What would your ideal notebook look like?
Suppose you could design your own moleskine-esque notebook, where every page and the cover is fully customizable. What kind of pages and images would you include? Please leave your ideas in the comments!
Filed under: books, diy notebook · 11 Comments
Be able to add tags of some sort to pages so you can have a table of contents and an index (both optional).
These books could be big, up to 100 pages?
My ideas:
- graph paper
- todo lists
- calendar
- a page to jot down restaurant reviews. maybe a general review page
- bart and muni maps
- shopping lists. maybe a page that lists common ingredients i need to buy at Good Life, that I can just circle when I need to pick them up.
- more graph paper
- it would be cool if there were tear-out business cards inside, so i didn’t have to worry about keeping those
I think they could be up to 500 pages. Say 10-500. A table of contents and index would be great for large books.
I think one option would be to include “smart pages” that automatically construct things like TOCs and indexes.
Uh-oh. I already thought of a reason for private pages, but I didn’t want to have to support those… Address Books.
What if people could upload their Mac Address Book or Outlook address books and we could insert those.
Great ideas!
I would like to include:
- pockets (for stamps, business cards picked up on the road, etc), more secure than the pockets in moleskines
- space for a pen
- bookmarks (or even better, tags as mentioned above!)
- world map with time zones (for those of us without internet access on our phones…)
- adhesive tape (to quickly add flyers or ads for events to a calendar without having to write down every detail nor having to keep track of a scrap of paper)
- neighborhood histories/(quick summaries of natural and architectural history) for giving tours to visitors — maybe images like the “still here” billboards that showed many Bay Area locations as they were 100+ years ago
- contact information of friends, so being without a cell phone is not like losing the world
- waterproof pages and ink
- measuring tape (or just measurements marked onto the cover)
- things to do while waiting (vocabulary words in English or another language? list of games to play while waiting either alone or with a group – some quiet, others more dynamic?)
- list of books to search for at libraries and used bookstores
- list of unusual business hours (which places close early on which random days)
- the ideal notebook is very durable, yet somehow fits into a pocket
I make my own notebook every year around december/january – we should have a book-making session sometime!
Some more thoughts we had over lunch:
- A “Things to do every month” checklist, with months along one axis and things like “pay rent” and “pay phone bill” on the other. lots of blank lines for your own todos.
- A SF annual events calendar with things like bay to breakers, street fairs, etc
- A vegan ingredient food label decoder for Ralf
- C operator precedence table and other cheat sheets (vi, emacs)
- List of good restaurants in various neighborhoods (where to go if you find yourself in the richmond and want thai food, etc)
- Packing lists
For those really big ideas: a few pages that have been pre-folded so they can pop out into a sheet 400% larger than the normal pages in the notebook.
Great ideas, all!
Unfortunatley, pockets and foldout pages can’t be printed on the book printing robot, so we’ll have to find a way of easily adding those kind of customizations. The idea is that we would be making hundreds or thousands of these custom notebooks, all different, so we want to minimize the manual customizations.
How about some perforated pages? I have bound notebooks from which I can’t tear pages without its other half falling out. This has proven inconvenient at times when I want to give someone a list or a phone number. Maybe this goes along with the business card idea. Maybe a page of blank cardstock perforated into business card-sized pieces.
Common unit conversions
A glossy page on which you can write with and erase a china marker or even dry-erase?
How free is the cover design? A pocket integrated into the cover would be nice. Like the folders we used in school.
A note on the 10th-to-last page saying “order new notebook.”
I like basic lab notebooks with grid paper
http://tinyurl.com/54yyc5
They’re cheap and pretty durable! Only problem is they’re too big. Moleskines I think are too small. Something the size of a common paperback book would be ideal.
all of those suggestions sound awesome! in my ideal moleskine there would also be idea/proposal pages. i’m always getting flashes of ideas for science proposals, but rarely write them down (i know i should!). an idea page would have space for date, time, and place i thought of the ideal, and also collaboration possibilities, broader impacts, ways to link into to other work, and a space to sketch out the idea.