Coal Headwear has teamed up with Draplin Design Co. to produce a special, limited-edition Field Notes set that is timed perfectly for both the 4th of July and the World Cup. This beautiful Americana-inspired 3-pack is of the graph paper variety, and will run you $12 + US-only shipping (which was $5 for me).
This season's entry in the Field Notes COLORS lineup is the new "Arts and Sciences" edition. At 4.75" x 7.5", these notebooks are noticeably larger than the standard 3.5" x 5.5" Field Notes. Rather than shipping as a three-pack of the same notebook, this edition contains two distinct models: the wine-colored "Arts" notebook and the dark slate "Sciences" notebook. Each is respectively…
Just when I thought nobody could possibly innovate in the notebook space, along comes a Kickstarter project to prove me wrong. Magnote magnetic notebooks look like simple notebooks on the surface, but their covers and spines are comprised of neodymium magnets. This allows the notebooks to be attached to one another for easy storage, and separated only as needed. Each Magnote is…
The Orée Board 2 is a wireless, super-light, wooden keyboard crafted from a single piece of walnut or maple. It can pair with up to five different devices at the same time via Bluetooth, and its surface is coated with a varnish that protects it from finger oil and liquid spills. After being carved, each board is polished, oil-rubbed, and assembled by…
Editorial, the powerful text editor for iOS, updated to version 1.1 today. It might as well be called 2.0 though, given the sheer number of changes, overhauls, and improvements that went into it. On top of having a redesigned interface for iOS 7, Editorial is now a Universal app so it works on iPhone as well as iPad. Editorial on iPhone is…
The Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover remains one of my favorite iPad accessories. The one I own is practically a part of my iPad at this point, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in using their iPad as a primary writing device. Logitech produced a version of the Ultrathin for iPad Air last Fall, but now there is a new-and-improved edition that…
As the name implies, this poster shows off the beautiful typewriters of famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Hunter S. Thompson, and more. Perfect for any literary or writing geek to hang in their workspace. $14-$39 on Etsy.
A simple leather cover for Field Notes notebooks. As my friend Patrick Rhone puts it: “Not only a nice place to keep a Field Notes brand notebook but also a handy place to keep some index cards, business cards, and book of stamps.” Not much more to say than that. $45 at Hellbrand Leatherworks.
As much as I love the Cosmonaut stylus, some note-taking situations call for a...finer touch. The Adonit Jot Script — Evernote Edition is about as close as you can get to writing on your iPad with a real pen (something I do not condone). Its mere 1.9mm tip would normally cause issues with iPad detection, but Adonit has solved that problem by…
People have mixed feelings about Comic Sans. "Civilians" love the font for its casual handwritten look, while designers just love to hate it. Graphic designer Craig Rozynski decided he'd had enough of this divide, and designed a new typeface intended to make both camps happy: Comic Neue. In Craig's own words: “The squashed, wonky, and weird glyphs of Comic Sans have been…
Speaking of TextExpander Touch, it's been updated to version 2.5 and sports a new iOS 7 design along with some new features. They've made it much easier to rename and reorder snippet groups, as well as move individual snippets between groups. Groups that are only useful on a Mac can now be disabled for iOS. They've also added some external keyboard shortcuts:…
WriteRight is an app for iPhone and iPad that probably won't replace your favorite iOS text editor (cough Editorial cough), but works nicely as a supplemental writing and editing tool. It analyzes your writing and offers synonyms and antonyms for any highlighted text, and will even show alternative ways to phrase a multi-word selection. It understands gender, number, and conjugation, so its…
Sean McCabe, the guy who designed the awesome 'Influence the World' poster (amongst many other things) has put together a set of video courses to help you become a hand-lettering artist yourself. In these videos, Sean shows you how to craft a hand-lettered composition from start to finish, including lots of tips on technique and style. In the more advanced lessons, he…
William Zinsser's On Writing Well—much like The Elements of Style and Stephen King's On Writing—is one of those books that gets recommended to all writers sooner or later. And for good reason. Zinsser has been in the writing business a loooong time (nearly 70 years, in fact). He's taught classes and workshops, worked as a journalist, and authored nearly 20 books on…
The guys at Field Notes have done it again with the latest in their COLORS lineup, the cover of which is actually made of wood. It's called the Shelterwood Edition. As you can watch in their behind-the-scenes video, they've very thinly sliced up some American cherry wood and bonded it with kraft paper to form each cover. Due to the nature of…
Mike Dudek, the guy who writes about pens over at The Clicky Post, also handcrafts some very nice pen-and-notebook holders. My favorite of the bunch is called 'The Display', because it displays your pens nicely (up to 5) and also holds a few Field Notes notebooks. It's obviously a great item to have in your workspace, but I think it works just…
As I've mentioned in the past, I do all of my writing and blogging from my iPad, using a combination of the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover and Editorial. I enjoy this setup for the most part, but the one aspect that still isn't 100% up-to-snuff is dealing with images in posts. There are various apps on the iOS App Store that tie…
My friend Patrick Rhone has just released another one of his "living guide" eBooks, this one titled Some Thoughts About Writing. In it, he discusses what it takes to be a successful, professional writer, and provides some excellent tips along the way. It's a "living" book because it will likely receive updates with new content in the future, all of which are…
1Writer is one of those iOS writing apps that I always thought looked very nice, but it never provided a good enough reason to switch away from something like Editorial or Byword. You'd still have to pry Editorial out of my cold, dead fingers, but the latest update to 1Writer now puts it at least above Byword. It's now my go-to iPhone…
On the latest episode of The Prompt, Federico Viticci mentioned an iOS app called WordBook that sounded interesting enough for me to check out. It's a pretty powerful English dictionary and thesaurus, and I think it might just replace my long-running "Words to Remember" list in Simplenote. You can bookmark your favorite words and have them sync between devices via iCloud, have…