It’s always interesting to see what new products pop up on Amazon for the coming year. There are quite a few “Chapters Journals” in various colors and sizes– unusual ones for Moleskine, such as 3.75 x7,” 3 x 5.5,” and 4.5 x 8.25.” The colors include “old rose,” “tawny olive,” and “plum purple.”  There are no photos yet, and no descriptive info. The format says “diary,” but they don’t seem to be dated. All are soft cover, and page format options seem to just be dotted and ruled. Will these be something book-related? Intriguing…

There are also new collections of notebooks with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Batman themes.
I was thinking that what Moleskine really should create is a daily planner specifically for art journalers. The Hobonichi Techo shows there’s a demand for a daily planner with a more free-form page. Moleskine’s own daily planner in the extra-small size comes with unlined pages, making it perfect for daily drawings, but a bit small. I was all excited when I first saw that, as I thought they’d changed the design of all the daily planners to having unlined pages, but it’s only that size– I guess they thought the lines made the extra small page too busy. If they made a pocket size and large size daily planner with unlined pages and slightly heavier paper that doesn’t bleed as much, I think a lot of people would embrace them for daily art journaling. People like Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel have made a name for themselves doing daily artwork in Moleskine planners over many years, but lately she’s been complaining about the severe decline in paper quality. She points out that she’s never expected Moleskine paper to be perfect for all media, but their planners used to be able to hold up to watercolor and now they don’t:

I don’t know if the lines bother her, but I think a plain, unlined day-per-page art journal would be a widely popular product if the paper was either the heavier weight sketchbook paper, or at least a version of their thin paper that was more in line with the quality of prior years. Would you buy one? Do you know of other planners with an unlined daily page layout?