KOKUYO began as a supplier of account ledgers, and we continue to this day to manufacture and sell a variety of office paper products, as well as stationery products designed to provide ease of use for everybody in office and school environments. Their most popular/well-known product is the “Campus” range of paper and notebooks.

The Campus Todai series of notebooks came out of a research project by students at the University of Tokyo to best utilize lines and dots on each sheet of paper for study purposes. Read more about the evolution of their notebooks designed for studying.

While I love the Campus Notebooks I can find the “Campus” Branding very studenty. As a professional I was looking for other options from Kokuyo. The notebook I ended up purchasing was a Soft Ring Notebook in A5 which included the dot-lines rule (pictured below) in green (but they are available in a wide range of colours).

The soft rings are bendy and flexible which means that the notebook can take a lot rougher yanking around in my bag. It also lies perfectly flat and folds back on itself to save space. The soft rings (when compared with wire or ring bound notebook) don’t get in your way when you are writing – they simply push down flat out of the way making writing much easier – it is surprising what you didn’t know you needed as I never thought of this as an issue as you just work around it – but actually it works pretty well as a solution. Kokuyu won a Good Design Award in 2015 for this product.

Why not share in the comments – what products have you come across lately that you have thought “that is a good design!”

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