Here comes the new Moleskine Folio products arriving stores soon. ITOYA will be the first to have a global preview event on 23rd March 2010, while city'super is working with Moleskine to have a fun way to peek at Folio and other stuffs in people's bags starting in mid-May 2010.
I'm not going to go through the complete line up here, I will be skipping the 2-rings binder and binder set which consists of expandable pocket, tabbed dividers etc. Instead I'll tell you what I think after using some of them for the past few days.
The most impressive is the smart looking slim document holder simply called "Folder". It is made with the same material of the soft cover notebook, so it gives you the soft touch of leather with a layer of paper lining. You can easily carry a 100 sheets of 100 gsm A4 or letter size paper despite its slimness. Believe me this looks real smart in meetings, especially when you open the flap like an envelope to pull out a nicely printed document. Priced at HK$165, expensive yes, but it gives you the professional look you may need in presentations.
The next Folio product I like is the A4 Print Paper in ROUNDED CORNERS! I don't know about you but I love rounded corner photos a lot and this extends to cards and papers. This tiny aesthetic element seems to elevate what you want to show to a new level, well, to me. I have very nice result writing with fine nib fountain pen and with Tradio fibre pen from Pentel, no bleed at all, but don't expect to use the back side of the paper once used. Did I say it is CREAM in color? Realize the background color of my Scription blog? Oh and I have a cream color Strida bike too :) Compatible with laser or inkjet printers, it comes in packs of 50 sheets of 100 gsm papers. HK$115 per pack, which rounds up HK$2.3 per page. It costs to look good, I think they should put a Moleskine watermark on these papers.
2 other new products are called Folio Tools. They are pocket sized Memo Cards and StickNotes, both comes in black paper jacket. I like the Memo Cards' 200 gsm cream colored, rounded corners paper, which can be used as presentation cue cards, to-do list etc, but I'm expecting to see people come up with creative ideas using them. I mean think about it, they are Moleskine Cards! The package comes with 10 ruled and 10 squared cards but they are blank on the back. The down side of this is that ink or water based pigments don't settle into the paper that well, sort of like the Moleskine Sketch Book type of paper. Phew, HK$78 per pack (20 cards).
StickNotes is not what I need however. I can't think of reasons to use it instead of a simple pack of post-it, except that the paper is … cream with rounded corners, that's just me. I found it strange that the paper lean towards white more than cream comparing with other Moleskine papers, maybe they want to distinguish it from Post-it too badly. The glue is a bit too strong so pulling out a piece of StickNote curls up the edge, not very pleasant to me. However the tack strength of glue on objects is just fine. In this case, there is a reason why Post-it is Post-it, their glue is made by special polymer in microspheres which has a unique universal design quality, i.e. strong enough to hold and stick, easy enough for anybody to pull apart. As for the StickNotes price, it is HK$78 per pack.
