I thought rather than just having blank pages in the notebook I produce, I could maybe have a small element on each of the pages to help even more with keeping organised. One of the biggest problems I have had throughout the year, and when ever I have mentioned this to anyone they have always said the same, is that I make notes from all of the different lectures and seminars and what not, but then when it comes to looking back over them because there was this one thing Fred said during this one lecture of something, it's really hard to find it again because every page basically looks the same.
A good way I thought to avoid this would be to have a small section somewhere on the page to encourage the student to write down the date of the seminar and the module/brief it is for, so that when they remember that something Fred said... they can think about when it was, and then once they remember the date, flick back through and find the page(s) with that date on.
I began by sketching out different page ideas.
I then figured a better way to get a good idea on how these would look and if they would work and what not would be to draw them out in the pages of one of the notebooks I bought. I found it a lot easier then for me to make a decision about which works best.
With printing cost in mind for this, I have decided to have the pages slightly smaller than A5 so that it would be possible to print 2 pages on an A4 sheet. Also, before I thought about the cost of printing, I decided that I would keep the back of the pages blank because when I flicked through my notebooks it's rare I used only one page, so leaving it blank would give the student using the book the space to use the other side if they want to, and then keep using the pages for how ever many they need.
To work out the size of the paper I started with it being 20cm x 14cm, and printed it out to see if it fit, and then had to change it to 19.5cm x 13.5cm and this works perfectly. Here is the print outs to see why.
I put the page design I think works the best on to the page I made on Illustrator to print out to make sure that it would work alright, and wrote on the top to ensure the spacing was right but not too big.
Stock
After considering which of the stock samples I have collected and shown in the previous post (here), and experimenting to see which I think would work the best I have decided that for the pages in my notebook I will use the Hi White Cart 120g stock.
Number of Pages
I want the number of pages in my notebook to be at least equivalent to how many there is in the examples I got, so I will have at least 50 sheets. I have decided to print off 100 and then see from there, so I got these printed straight away.
Hardback Cover
The book board arrived as expected, and the colour of it is like a grey colour so I have decided to cover what I need in white so that it visually consists with everything else, because I have decided to have the background colours for everything white as this will keep it simpler. To cover them, I will use the Linen 100gsm stock from the paper sample book. Even so, because I am having problems booking into the digital print, I will have to look into either printing this at home, or doing screen printing for it.
First Attempt
After backing the hardboard, and printing and trimming out all of the pages for the notebook, I had decided to drill through all of them to create the holes to be able to ring bind them (with the assistance of my brother) but we just did it completely wrong, and the holes aren't in a perfect line and some reason the hardback board just turned out awful - as shown below.
I am gutted that it didn't work out this time as it has taken me a long time to prepare them so it just feels like time waster. Even so, lesson learnt! I will look into different methods for me to be able to bind the notebook as I still believe that ring binding it is the best way to do it for many reasons. I will set about making the book again.
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