As a drawer (cartoonist ? Illustrator ?) I use sketchbooks since… high school I think, maybe middle School. So I have a big collection of notebooks, sketchbooks and many other kind of logs. I currently have a little notebook to take notes, a sketchbook and a big notebook for scenario and comics layouts. I feel naked without them.
It’s really useful and nice to go back one or two sketchbook to see my progress and revisit or transform some old ideas.
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Hey, I don’t need to look back too many years for that, sometimes yesterday will do…
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I disagree. I can’t feel comfortable putting my thoughts into words unless they’ll remain private. It’s much easier to assure that through strong encryption than with a physical journal.
Libreoffice has a great password protection feature, and similarly I can jot down little thoughts in the notes app on my iPhone.
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You start with a decent pen. Black ink.
And then a good notebook.
https://rhodiapads.com/explore_bullet_webnotebooks.php
If you want to sketch or write with a pencil use a Blackwing 602.
https://palominobrands.com/product/palomino-blackwing-602/
Sketch pads are not my thing but I’ve used these before.
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I would argue for a non disposable pen but still inexpensive.
https://www.amazon.com/Platinum-Fountain-Preppy-Black-PPQ-200/dp/B001H0CEM4
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My current favourite:
http://www.copic-shop.co.uk/copic-multi-liner-sp/
(I’m quite promiscuous as far as stationery is concerned.)
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Nice Pen!
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I have a fine point and it really is a pretty sweet fountain pen for only $3.
Awesome! I wrote my own terminal program in Turbo Pascal back in “those days” too! MiniTerm! It even had a basic scripting language! Fun times. Then moved to Windows and abandoned all of that hard work and the simplicity of a character mode interface. Oh well, great memories!
I started carrying one of the small, cheap Moleskines around several years ago. Gridded or blank, it’s small enough to fit in my pocket and carry _every_where. I use it for random jottings, making impromptu bookmarks, shopping lists, phone numbers, ripping pages out when I want to give some one some info, writing stories when I’m bored, etc.
Just recently I started using one my daughter made for me by hand …
… I love it! 
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While I’ve kinda moved on to CAD and phone for my drawing and note needs, back when my business revolved around a quadrille ruled notebook I used a terrific but obscure product from http://www.komtrak.com. They’re refillable binders with thick indestructible plastic covers and 80lb paper available in whatever flavor you like: lined, graph, blank, watercolor, music staff, etc. The heavy paper is such a joy to write or draw on. None of this seeing what’s on the back of the page coming through.
It’s definitely weird looking through 30 year old notebooks. Names and projects from the past…
This is why I cannot put a journal on paper. I’ve already got so many papers from school that I don’t want to add more. At some point in the near future, they will go into a shredder. They are not of interest for someone else to read after I am gone.
The journals and notes I write are for me, and I don’t have time to go flipping through multiple notebooks looking for anything. Since the days of the PC and Palm Pilot, searching through what I’ve written has been quick and easy to do. I doubt that I would keep a journal or take notes at all if that wasn’t possible.
I type significantly faster than I can write by hand, so I find that when I type I only think about my words and ideas, while writing by hand causes my mind to drift away. I end up thinking about what I’m doing and judging myself for writing about my thoughts and feelings. Also the extra effort of writing by hand can lead me to judge the effort against what I’m writing, saying to myself “was THIS really worth the effort of writing down?”
So I could never get into journaling. Livejournal got me journaling back in the day, but when I drifted away from it and found myself unwilling to start over somewhere else and not really into the whole blogging thing anymore, I took the habit private. For a while I would type out my feelings in a notepad and close it without saving (as typing it felt more useful than reading it later). Now I journal in a scrivener file.
I would argue that, if you’re like me, you should start with (and probably keep using) the cheapest notebook possible so that you don’t feel bad when you completely drench it in coffee or spaghetti sauce.
I use a $3 180 page moleskine knockoff that I found at Walmart and I write with a blue Pilot G2 when I’m taking work notes and black one for everything else.
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This is so true. I can’t find the link right now, but when I was researching instructional design for a curricula project, I found an article or chapter describing that taking notes by hand is a sign of kinetic learning style, which I had never considered. I would’ve guessed verbal (the 3rd being aural). Even more interesting, a reference comparing taking notes by hand to taking notes on a laptop showed taking notes by hand resulted in way higher info retention by the note-takers. Kind of like muscle-memory meets language. Different than keeping a journal, but interesting.
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