Chicken Nation – Patrick Alexander’s Personal Internet

I spit on it; ptooie, ptooie!

For the past three years I’ve had attractive, well-designed Japanese diary/planners. This year, I’m back in Australia, where every diary is a piece of shit. Most are black on the outside; those that aren’t are garish and/or ugly. All diaries have white pages printed with black ink, and only black ink. Neither any effort nor inspiration has gone into the design of their boring, boxy interiors. Do the makers of these awful things not realise that people are going to be looking inside their diaries every day, probably many times? They are, after all, diaries.

Another problem is the lack of month-to-view diaries — you can only get day-to-page or week-to-view, neither of which are of use to me. I searched and searched and found only two month-to-view diaries, one of which was spiral-bound, and I hate anything spiral-bound: it gets tatty; it can be difficult to turn the pages; the spiral warps or breaks. That left me with the Moleskine® Monthly Notebook Diary, which despite its high price and fancy branding is still a piece of shit. A slightly less malodourous piece of shit than many of its competitors, but — well, let me show you what I’ve been accustomed to.

Here’s my 2009 diary by Mark’s Inc., next to my tedious new Moleskine® brand whatever:

See, ‘not black’ doesn’t have to mean ’something you’d wrap a birthday present for a six-year-old in’. That metallic mauve world map is perfectly sophisticated, without being a boring nothing.

Name and number of the month, days of the week (in both kanji and English), public holidays and special days, phases of the moon, and reference calendars for the two adjacent months — all included without confusing the eye or crowding the page; there’s plenty of room for notes in the generous left and bottom margins, and the unused spaces for days.

Each month has its own main colour, mostly for variety; October 2008’s is yellow-brown or gold. The name and number of the month is printed in this colour, as are the horizontal and vertical dividing lines, and a bar of colour along the right edge of each spread that makes it easy to find a particular month when flipping through the diary. The horizontal dividing lines are solid, while the vertical ones are dotted — subtly but effectively creating an instantly clear visual block for each week. Names and numbers of weekdays are the only things printed in black; Saturdays are blue and Sundays and holidays are red.

I hate notebooks and diaries that are printed in black, because whatever I write in them will be either lost, if I write in black, or overwhelmed, if I write in pencil or coloured pen. When my eye falls on a used page in a notebook, the bloody lines I wrote on shouldn’t be the first thing I notice. I shouldn’t notice them at all, in fact.

Here’s the bloody Moleskine:

First of all: Look at that fucking show-through! I’m expected to write on both sides of this paper? Really? The show-through in this diary is just ridiculous — it’s bad enough in the photos; it looks even worse in real life.

I complained above about all diaries for sale in this country using black ink on white paper. To be fair to the Moleskine diary, it uses not-quite-black ink on off-white paper, which is easier on the eyes, though still very plain. At least the dividing lines, and the lines on the notebook pages, are cunthair thin — I’ve seen many diaries and notebooks with bold black lines; god knows what some idiots are thinking. You don’t want to pay a proper designer? Fine. You can’t afford to print in more than one colour? Sure. But why pick black, or anything like black? You know there are other colours, right, and you’re allowed to use them? Why not light blue, or green, or even brown?

Back to the Moleskine: I understand they’re going for sophisticated minimalism or whatever, but I think this monthly view is poorly, lazily designed. Public holidays aren’t even written in — there’s a tiny symbol to indicate them, easily missed next to the phases of the moon. Positioning the numbers of days bottom-centre means a whole chunk of each square is taken up — probably the bottom 5mm — instead of just a corner. And in a month-to-view diary, the space available to each day is especially valuable. The rightmost column is labelled ‘Notes’, as if I wouldn’t have realised otherwise that I could write things in the empty spaces.

There’s also the font used for the names of months. It’s a bit fancy and modern — seems out of place in this intentionally plain diary. I dunno; just bugs me a little.

Oh! Another thing I wanted to mention is that the Moleskine diary contains only 12 months. Ridiculous. Calendars and diaries should also contain at least December from the preceding year and January from the next. My 2009 diary goes from September 2008 to January 2010.

More compare/contrast: World times from the Mark’s Inc. 2009 diary:

Clear, thorough, and easy on the eye. Some countries and states (no examples in this photo; sorry) even have specific times written beneath their names, where they deviate from the longitudinal norm — for example, Myanmar, in the ‘-3′ column, is marked ‘-2:30′.

World times from the Moleskine:

PFFFFF, WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT?

Here’s something very important: All my Japanese diaries have had plastic covers with a place to hold a pen or pencil:

The Moleskine doesn’t have a pencil holder; very few diaries I’ve seen for sale in Australia have pencil holders. A diary without a pencil is useless; it doesn’t work — it is an incomplete, non-functional object. Is this so hard to understand? We’re not talking about diaries you keep in a desk drawer and write your thoughts in at night — we’re talking about planners; you carry them around with you, and need to be able to write in them at any time.

The Moleskine does have a potentially quite handy pocket at the back, containing “the history of the Moleskine notebook”:

I’m supposed to read that and feel privileged to have spent 30-odd dollars on this fucking thing.

It has a Moleskine® brand ribbon, which is quite nice, though I’ve never had a problem just folding the corner of whatever month I’m on. (Perhaps I could tie a pencil to it.)

My 2009 diary has 22 pages of very light yellow lined paper, and 20 pages of very light pink dotted grid paper:

It also has, in addition to the usual diary stuff, ten pages of words and phrases in five languages! I was impressed by that. A lot of thought has gone into this excellent diary, and I’m going to miss it.

The Moleskine, meanwhile, is a Moleskine® brand notebook with half-arsed diary stuff printed on some of the pages. If they’d made it a better diary, it would have ceased to be a Moleskine®; it wouldn’t fit the brand. I guess I’m saying they shouldn’t have made diaries at all — but, if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to buy a month-to-view diary. So… whatever.

What we can all take away from these 1200 words is that I really, really care about stationery.