Nomad Notebooks Background

I picked these Nomad Notebooks up from a Kickstarter campaign in 2017. ( I wrote about it in this post.) They raised over $26,000 in a successful campaign, and are still selling notebooks, notebook covers and other products on their website. Their notebooks are were also available on Amazon. (Sometime after I started drafting this post, I guess they went out of stock, and there is no re-stock date listed.)

The Nomad founders are two graphic designers who found themselves using mixed up paper scraps in their studio, and wanted to reproduce that experience in a notebook. The idea is that a notebook with only one kind of paper isn’t as conducive to creativity, while a mix of paper types will stimulate the imagination.

The Sea+Air+Space Three-Pack

I chose their Sea+Air+Space pack. It comes as a shrink-wrapped bundle of 3 staple-bound notebooks, very much like the Field Notes or Word. Notebooks concept. Each notebook has a different design.

Sea has nautical charts on the cover, and the inside cover celebrates JFK’s nautical style. The papers are a mix of colors, dot grid, and sea chart patterns. 

Air has pilots’ charts on the cover, and pays homage to the Tuskeegee Airmen on the inside cover. Again the inside sheets are a nice mix of the chart pattern and coordinating colors and squared sheets.

Space features a star chart cover, and a tribute to John Glenn on the inside cover. Star charts and cross-grid pages are among the mixed papers within.

The Covers

I love the design of the Nomad notebooks. I do wish they hadn’t cut the corners off diagonally, but I’m sure this makes them easier to fit into notebook covers. The covers are made of a smooth, sturdy-feeling card stock– I’d be interested to hear how people who have used these long-term feel about the sturdiness, though, as I popped the cover off a staple while trying to open the notebook flat to take photos, and the top and bottom of the spine were already tearing a bit.

The Paper

The paper within all seems to be a good weight with a nice smooth feel. The colors and patterns coordinate nicely, and are mostly not so bold as to distract too much from writing, though some of the chart pages may not work as well with finer nibs, lighter ink colors or tiny handwriting.

I wondered if the paper was actually the same throughout the notebooks, with all the mixed designs are just printed on, but I didn’t find anything on their site that explicitly confirmed this one way or the other. (It sounds like the designers started out making notebooks out of actual recycled/reused mixed papers, but for the Kickstarter notebooks were just trying to recreate that concept in a new way.) Since the consistency of the paper isn’t clear, I wasn’t quite sure how to present pen tests for these notebooks– it would be kind of a drag to test every single type of paper used within! So what I’ve done is one full page of pen tests in one notebook, and then numbered all the pages in all 3 notebooks with one of my fountain pens to see if any differences jumped out.

Pen Test Results

Based on my tests, I would guess that the papers are slightly different– it is hard to tell by touch, but some of the colored sheets and charts feel a little heavier, or maybe being printed with more color makes them feel that way. They do seem to resist bleed-through better. My full test page on the Air notebook chart page had very little bleed, but of course the pattern really camouflages what little bleed and show-through there is! Plain white sheets seemed to have the most bleed-through when numbered with the medium Preppy filled with Pilot Iroshizuku Ku-Jaku ink, so I tested a few other pens there too. Definitely some bleed-through with wetter inks. Doing the test on the chart page shows the disadvantages of using certain kinds of pens/inks and even harder pencils on a busy pattern. And yet it is not dark enough to give visible contrast to a white ink. The pens that look best on the chart pages are unfortunately the ones that are most likely to bleed and show through on non-chart pages.

Should You Buy the Nomad Notebooks?

Nomad has other designs available, including a planner format, and a version that comes in a larger size. Prices start at $9.99 for their “Graph Pack.” I can’t really call these “fountain pen friendly,” as I don’t think it counts if you can’t use fountain pens consistently on all pages. The design of these notebooks is a nice change from others on the market. I do like them, and think they’d be fun for collages and more of a scrapbook kind of use. But if you just want a notebook to write in, depending on your pen preferences, you may find them a little frustrating.