Overall rating
Size: | A5 |
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Colours: | Black, Cinzano Red |
Cost: | $70 AUD |
Personalisation: | No |
Country: | Australia |
Available from: | www.artex.com.au |
For: | Two-toned stitching, perforated pages, page hole punching, external pen holder |
Against: | Thin ‘leather blend’ outer, wear on leather edging after use |
First Impressions
This ARTEX leather journal notebook is available world-wide online, and available Australia-wide at most luxury department stores like David Jones and Myer.
The two-tone stitching is quite nice and adds an element of charm and character to what would otherwise be a standard ‘corporate’ journal notebook.
Regarding the features, the leather outer has a thick pen holder, an internal sleeve, and the notebook pages are thin lined, with perforated edges and hole punching for storage.
1 Week Review
We enjoyed the spiral bound notebook and its perforated pages so much that it became our daily journal for a month. Why? It’s just easy to use.
The spiral binding means you can open this notebook completely flat, which doesn’t happen easily with the ‘perfect bind’ or ‘cotton stitched’ binding of other notebooks. With the latter, you need to use your non-writing hand to hold the booklet pages flat whilst writing, at least for the first week until they give a little.
This A5 notebook can easily be removed from the leather cover for easy future replacement.
As we got to road-test this product for a month, we noticed things we wouldn’t have seen from the standard 1-week test. This took the form of premature wear as the inside leather edgings became unstuck. This was slightly annoying but not a deal breaker.
The front cover internal sleeve was a bit thin for storage purposes (around 1/3 the width of the cover) so this meant documents had to be folded, and had little coverage or protection.
One thing we’d like to comment on is how ARTEX put the pen holder on the outside edge of the journal notebook, as opposed to the middle spine like in most products. This was fantastic as a short glimpse into a carry bag was enough to check if we’d packed a pen. Too often with other notebooks using spine-based pen holders, we’d leave home to head out and not realise we’d left our pen behind.
Again this was a thick pen holder, which allowed storage of medium and full sized pens, not just pencils and thin pens.
Criteria Review
Quality
Features
Usability
Charm
Value
OVERALL
6.2
“The corporate notebook for serious daily writers”
Conclusion
At $69.95 AUD this product is likely to be purchased by corporate types looking for a sturdy performer to get the job done. It’s very easy to use on a daily basis, and we’d recommend this to anyone who needs to perform heavy writing tasks and regularly share notes with others.