#whitelineslink

Strolling through my local Officeworks checking out the journals and notebooks, I found this little gem from Whitelines Link that caught my eye. Sure, the bright orange (is far brighter than above) helps capture your attention, but once I got closer and had a read, that’s when my interest was piqued. 

This is the first lined notebook I’ve seen that has digital applications So, with the little extra cash I had in my pocket, I bought this bad boy and spent the rest of the car trip home trying to work out how to hide it from my wife.

So who is Whitelines?

According to their site, the company was founded back in 2006, in Stokholm, by three friends with one ambition; to make a contribution to a better world, no matter how small. But it’s the insight that lead to the creation of this product I liked most. 

In an interview on their site, one of the founders, Olof Hansson, states: “ I was doing sketches and made photocopies of Sinko* when I got annoyed by the dark lines disturbing my sketch. I realized that this was a familiar but annoying insight.”

So, now to the book itself... 

The book I’m reviewing is the A5 Spiral Notebook, priced at around AUD$8.00. 

Here are the specs:

Lined A5, 7mm

140 pages

80 GSM

Once you get the book you will need to download the app from either the App Store (Apple) or Google Play (Android), which is free. Then simply create and scan. 

I’ve comprised three different tests to see how this notebook handles, and they are:

1) Light drawing

2) Medium drawing with heavy areas

3) ‘To Do List’

Exciting, right? It’s extreme notebook testing for stationery lovers. So here goes. 

Test 1

OK, so I’m not the best artist and stick figures are at the very top of my skill set. Anyway, as you can see, it is simply black lines from an Artline 200 pen. The only areas of concern are the eyes and nose where I have coloured in ‘Happy Pig’ (a character I created for my daughter). Now all I have to do is use the app and scan in the picture. 

First you will need to open the app, if you have downloaded it already, and select the camera in the bottom corner of the screen. If you look at the above image, you should be able to make out squares in each of the corners. These corners need to all be ‘in-frame’ in order for the image to be captured.

After some navigating, this was the best image that I was able to get from it:

Not bad actually. I did take a few pictures to begin with because there were plenty of black marks on the digital image. I thought these were the results of the app itself, like moving the camera, but found shadows also hindered the picture quality. 

For any hardcore writers and sketchers out there, the biggest concern is always ‘bleed-through’. There’s nothing worse than shelling out money for a 140 page book and finding out you may only be able to use 70 pages at maximum. Unfortunately, as you can see below, this is where the book let me down.

**Please note that, although not shown, the page opposite also has marks from the eyes and nose area. So in effect, if you are that pedantic, you lose two pages if you draw on one.  

Test 2

In this test I have drawn an image that is mostly light but has a couple of heavy areas. For this test I have used a Sharpie ‘No Bleed’ felt tip pen. After using the Artline 200 for the previous test, I didn’t want to waste any more pages and so tried to play it safe. Below are the results...

The scan...

The bleed through...

Test 3

This one was a very simple test; create a list, for no other reason than I was not able to draw anything else. 

The Scan...

...this image had a lot of shadow when taking the picture. Which is why it looks like a bad photocopy job. 

As this was a simple writing job, there was no bleed-through on the back of the page. 

So overall, this book is not bad. The ability to draw and then take a picture that looks like a clean scan, and email it to whoever you need, is a great feature. It makes it easy to scamp an idea and send it to your client or colleague. But there is not much else that differentiates this from other notebooks. 

The biggest problem with this book is the bleed-through. At $8.00 for 140 pages, you don’t want to be wasting them.

If there is ever an update to the app, I would love to see the ability to turn handwriting in to digital, editable text, which would be great for straight note taking. You could write it all down in point form or just continuous text, and the app would save it as a digital file that could be opened in Word (or a similar app/program) and edited later. 

New connected pens and improved styluses make your handwritten notes available on all your devices. Joanna Stern tries out the leading implements.