Design notebook suggestions?
What do you guys use for design and or sketch books? I know everyone seems to love moleskins, but frankly they've broken down on me in the past. I also like having larger size sheets of paper to work with.
Konigi graph paper looks decent for wireframing: http://konigi.com/tools/overview
As do Whiteline books (you can buy them off Amazon): http://www.whitelines.se/en/
I personally use and recommend Muji recycled ring notebooks. They're relatively cheap and excellent for quick sketches/journaling: http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/note/recycled-paper-note...
For me, anything that'll let me get my ideas on paper as quickly and effortlessly as possible is the way to go. As long as the notebook doesn't get in the way, it's perfect.
Moleskines are $$ for a pile of paper. A few minutes and an upholstery needle and I have graph paper, light-weight blank, and watercolor paper bound together just the way I like it.
Note that these are tutorials for reasonably archival binding; good for 300 years. You only need your nodebook to stay bound for a month, until it's full of your distilled brilliance, and then you file it. So if you don't have a binding frame, that's OK. A couple boards and a hand-clamp will do 'ya.
These lab books are designed to document work for patent purposes, but I find that they are great for all manner of design and implementation writing.
Unlike the cheap shit you find almost anywhere else, the bindings are incredibly durable, and you can lay them flat, like a spiral notebook. You can paste printouts directly into some of the larger versions. The quality of the paper is very high. For a small fee, you can have your name embossed on the cover in gold leaf.
Anyway, my requirements were thus: it had to be reorganizable (e.g. your standard three clip binder), it had to be relatively small (I want to carry it around in a small messenger bag or even better my versipack) and it had to be amazingly simple (lined paper only, no calendar, no pockets, no special latches).
Long story short: every notebook I looked at was absolutely idiotic in some fashion or another. The reogranizable requirement limited me to like half a dozen. The simple limited me down to basically two: a standard 1/2" binder or one of these new fangled "rolla" notebooks, which are absolutely horribly designed. I ended up going with a simple 1/2" binder, a bunch of paper, and the hope that eventually someone will solve this problem acceptably so I can have a reorganizable notebook.
The main benefit of the 1/2" binder is it small: keep only what you need, but keep it with you as often as possible. Insight comes at odd times, and if you keep your goals in the binder they will get revisited often, solidifying them in your mind.
Hope that helps.
It really depends on what you are doing though. I use a graphpaper spiral bound book in my bag for long term ideas and designs and then the legal pad for working with people and sharing designs.
Rhodia [http://www.rhodiapads.com/] and Whitelines [http://www.whitelines.se/en/] are great for sit-down work.
I generally pick them up at University bookstores where they tend to be cheap (~$10).
Before I got a tablet/ebook reader I would regularly print out documentation and get it 'perfect bound' with a heavy card stock cover sheet.
Benefits: - Cheap - Fully customizable - If you cannot find them then make them
it's really simple, just fire up spreadsheet and resize the rows and cols respectively, then border them.