Welcome Guest [ Login | Register ]

Wide-format Project Books - How to grow your own

You could chase around all over the store looking for project book bits, or you can do it the easy way and follow the links below.

 We have invested quite a few bottles of top-shelf booze into coming up with this solution - it seemed like the best idea at the time.

But you've probably heard that one before.

First up, you will need some covers.  They come in three styles:

• Techno - these are brightly coloured translucent-cover.  You can buy the complete book with matching rings and lined, squared or blank paper with dividers and pockets.
• Pro - These are dark, business-like covers.  They work well in the board room, but can get lost on your (or at least, my) desk.
• Texon - This is a synthetic industrial material that is usually hidden inside your shoes.  It is very durable.

 Next you need some rings.  

There are two things to consider here

• size (disk bound notebooks work best when the book is about 66% of the size of the disk)
• colour - the disk is the stand-out feature of the book.

So here are some things to keep in mind regarding discs:

• Aluminium goes with everything - Texon, Techno, Pro  all look good with Bling Aluminium discs in 24 mm and 20mm - 16mm is too small for a project book;
• Transparent notebooks look best with transparent discs - can't explain it, just is.
• Purple and green look good together, turquoise enhances all translucent covers, red and orange set each other off nicely.  Discs are cheap (well, the plastic ones are, anyway) so take a chance!
• You can mix the colours of the rings (but not the sizes!).  Alternate green and turquoise on a purple cover, for example - make it yours.  And send us a picture for our Facebook page (or a link to yours)
• Texon looks stunning with the 28mm translucent Urban Blue disks.  If you need a fat Texon, then consider this as an alternative to 28mm Black.
• Urban Blue translucent rings (28mm) look good with all translucent covers - especially orange and lime, but also turq, red, purple and whatever the other one is.
• Opaque Dark Blue 20mm disks also look good with Texon covers and Blue Pro covers.  They make an interesting alternative to Black 20mm rings for Black Pro covers too.

But these are just thoughts to loosen up your mind.  Think weird...

You might weill want some paper.  Ours comes in many colours - Vivid White, Pale Cream, Legal Yellow and 4 Colour.  All colours are built on our long-fibre, European sourced, responsibly harvested paper.  The long fibres mean that the little claws that hang onto the rings will last for a very long time, even if you move the pages around a lot.  Anything else?  Oh, both papers are excellent for wet ink pens such as fountain pens, fibre tips and rollers.

• White refills are available in Lined, 5x5mm Squares, 10x10mm Squares, Blank, Music with lyric line, Commercial Squares (8x4mm) and Seyes handwriting training paper. Lines are blue and most rulings have a red margin.
• Cream refills are avaialble in Lined, 5x5mm Squares, Blank, and 5x5mm Dot Grid, ruled in grey with no margin.
• Legal refills are yellow with blue lines,  They are available only in squared rulings.
• Four Colour refills have 40 sheets each of paleish red, green, yellow and blue for a total of 160 sheets, also square ruled.  This is 33% more than our usual refill size.

Great! I hear you think, I'm gonna get me some of that cream.  Maybe, but think for a moment...  See - hardly hurts at all.  If you are doing technical stuff, sketching, illustrating, diagramming or any one of a bunch of other jobs, your jottings might well present better on white paper.  And don't get hung up on lines.  Squares are great for many tasks, and some folk swear by blank, even though all they write is words.  We have a 5x5 dot grid that is only availabel in Cream, and 10x10 squares in white only, so this decision might make itself.

There are two weirdos in the white refill range - Commercial Square has tall skinny cells that are intended to hold a single character each.  If you do anything involving columns of numbers, this is your paper.  Seyes has horizontal ines spaced for practicing your  handwritiing, to help those few of you who still care enough about penmanship to want the ascenders, descenders and dots to be all the same height.  It does not have any slope lines, so you will stll need a slope card.

Dividers are available in a bunch of styles:

• Untabbed dividers - these are designed for our standard A4 books.  The divider is a smidgeon wider than the paper so you can feel it with your thumb.
•    - Card dividers come in a pack of five - brightly coloured suits most notebooks
•    - Bio card dividers have more natural colours - good with Bio notebooks, but also suits Black and Texon covers.
•    - Poly dividers come in a pack of six - three grey and three white, or maybe coloured - depends on how the boss is feeling.
• Tabbed dividers - available in a six-pack of alternating white and grey polypropylene sheets,
• A-Z Indexes - 12 polypropylene leaves with two letters per tab except IJK and XYZ.  And no, I can't get other combinations...

You might want some pocket pages  These are transparent plastic wallets that you can put an unfolded A4 page into.  Ideal for documents that you don't want to punch, spike or staple.  Pockets come in a pack of 10.

And, of course, you will definitely need a Bookmark Ruler.  Definitely. In fact, get two.

Remember - you don't have to put everything into one book.  In particular, the beauty of Atoma is that you can take paper out and file it (one way or another) and replace it with clean sheets, so keep it light and under full.

Have fun!