Brief 5 // Notebooks // Notebook Practice

The first notebook in the range for this brief is an A5 blank page notebook. This uses an elastic band binding method, shown in the previous post. The inners of the notebook are 80gsm plain paper with a combination of grey 120gsm card and GFSmith blue colorplan card to make up the front and back cover of the notebook.

In order to create the bind within the notebook I used a series of holes down the left hand side, which were made using a hole puncher. The ones which were slots were simply hole punched and then scalped straight to the edges of the page.

In order to give the notebook some stability and to support the tension of the elastic band, I have used a piece of grey board attached to the back cover. The front cover features the use of GFSmith Colorplan stock, this acts as an accent and compliments to grey stock used for the front cover. Layers of the stock have been built up to create a thicker front cover, again to give the notebook some stability.

I am pleased with the first notebook of the brief. I am very happy with the result of the binding method, this was the first time I had tried it out and I have done this without any sort of instructions, it was just taken from an image of another publication which had used the bind. The quality and craftsmanship of the notebook is the best I could possibly achieve, I purposely took time over creating it as this is a main feature of the whole brief. 

Feedback from peers within the group has been great towards the notebook. It had a lot of attention over the binding method and people were intrigued to look at it, this is a great result as the binding is the main focus of the brief and the notebooks. Also feedback on the quality were made. 

It has been a great start to this brief and one which has set the standard of the the future notebooks pretty high, but that will just push me into creating something better each time.