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Agenda beginnings

11 Jan 2016

There is a charm, a magic about agendas that I can’t really explain. In my schooldays, I remember how special the day was when I went to the book store to get my textbooks and also choose an agenda for the next school year. I would spend so much time looking at all the available ones carefully, the cover, the size, the design… It was a difficult choice but very enjoyable, and I loved using them month after month.

The agenda from the front

With time, though, as my life follows no schedule and I have little to organize, my agendas would growingly end up empty, unused, sad. So, even though I still browse through them when they appear in the stores by the end of the year, I don’t let myself buy any, because it just makes me sad to keep them blank.

But I discovered something: I can revisit some of that magic in the action of bringing an agenda to life.

Inside view, two pockets.

These pockets are an envelope divided in two by the binding.

So I ended last year and started 2016 immersed in this process. I designed how the week would look, printed each page in my home printer, manually feeding the pages one by one to print the back sides. I found a nice fabric in a small shop for the cover, and with some paper  that I decorated as a craft in my childhood -yellowed with the years- as endpapers, some fun details like back pockets, a bookmark, made with a ribbon I found on the street, and an elastic closure, I am very happy with the overall result, and as always I hope it is durable enough for intensive use.

Inside details.

One of the illustrations… Anybody recognize the scene? And the back pocket.

And there is something else: as I was working on the page design, I was testing the use of typographical symbols as a separation line between the weekdays… But I had a better idea: couldn’t it be actual text, in small print, forming a visual line, as a separation, yet at the same time adding a bit of extra content? From here on it evolved into the idea of using the beginnings of books and texts, some classics, some books I really like, some poems, that would in fact become a riddle for each week: what book is it? Would it be easy to guess? And if not, it would become a book recommendation. On the opposite page I included illustrations related to each of the texts.

Inside pages.

This one is in several languages: catalan, spanish, english, french and italian. I am playing with the idea, though, to make a version in a more accessible mix of languages or in just one, and see if anybody would like to have one.

I must say I had a lot of fun doing it, I hope it’s also fun to use!

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Hoch soll er leben!

23 Aug 2011

It's re(a)d like a strawberry

We have another sheet of this hearty wrapping paper and I wanted to cut some to use for a notebook that was intended as a gift bestown upon my best friend for his concurrent birthday.  This is the result.  Finally, my efforts have born good fruit that hangs low from the tree; gotta love them easy pickins.

As ever, we had more of this containered colour-coded paper to use up and I oriented it to trim neatly the page-bottoms.  I had the half-baked notion of trying out a japenese stab-stich to hold in the block and turned out well enough, if a bit sloppy, but I will think thrice before attempting to implement that device ever again in such a thick book, especially a perfect-bound/hard-cover hybrid as this.

As you can see, Z impressed upon me the widsom of giving it a bookmark.

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