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Brand Case Studies: Smart writing with Moleskine

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Moving with analogue into the digital age is a problem facing many brands who work within a well established craft. As productivity takes precedence over the traditional, many find themselves outwitted and outdated by technology that offers quick, one-click solutions to otherwise lengthy processes or practices. But, although some brands are rendered obsolete in this fast paced environment, others such as Moleskine are making smart decisions and partnerships to ensure they remain relevant in the 21st century.

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There's no notebook more celebrated than Moleskine, for both its history as well as its simple, effective design. The modern Moleskine is heir to the legendary notebook used by great artists and thinkers over the past two centuries including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. They all loved their black leather notebooks which were manufactured by a small family-owned company in France. In fact, Chatwin even told the story of his notebook in his novel, Songlines. But, when the company went out of business in the 1980s, the notepads became infamously difficult to source. Luckily, the product was resurrected and the modern day Moleskine was brought to life in 1997, by a small Milanese publisher.

In the face of more redundancy (this time at the hands of technology), the brand has had to release a number of successful collaborations over recent years to prove that analogue and digital are still aligned. Notable associations have included Evernote and Livescribe. And in the last couple of months the brand has excelled itself, releasing two advancements which outdo all other breakthroughs in their field.

First, they gave us the Smart Writing Set. A collection of three separate components that make it possible to possible to write by hand and have everything from notes to doodles appear simultaneously (or later) in your phone. All written text can then be transcribed from handwriting to font, and then exported to Google Drive, Evernote, iCloud or sent as a PDF.

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Key to the set’s functionality is the Pen+. A Bluetooth-enabled ‘writing’ instrument that uses ink, but that also carries a sensor (a version of Neo smartpen technology) connecting it to iDevices and Androids. The Pen+’s internal memory can hold roughly 1,000 pages of notes before it needs to be connected to a device though, and it’s voice memo feature can record someone speaking as you write. The voice note is then attached to the same note page you're writing within, It’s insanely clever, and painstakingly user intuitive.

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, there’s also the Moleskine and Adobe collaboration. Here, the Moleskine Smart Notebook and accompanying Creative Cloud app make it breathlessly easy to turn work on paper into JPG and SVG files for use in Illustrator and Photoshop. The magic here is in the notebook’s companion app, powered by Adobe Creative SDK, which reads the page markers at the corner of the notebook and utilises the iPhone camera to capture optimised high resolution images which it then converts them to both JPG and SVG file formats. Paper creations turn into vector files before your eyes, with crop, unwarp and perspective alignment functions all built in.

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Both these advancements have provided indispensable counterparts to the new and portable technology of today. Moleskine has managed to capture reality in movement by allowing users to glimpse and record details like never before and the Moleskine notebook has become a battery that stores ideas and turns them into a workable reality. The brand has remained relevant in the digital age, setting it light years ahead of the competition. Well done them. 

All images courtesy of Moleskine

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