The Little Things

While cleaning out some cabinets, my Mom hands me an 11x17 notepad of grid paper and tells me that it's mine if I want it. Now, hopefully I'm not the only person who responds "Ooo! Paper!" As a designer, I like to use grid paper for my sketches, so, that night I stowed it away in my desk. The problem came about this morning when I went to stuff the notepad into my backpack. Being 11x17 it just wasn't going to fit. So, instead of joining America in saying, "Oh, I'll just buy another one," I decided to work with what I had. 

Issues:

• Too big

• The tape binding didn't allow for folding the cover around to the back of the book

• The printed grid didn't meet the edge of the pages

Solution:

Chop it up! By cutting the notepad down and rebinding the larger portion, it still provides a larger format grid paper for my sketches and gives me three pocket size notepads as well. The original tape binding of the notepad is still attached to the smaller notepads which allows them to quickly slide in and out of a pocket while the plastic comb binding of the larger format allows the cover to easily rotate around to the back of the book.

Okay, so it really isn't that amazing, but it's the little things that can start a morning of right.