5 posts tagged “city notebook”

After a week of setting up the Travel Photo Cafe promotion in various stores (which I will cover later), I must say a BIG THANK YOU to Moleskine, its distributor and colleagues who helped to pull this off smoothly.  Finally, the long awaited Hong Kong and Beijing City Notebook versions are launched, the first 2 Asian cities for many to come.  Moleskine enthusiastically rushed to release these two notebooks in order to catch the Beijing Olympic event, which generated a lot of excitement among the locals.

I was honored to be invited as one of the 4 judges for the Invitation Au Voyage Moleskine City Notebook competition last Saturday.  The panel includes Mariko Jesse, an illustrator and teacher; Winnie So, publisher of Little Cream Book and Arnault Castel from Moleskineasia.com.

Entries were sent from all over the world and we got over a hundred of them.  It took me the whole afternoon to flip through all the pages.  The judging criteria are mainly about the originality and creativity of the concept presentation, as well as how the drawings capture the travel spirit.

Each judge was to rate the notebooks from 1 to 10 (10 being the best) and all the marks were added up to find the winners.  I first scanned all the notebooks once and grouped them in piles of my own preferences, then looked at them again in more details (I found many used amazing techniques, some almost like book art) and tried to think of how appealing when they were to be exhibited.  Finally, there were 11 top most impressive ones from my choice. Marks were then given to them after a final study of details.

I've been using City Notebook since January for my business trips to several cities including London, Frankfurt, Paris and New York. I love the concept of combining note-taking, maps and travel planning in one little black book and I'm amazed by the growingly strong supporting from Moleskine City web site. However, I had some difficulties with City Notebooks and I'm sure many of you agree at least some points, so I made sure I travelled enough with the notebooks and here's the comments for improvement:

Mental burden: City Notebook lacks a full size foldable map which would allow you to quickly locate zones/districts AND street names in one view.  I had to flip back and forth from the main map to find out which page contains the more detail street maps, so in order to locate things fast, I needed to have a mental map of where the large-scale pages are, which is not relaxing at all considering all the places I needed to go in a short trip.  In the beginning I did plan my trip on map (London and Paris) in very detail, but finally I relied on free maps from the airport which has far more details than City Notebook.

Limited street names on map (Where am I?): I think this is the biggest problem with City Notebook.  Just compare the maps with a regular or free map from the airport you'll notice a big difference.  There are not enough street names on the maps!  I had this problem many times: if I'm standing on a street corner trying to find out where I am, I would look at the street signs and locate corresponding streets on the map but gee, the area on the map is empty!  Yup, try to find the names from the index pages, they are not there if they are not on the maps!  So where am I?

No street numbers: This is not a common feature on maps but since City Notebook maps are cut up into many pages, I think the feature is very useful since there is space on large-scale city center pages.  For instance, I was staying in New York Holiday Inn Mid-town, which is 440 W 57th Street.  The address doesn't say anything about Avenues and you know New York taxi drivers, they need to know 'W 57th where?', 440 was not enough and you couldn't hear what they mumbled.  So if I knew 440 was somewhere between 9th and 10th avenue, then it would be so much easier to tell them right away after flipping though City Notebook.

Unnecessary scale: The scale of the map is printed on every map, since the maps are cut up into many pages, some of the key locations really sit at the margins and the scale really blocked the view of the street maps!  The scale can be printed on the maps in less intrusive ways.

Flipping back and forth: Since all the maps are cut up into sections, in addition to the above trouble to flip from main map to locate a zoom-in page, I have great problem with the London and Paris maps because most of the key locations I needed to visit are sitting at the margin of those little maps.  For example in London, if you walk in the SOHO area between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus stations, you have to flip between two pages and smaller streets' names are not on the maps, prepare to flip frantically if you are not familiar with the area.

Not enough translucent sheets: City Notebook Lacks enough translucent sheets for even just one trip to those who are new to the city.  There are just 12 of such sheets and since there are a lot of map pages, you can't write on the translucent sheets on every map if needed.  Worst, you can't buy them coz they are not available as individual retail refill.

Translucent sheets are not for pencils and roller balls:  Since I found that I don't have enough translucent sheets and roller ball ink doesn't dry fast enough, I tried to use pencil on them so that I can later reuse some of sheets, turned out  the sheets are not pencil/eraser friendly either.  If you try to use an eraser to clear pencil marks, the sheets will change from matte to gloss, you can't write with a pencil on the gloss surface anymore.

Translucent sheet too small: If I started to use ballpoint pen on the sheets to mark several locations and suddenly I found that some of the locations are close to the page margin and by moving the sheets to get closer the the margin it would render the previously marked points dislocated, therefore new sheets are needed.  The sheets need to be a bit bigger to cover the margins.

Translucent sheet not friendly to bookmark: If you have two translucent sheets sticked to opposite pages and you placed the bookmark in between, close the notebook and try to open the page using the bookmark, it will slide underneath  either one translucent page and it is clumsy when you want to find something quick.

Things I found City Notebook great though:

• Great concept to plan ahead and enjoy the process, knowing the city before you travel and with support from MoleskineCity blog
• Intuitively combine notes-taking and city navigation with maps
• Retaining measures and conversions info, found it useful in several in several occasions
• Perfect size fitting most pockets
• 3 bookmarks allowing quick access to info

I'm sure Modo e Modo is listening, it is easy to gather more user experience from Moleskine City web site and I hope by the time they print the Asian cities some of the problems can be prevented.