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June 3, 2004

My Miquelrius Sketchbook

A few months ago, I happened to mention my love of Moleskine notebooks here on the weblog. The beauty of these little books are their size, durability and paper quality.

However, there are times when I need more space to draw than a Moleskine offers, particularly for graphic and web design projects I do at my MakaluMedia day job. Besides size, I don't need a hard cover or high paper quality for concept sketches.

Enter my Spanish-made, Miquelrius (Leather-Look Pad) notebook. The notebook is 6" x 8.25", a size that is small enough to toss into my shoulder bag for a café visit, yet large enough for concept sketches. Because it's smaller than US Letter or Euro A4 I can fit the Miquelrius into my smaller bags. Further, it's the perfect proportion for my technical sketch work.

The Miquelrius has 200 generous pages of thin, good quality white paper with light blue quadrille pages, wrapped in a rubbery, leather-like fabric that's thin, tough and flexible. Covers are available in black, blue, red and green. I found mine at Barnes & Noble for $10 each. Online, The Daily Planner has them for $12 each (plus shipping).

Initially, the cover material and flexibility of the Miquelrius was a bit annoying, flip-flopping all over the place. The cover and pages would also tend to roll after spreading the book out. This was quite a change from the rigid sketchbooks I was so used to using. In fact, for a long time I didn't use the notebook because of this. Then one day I grabbed the Miquelrius because it was nearby and started to use it.

And, I kept using it! Since using my Miquelrius regularly for work sketches, I've grown to love the flexible cover and pages. I like to roll the left-hand sheaf of pages and the front cover under the book to work as a handle. To restore the shape of the book, I just flip it on its cover for a while and it's good as new!

I'm always happy to find good additions to my creative toolkit, like the Miquelrius notebook. I hope my little review of these, handy, flexible sketchbooks will help them find their way to the tooklits of other creative people out there.

Update: I forgot to mention that Miquelrius notebooks are available in Moleskine sizes (3.5" x 5.5"), in the four colors noted above. Further, my Catalonian friend Paco Rivière, notes that Miquelrius is based in Barcelona. Thanks Paco! :-)

June 3, 2004 1:35 PM | Design | add to del.icio.us

Comments

Nice to know you like Catalan products ! Miquel Rius is catalan. By the way Miquel means Mike in catalan (Miguel in Spanish) As you can see at http://www.miquelrius.com/ it was founded 150 years ago at Barcelona.

Posted by: Paco Rivière at June 3, 2004 4:45 PM