Though the angle of the sun conspired against my cell-phone picture taking efforts, this lobster trap Christmas tree — at Lee’s Market in Westport, MA — seemed like the perfect follow-up to the book tree Cecilia found earlier, and in the spirit of the not-quite-gone season, I figured I’d post it here.
Hope your holidays were joyful!
It doesn’t always happen immediately, but we do sometimes bring back discontinued products and give them another chance to succeed.
Of course, before we do, we need to make sure that people want to see the product return, and are passionate enough about it to actually make a purchase. So in honor of the coming new year, let me ask: what would you like to have back? A few items we’ve toyed around with:
I just made the switch to my 2012 Space 17, and as I was fitting the book into its cover, I started thinking about those little tear-off corners at the bottom of each page — the ones that help you flip straight to your page when you open the planner. I don’t particularly care for them (they’re too prone to excess tearing, in my clumsy hands), and I haven’t used them ever since I got an elastic bookmark.
However, they’re still admirable in their simplicity, and I suspect they must have their fans. What do you think? Do you use them?
There was a great piece in Slate last week about recipe cards — “an accidental charter of [family] traditions, rendered in 3-by-5-inch index cards” — and how digital collections have since replaced them.
I’m certainly guilty of maintaining a digital recipe collection: blog posts that I’ve bookmarked, emailed recipes that I’ve filed away in a dedicated folder. But I also add my favorites to a binder I’ve owned since college, which has, like the index cards of yore, become “spattered with grease stains and marked with thumbprints.” It’s a haphazard bunch of dishes that I’ve printed from my computer, cut from the Sunday paper, or written out by hand, and it’s always fun to flip through and be reminded of something I added when I was living in Germany, say, or looking for new ways to cook the green beans from my garden.
Do you keep a recipe box?
From Cecilia, our product manager and finder-in-chief of cool stuff on the Internet, comes this amazing Christmas tree at Beck’s Book Store in Evanston, IL.
What’s particularly great about this idea to my space-starved urban eye is the fact that you can pack it up at the end of the season by putting the books back on their shelves. A, er, novel approach, dare I say!
As the new year approaches, people’s minds turn to their planners, and we have the pleasure of receiving some of our most interesting new ideas. Many of our daily and weekly planner users appreciate having a monthly calendar at the beginning of the book (not all of our formats have this, but many do).
Well, one reader recently suggested something else:
A monthly calendar at the bottom of each week on the left side, so you can see where that week is in relation to the month…
Intriguing, eh? What do you think?
An eagle-eyed reader found these lovely paper cotton planner covers at Quo Vadis Japan. Also on the site: these handsome linen ones.
Unfortunately, since both are manufactured in Japan, they’re quite expensive to import. According to our product manager, Cecilia, a realistic retail price for the cotton covers is an eye-popping $32-50 US dollars, and $52-55 for the linen — without the planners, even! The yen is strong, and textile covers are subject to heavy taxes. On top of that, we’d have to pay an additional 5% to cover the Japanese taxes.
As always, though, if there’s enough interest, we could certainly try it. So here’s what I can tell you… the cotton covers are made of oil cloth and have a special interior pocket for business cards. They come in five colors: rose, sky, stone, chocolate, and lemon. The linen covers are hand-embroidered and also have a business card pocket. They come in red, blue, and gray. Both covers are refillable, and while I’m not sure which of our formats they fit, I can certainly try to find out if it makes a difference.
What do you think? Are they worth it?
From my French counterpart, Murielle, comes this post about Jitesh Patel, an amazing London-based paper artist — sculptor, I might say. As Murielle explains:
Jitesh Patel founded his studio in London in 2007. The artist works on paper in the form of multifaceted 3D creations and with a resolutely graphical style. A feast for the eyes, these achievements offer the ultimate results in advertisements for the Alpina Yogurt as well as in the streets of London.
You can see one of Patel’s street art projects in the image above; to see the intricate paper birds and butterflies he crafted for Alpina and learn more about his work, check out his website.
From Pens and Paper, the site of a UK based organization (or organisation, I suppose) that teaches composition and handwriting and blogs about the life creative, comes this phenomenally comprehensive review of twelve different notebook papers — from the Habana to the Webnotebook and Moleskine, Leuchtturm 1917, and many others.
Each review is written with a careful and comparative eye, which makes it very useful indeed to have them all in one place.
We’re going to create a new planner soon, and we’d like your help… If you have a few minutes to spare, please take this survey and let us know what your preferences are in terms of size, layout, cover, paper, and all the other good stuff.
Afterwards, we’ll do our best to incorporate the most popular responses into the design of the new format.
Thanks, and happy planning!
