour leaves them out. We checked every pair of feelings under simulations of the three common kinds of colour-vision deficiency, so that no two end up as the same colour. And colour never works alone: every feeling has its name beside it when you choose it, in the key, and when you open an entry.
You choose; the app never guesses
The feeling on an entry comes from you. HushNotes doesn’t read what you wrote and decide how you felt, and it doesn’t score your mood. Choosing is optional, too: you can write first and choose a feeling at the end, or not at all. An entry without one is drawn as an edge instead of a fill, so “I didn’t say” never looks like a grey day.
When you open an entry, the screen fills with its colour. It is a small thing, but it makes reading back feel like stepping into the day rather than looking at a record of it.
Nothing to keep up
Many apps count consecutive days and reset the count when you miss one. It works for some habits. For a journal, we think it does harm: it makes a quiet week feel like falling behind, and it rewards writing something, anything, just to keep a number alive.
HushNotes has no streaks and no targets. The wall has no gaps for days you didn’t write, so a missed week doesn’t leave a hole. Nothing resets. If you come back after a month away, your journal looks exactly as you left it, ready for the next entry.
What it looks like over time
- On your first day, your first entry is one big block.
- A few weeks in, you see this month’s wall, then earlier weeks below it.
- Once your entries span more than a year, each year appears as its own row.
With HushNotes Pro, feeling trends show how often you chose each feeling over a period. They count only what you tapped, with no score on top. They are a way to notice, not a way to be judged.
And like everything else in HushNotes, the colours and feelings stay on your iPhone. Nobody else sees your wall unless you show it to them.