The Well-Appointed Desk

My dear friends over at Tag Team Tompkins showered me with notebooks for my birthday so I thought I might share the goodies with you, my fine readers. The first up is the Semikolon brand notebooks. I received a A4 Paper Block tablet and a composition-style, A5 exercise notebook. It seems their focus is on making their products in an array of delicious colors that coordinate. I got a cocoa and cream exercise notebook and a coordinating striped tablet.

The exercise book has a small window in the matte-finish, coated cardstock covers that you can fill with your own photo or business card.

Inside, the exercise book includes a pocket inside the front and back pockets help give the covers some heft. The paper inside is a creamy ivory with gray lines. A bit more widely spaced than I usually like but not as wide as standard “wide ruled” notebooks.

The tablet contains the same paper but opens from the top like a legal pad and the cover is die cut into a semicolon so that you can see the lined paper through the diecut. While I find it aesthetcially pleasing with blank sheets visible, if you write on the first page, bits of your text will be seen through the die cut. Not a good place for sensitive information, poor handwriting or incriminating doodles of your boss.

Both notebooks use the same paper stock so I only test one book since the results are the same.

All my standard writing instruments performed well on the paper. Its a smooth stock though a bit thin so there is a bit of bleed-through with heavy ink flow. The Uni-Ball Vision and Sharpie that I stole from my husband definitely bled a bit. All the other tools, including two fountain pens, had a slight show-through but not so much so that you could not use both sides of the paper.

These are very clean simple products. If you’re looking for understated looks and minimal branding, I think these are a good choice.