Inspiration: Sticky Pad - Dots June 23, 2016 08:00

In our "Where do you find inspiration?" post a few weeks back we shared briefly about how we develop products, from inspiration to final design.

The very first step is making a list (in our lives, it is the first step to everything, not just product development). Our love of lists easily turned into wanting to develop a notepad. You don't always have your planner or phone handy to scribble things down on/in. Sometimes you just want an old fashion pencil and pad. 

But there are so many notepads in the world, how could we possibly make something that is different and original?

So we brainstormed. Our initial thoughts:

• We want it small enough for a sheet to fit inside the UPstudio planner but large enough to really have space to write decent size lists (those standard size post-its kill us, our line items on a list are longer than 2 words).
• We at UPstudio are in LOVE with graph paper! It is the most versatile thing out there. If you make the lines fine/light enough they just serve as a guide and don't obstruct your list or sketch.
• We wanted it to not just be completely blank or completely graph paper, wanted a little flavor (FLAVA FLAV!)
• We wanted them to be affordable, so researching the most economical version of what we wanted was key.

We took our initial thoughts and started searching our everyday lives for inspiration. We finally found it in bullet journals and an Instagram post from Mr. Bobby Bones.

The layout of a bullet journal is very similar to graph paper. You essentially place a dot at each intersection of your graph and then remove the lines. What you are left with looks eerily like a game of Dots and Boxes, that game you played forever in 4th grade (if you're feeling a little nostalgic click here or here to play online). That way we'd still get the graph paper affect with a little switch up.

So then came the flavor... 

Bobby Bones is a radio personality. In Raleigh you can hear him and his friends on 93.9 (a country station). They are based out of Nashville. If you want to give the show a listen they are on iHeartRADIO. We came across this tweet via Bobby's Instagram and the last part stuck with us. Cutting yourself slack when it comes to not completing your long to do lists is key, "there is always tomorrow."