n Tuesday, Scout Books launched their new website which includes an online shop, blog, and the option to make your own pocket notebooks. Any creative living in Portland is probably familiar with Pinball Publishing, the independent and sustainable offset printer that produces these lovely custom cahiers (and many other items) printed on 100% recycled paper with soy based inks. Frank Chimero fans will also be excited to discover a limited edition Scout Book design for sale called Muttnik, a title in which Frank explains is “a nickname for Sputnik, since it was ‘manned’ by a dog named Laika and had no humans on board.”

Several years ago, Portland-based designer Aaron Draplin teamed up with with Coudal Partners of Chicago to create Field Notes, a line of little notebooks inspired by agricultural memo books and pocket ledgers which was printed with Pinball Publishing. The Field Notes brand has since become so popular in demand that Pinball has been unable to keep up with the quantity needed to be produced. Even though the notebooks are now being printed elsewhere in Illinois, I still love the fact that it originated from a small northwest print shop and has become a cultural brand with universal appeal. Jim Coudal said, “The thing that’s cool about Field Notes is it appeals to a rifle-toting budweiser-drinking mammal killer, AND a coffee-swilling fedora-wearing pretentious Brooklyn hipster.”

Read+Write, the new Scout Books blog is running a series called Show Us Your Scout Book. Nicole Lavelle, the Design and Marketing Assistant at Pinball describes it as a place “where artists and designers send us photographs or scans of their filled-up Scout Book interiors and we post them to our blog with a short interview.” Michael and I are excited to take part in this series by sharing some Colorcubic doodles and drawings in the near future. To take part in the series, all you need is a Scout Book of your very own. You can purchase some from the shop (I personally love the various colors of the Composition style), request a free sample, or better yet, customize your own. I spent quite a bit of time looking through the Scout Books gallery and have selected a few of my favorite custom designs below: