How do you design a private but practical personal writing system?
I want to create an invented alphabet / writing system for a physical diary, mostly for privacy reasons and peace of mind.
I’ve made simple substitution alphabets before, but they always end up feeling too easy to decode if someone spent enough time looking at them.
The problem is that I also want it to stay practical and fluid enough for everyday journaling. I don’t want something so complicated that it takes me 3 hours to read back a single page or makes writing feel exhausting.
I’m neurodivergent and extremely private with my personal space/thoughts, so journaling is one of the only ways I can process things mentally without feeling exposed. Because of that, I’d love to make a system that feels genuinely “mine” and difficult for other people to casually understand.
I normally think/write in Spanish and Catalan, and sometimes English too, so ideally I’d want something flexible enough to work naturally across multiple languages.
Does anyone here have advice for designing a script that is:
- reasonably hard to decode
- fast to write
- fast to read once learned
- and still aesthetically pleasing/natural?
Especially interested in:
- syllabic systems
- shorthand-inspired scripts
- ways to break letter-frequency patterns
- contextual symbol changes
- ligatures/connected writing
- partial vowel removal
- etc.
Would really appreciate hearing from people who’ve designed personal scripts before.