To some they serve as a functional day to day tool and to others they act as a creative statement, but regardless of their use, notebooks are a product that seem to never fall out of fashion. Simply scrolling through the endless list of notebook campaigns on Kickstarter is a testament to this.
Inevitably some of the of the Kickstarter projects are better than others so we picked out two of our favorites to share.
The Everalast Notebook
Over the past few years there have been a lot of ‘smart pens’ and ‘smart papers’ appearing. The premise being that you can write on your notebook and the drawings, scribbles and notes will all seamlessly appear on your phone or laptop. And with many tries have come many fails. Notebook kings Moleskine are just one of many brands to have missed the mark, with their own Smarting Writing Set being met with generally poor reviews.
A new entrant to this niche space is the Everlast notebook, which has a unique selling point that in theory solves one of the many issues usually found with ‘smart’ notebooks. The pages have been made with a ‘waterproof synthetic poly blend’ that mean that if you use a pen from the Pilot Frixion line you will be able to wipe the page clean with a damp towel. This eliminates the necessity of restocking proprietary which can of course become pretty expensive.
When you’ve written on the Everlast, you can then capture images of the pages with relative ease by using the Rocketbook app. The Rocketbook, by the way, was the notebook the company funded in early 2016, which you could erase ink by putting it in the microwave with a glass of water for a while and then vacuuming up the ink. And no, we are not making that up.
Your notes and sketches aren’t stuck in this random app, though: it’s just for scanning. When you snap pictures, it crops and processes the image and then sends it to the cloud services of your choice.
The Everlast isn’t going to change the world, and it isn’t for everybody, but this is a cool way to do the analog-digital thing these other notebooks do, for cheap ($34 for early birds) and without actually using any paper.
The Comp Notebook
This is a notebook and project for designers. Designed by Aaron Fray, a graphic designer from New York, the Comp kickstarter campaign is refreshing void of ostentatious descriptions of life changing features, that are invariably an extra pen loop or new type of paper lining. Instead Fray goes into detail about the process of design process that went into the notebooks creation, with much emphasis being placed on the marble cover
‘Around the early nineteenth century (1820s–1830s), a new industrialized type of paper marbling began in France and Germany. This ‘pseudo-marbling’ process, a term coined by marbling expert Richard J. Wolfe, aimed to create marbled patterns using industrial processes––it was here that a new type of pattern was created in Germany, called the ‘agate’ pattern. Over time, these chemically made agate papers started to be used on more and more cheap blank notebooks, and the pattern evolved slightly into the printed composition notebook pattern we know and love today.‘
For a lot of people knowing that a product has been made with care and consideration can be just as important as the finish. And with the Comp, whilst the covers fray, ink bleeds through their whisper-thin pages, and it’s next to impossible to get them to lie flat, designers and artists love them just the same. It’s also worth noting that since its kickstarter campaign the comp notebook has seen some further improvements. The thick cover boards have been wrapped in micro-embossed paper to protect the corners and lend them a hardcover feel, and the ubiquitous marbled pattern has been upaded with a hand-drawn version that balances the black and white specks. “Literally every single dot on here has been obsessively placed to create a very consistent pattern,” Fray says