Paper and design collaborate for limited edition notepad

Posted by Will Green 05/06/2015

For its latest marketing campaign, Arjowiggins Graphic has collaborated with Studio Special, using designer-led insight from across the UK, to produce a limited edition notepad exclusively for designers.

For a designer, the notepad is an essential tool that goes everywhere with them. Recognising this, Arjowiggins Graphic carried out extensive research with designers  to understand what it was that they really want from their everyday ‘working’ notepad – the critical pieces of paper that hold everything from the beginning sketches to the final designs.

Donald Soutar, Designer, Touch Edinburgh commented,

“The new notepad is a designer’s dream, from the tough customisable cover, to the tactile paper within. The variety of page-styles has everything you need day-to-day: plain pages for sketches, ruled for taking notes, small squares for designing logos and icons, and larger squares for working out pages or websites.”

Targeting designers of all kinds, Studio Special sought to pay homage to its own industry and provide something they will get maximum use out of but also to bring the everyday notepad to life. As requested by designers themselves, the notepad, which has an initial print run of just 700 uses the specialist process of lay flat binding and was printed using CyclusOffset (wrapped around Grey board to give it a really thick and heavy cover) and Cocoon Preprint and CyclusOffset for the text pages. The notepad includes lined, plain and graphed paper, providing designers with multiple canvases in one book, and comes in four different colours.

The result is a design that conveys practicality, personality and variety through the specific processes, the quality of the 100% recycled paper on which it is printed and the option to personalise the notepad.

David Lovelock, Designer, Studio Special, explains:

“It can be challenging working with such specific requests and required materials. You need to understand the reasons and requirements first, and then the key is knowing how to combine them – a bit like ingredients. We understood that it was important we stuck to the minimal theme for this notepad. There are lots of notepads that come in different sizes, providing dates and calendars for example, which is sometimes too much. As a designer, the importance of this one is you can make it your own.”

Angela De Vorchik, Operational Marketing Manager, Arjowiggins Graphic, the leader in the development of environmental paper solutions, adds to this:

“We’re really pleased that the quality of our CyclusOffset and Cocoon Preprint papers play an important role in the overall design of this notepad. We really liked the element of personalisation that a designer can have with this notepad - it has a unique look and feel with double debossing on the front cover, which has been left blank, to give a smooth area allowing designers to customise it and make it their own.”

Finding the right printer was an equally important aspect to creation of the notepad as it needed to compliment the various choices of paper and work with the specialist design processes.

Phil La Monde, Managing Director, Gavin Martin Colournet, explains:

“Lay flat bound books require a particular printing process. Grain direction and calliper play a large part in being successful in binding a lay flat job. Because CyclusOffset and Cocoon Preprint papers are also similar thickness made it possible for us to use different papers in the lay flat book block. This is one of the best parts of working with designers though – our ability to rise to a challenge and produce a colourful result that we know designers will love and use.”

Antalis, a distributor of Cyclus, will be using the notepad to showcase CyclusOffset and Cocoon Preprint papers by giving them out to their key designer customers.