Stack Millie's notebooks on their spines and you get a stripe of pink, olive, orange, rose and coral, and on the front of each a different painted village: pastel houses climbing a hillside, a stone bridge over turquoise water, a clock tower at dusk, a beach with parasols, a domed church under a red sun. Millie Illustrates paints these scenes, and she wanted them on the front of a range of A5 lined notebooks she could sell.
Each notebook has a four-page cover on 300gsm silk with a matt lamination, printed in full colour on both sides. That "both sides" is the detail worth stealing. The outside carries a village; the inside covers carry a dense pink and red floral pattern with a "This book belongs to" label, so the moment you open one you get a second illustration on a sheet you were already paying to print. Matt lamination keeps the painted colours rich without glare, protects the cover from bag scuffs and, on a silk board this heavy, stops the spine cracking as the notebook is bent back day after day. Millie's first reaction when the box arrived in Andover was about exactly that: "they are lovely quality, the colours are so vibrant, I love them. They arrived so quickly too."
120gsm uncoated is our standard writing stock for notebooks, and it earns the job. It is heavy enough that a fountain pen or felt tip does not ghost through to the next side, matt enough that a biro grips rather than skates, and it lies quietly under the hand without the slickness of a coated sheet. The 120-page block is PUR perfect bound, using a polyurethane adhesive that stays flexible and holds far better than standard hot-melt glue, which matters for a notebook more than for almost any other book: it will be opened flat, folded back and stuffed in a bag a few hundred times, and PUR holds. The block makes a 5mm spine, just wide enough to carry a solid colour, which is why each design has its own coloured spine and the set reads as a rainbow on a shelf.
Eight months later Millie reordered four of the designs, on the same spec, using the same 120-page lined file. Short runs of 20 per design are exactly what digitally printed notebooks are for: you can test five covers, see which villages sell, and reprint the winners without filling a spare room with stock. We printed a perfect-bound notebook range for Anne Davison Studio too, if you would like to see how a different artist approached the cover.
If you have artwork that deserves a notebook, get a price for notebook printing at exwhyzed.com, or ask Harriet and Mike to provide a bespoke quote.
