My Behance Dot Grid Book is open on my desk, taunting me.
It’s a handsome spiral-bound sketchbook, with slightly-toothy paper that takes pencil well, and erases nicely. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it for the last few weeks, and I’m trying to work out why.
Impression
The book is attractive in a way that’s qualitatively different from a Moleskine. The matte rubberized cover feels nice, and the Helvetica Strong embossed on the cover tickles my inner modernist swiss-grid snob.
It’s a non-standard size, something not really shown well in the photo: Ten and a half inches by nine inches, minus the spiral binding. The odd size is a result of the notebook’s double perforation, on which more will be said later.
Grid
My inner demon is a swiss designer with a shaved head, twin degrees in graphic design and architecture, rimless glasses, a mechanical pencil tucked behind one ear, and an obsessive-compulsive fixation on the typographic grid. It’s like having Joseph Müller-Brockmann as your invisible friend, which is not as much fun as it sounds like.
What I am trying to get across is, I like grids for sketching.
For years, I’ve been sketching diagrams and ideas on index cards and moleskine pocket sketchbooks.
But that’s a pretty small area to sketch in, even when you use both pages. Worse, the grid itself is difficult to filter out; if you scan it, you can’t get rid of it. It’s as if the scaffolding on a building is welded on, impossible to remove, even once construction has been completed.
The dot grid book neatly does away with both complaints.
In an inked and scanned sketch, the dots can be faded right out with photoshop, without any loss of detail. What’s more, the larger format frees up a needless constraint. It’s like taking off a heavy, binding wool sweater, and feeling a looseness in your arms that you had forgotten was lost.
Bound
And now I have to talk about the perforation and spiral binding.
If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that each page has two perforations. One, next to the binding, gives you a tear-off page with holes for a three-ring binder. The other lets you tear off a page with no binder holes.
Brilliant.
And yet.
The spiral of the sketchbook is of a decent quality, not cheap or flimsy. It’s tight, which is generally a good thing — if you’re going to carry something around in a backpack or satchel, you don’t want the spiral to get mangled. The binding on mine is in perfect condition, as far as visual inspection is concerned. None of which prevents this from happening:
Argh.
Every time I open the sketchbook, the pages get hung up on some point in the spiral binding, and need to be carefully re-adjusted, so that the paper doesn’t tear along a perforation.
So far, this is a minor pain, something that’s worked around by mindful handling of the paper. But I live in dread of the day that I have a brainstorm, try to pop the sketchbook open, and riiiiiiiiiippp. I can envision a day where I have a half-dozen pages sliding out of the sketchbook whenever I open it, edges worn ragged by my backpack.
Love
Despite that gripe, I still love the book. Every other detail has been seen to with care; the weight and tooth of the paper are a delight. Soft pencil clings to the paper, and adjacent pages stay free of pencil marks. Anyone who has come back to an older sketchbook and found ghost images all over facing pages knows what I mean when I say that that, alone, is a small blessing.
So far, the perforations have held up, and I have some hope that when I’m past the first dozen pages, the weight of the collective pages being turned will protect it from damage. At least, that’s the case when I open the book to random pages in the middle. Still, it would be nice if the first few weeks of using the book weren’t so precarious.
And, again, the dot grid is a lovely innovation. It fades into the background behind a sketch, providing structure without overwhelming, one photoshop filter away from disappearing.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a workbook to sketch in, and you like a quadrille grid, you’ve found it. It’s perfect for the office, studio, or laptop case.
It is not a carry-everywhere thought capture tool, and doesn’t pretend to be. The spiral binding reduces the book’s portability, and it’s not exactly a convenient size for carrying around, so this isn’t a ubiquitous capture device. You want index cards or a pocket moleskine notebook for that.
But it is an excellent medium for expanding some rough ideas into sketches without advanced planning. With a paper sketchbook, you don’t have to worry about mode, like a computer forces you to: do I use OmniGraffle for this? Text? Maybe I should use Photoshop…
The Dot Grid book is a modeless interface, and the perforations and scanner-friendly grid means that whatever content you capture, it isn’t lost in an analog silo.
If you’re looking for a sketchbook, I’d advise you to at least give it a shot. At US$14.00 for a 50 page book, it’s a bit pricey, but worth it if you overuse your sketchbook as much as I do.