A little side project of mine are custom notebooks. I have used lots of different kinds of books: moleskine, apica, Clairefontaine (and others) for notes, and Quo Vadis as an agenda book. But in the last year, I’ve been keeping myself straight with a custom daily planner. At first, I tried to keep it easy and low-tech. Which constrained me to a standard 1 inch 3-ring binder and some custom pages in Illustrator. This was good. Print pages when I needed them, scribble dates at the top and I’m off. But the 3-ring binder is big. And thought it lays flat (a key consideration for an agenda — it’s gotta be out and available) it takes up a lot of desk space. So I’ve been hemming and hawing about going smaller. I have seen the ol’ Levenger Circa stuff. It’s nice. But it’s expensive.

Last summer, I found a roll-a-bind agenda / planner at target. On the clearance rack. $6.99 or some such for two (two!) notebooks, one half-sheet (”Junior” in Circa’s language) and one standard 8.5×11. So I’ve been using them a bit, but not all the time. In January I bit the bullet and started using the smaller one as a daily planner. It’s good, but writing out all of the little lines and quirks that I need was getting to be a pain. So I’ve bitten the bullet and I bought a $40 roll-a-bind punch, and I re-designed my calendar pages.

I just got off the phone with FedEx-we-bought-Kinko’s. It’s going to cost $3.00 to have the pages cut ($1.49 per cut per ream) to my exacting specifications. Yes I know that’s a joke since ol’ Kinko’s isn’t known for perfection. But hey, if they screw up my ream, they can just buy me a new one and we’ll try again.

If you, dear reader is interested in a custom notebook / agenda / planner / or other papery-goodness, please don’t hesitate to ask me. I’m zach @ this website. I imagine (don’t have a price sheet yet) that a notebook with a translucent plastic cover and 120 sheets of “stock” agenda pages will set you back something like $25 + $5 shipping and handling. This is about 30% off of the Levenger price. If you want custom work, I’m happy to explore this with you. I’ll be releasing my layouts via a Creative Commons license in the coming months too. So if you’d prefer to do your own thing, that’s going to be a possibility too. Fun.