Guests at the Personal Statements showcase viewing my notebooks
I work through design concepts on pen and paper. Notebooks are where I tame the thoughts flying around my mind.
In this project, I set out to fashion a more joyful space for this exploration. This is notebook aims to kindle creativity for those navigating uncharted territory.
I created several prototypes of notebooks with colorful sheets of paper. When I’m feeling creatively stuck, I like to write with bright colored pens. What happens if the paper itself is brightly colored?
In the Design Impact program, the annual Personal Statements event is meant to be an introduction of the program’s second year students to the broader alumni community. As such, these projects should represent who you are as a designer.
Reflecting on my time at Stanford, I’ve grown as a designer by nurturing a deep passion for needfinding. The process of observing and deeply empathizing with our users grounds my design process in something truly meaningful. Because it is so focused on first principles, I find that nailing the needfinding process sets an extremely stable foundation for subsequent design and business decisions.
Needfinding has really become almost sacred to me in how it’s a guiding thread through everything I do. Hence, I wanted to put it on display for the entire design community.
The greatest tool in my needfinding process is my moleskin notebook. I am always journaling in it: synthesizing interview findings into crisp and articulate frameworks and sketching out design ideas. I wanted to make a tool that shares my enthusiasm for analog first principles in a highly digital, complex world. Pen and paper. Human thoughts and feelings.
It’s just a notebook. But it’s also something the world desperately needs: a space to commune with your inner thoughts and tame the storm inside.
I was inspired by high-end notebooks that feel good to write in. A good notebooks is one that you crave to hold in your hands.
Bright colors on notebooks are limited to the outside cover.
Bright colors on notebooks are limited to the outside cover.
I liked the unique dimensions, optimized for men’s fashion drawings
I gravitated towards unique page designs like this one, where each page has both graph paper and blank spaces.
I liked collections that felt cohesive as a unit.
I was intrigued by black pages - it’s like dark mode for your notebook.
Mnemosyne notebooks take a minimalist approach with their black covers.
Rollbahn notebooks have a wide variety of colored covers
Rhodia notebooks stick to an eye-catching two-tone cover pallet
I had many options for creating my notebooks. I quickly decided to stick with 8.5x11 paper, which I folded in half to create 8.5x5.5 notebooks. I had many options for binding: staples, hot glue, and needle & thread (with many threading options). After many attempts at threading and hot glue, I decided to stick with staples to optimize for time and neatness, as more manual methods can be beautiful but require high skill to get right.
I started by gathering old scrap paper to practice my binding techniques
Clamping down and binding page with a glue gun. This is called “perfect binding” but it’s hard to get it perfect with a clean seam