Despite there still being a place for old-school paper notebooks in anyone’s life, Moleskine is ensuring its products stay relevant as we become more and more dependent on digital devices. Today it’s introducing an Adobe Creative Cloud-branded Moleskine notebook and app that makes it easier to get your sketches, doodles and brainstorms into Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
Inspiration can strike anytime and anywhere, even when your tablet or smartphone is dead. But sharing concepts or other hand-drawn images with co-workers isn’t easy when they’re trapped inside a paper notebook, so Moleskine’s newest addition makes the transition from analogue to digital pretty painless.
Using a set of strategically-positioned dots on the corners of every page, a free accompanying iOS-only iPhone app can be used to capture a sketch and import it into Adobe Creative Cloud, where it’s automatically converted into both a bitmap JPG so it can be immediately loaded into Photoshop and a vector SVG so it can be brought into Illustrator. Moleskine claims you can draw using any tool you choose, but opting for darker inks and markers with broad strokes instead of shading will produce the best conversion results.
The steps can certainly be accomplished using the iPhone’s native camera and other apps, but the whole process is streamlined here, particularly if you rely on Adobe’s products on your computer. The special dotted pages also help ensure that even if a sketch is snapped at an angle, your images will be automatically corrected (using Adobe’s image processing expertise) and imported with the proper dimensions and perspective.
For the time being the Adobe Creative Cloud Moleskine will only be available as a larger 8×5-inch 160-page hardcover notebook for $US33. You can pre-order one now, but they won’t start shipping until December, and hopefully sooner in the month so you can scratch all your cartoonist and illustrator friends off your shopping list. [Moleskine]
