another day, another daycraft review

A few months' ago, I blogged about some lovely notebooks from the Hong Kong-based Daycraft and here I am again, with more products from the brand. This time, I present to you a diary and a notebook. 

First up: the diary. It is A6 in size and has a faux-leather cover. The design is the same as the Signature notebooks Daycraft do.

From the side, you can see that the year is clearly visible:

Now, moving onto the design of the diary pages themselves. The diary begins with quite a few reference pages (not shown in any of the pictures) and these include: a 2014/2015 calender, a comprehensive list of international holidays (quite a few countries are covered here!), international guides where major airports, currencies, along with other bits are listed for various countries, IDD codes, a chart of world times, size conversions, conversion tables, a few pages on nutrition and health, a table of food calories and a page on gift ideas.

These are then followed by two pages for you to jot down special dates for each month of the coming year and then a year planner for 2014 where two months are on each page.

Onto the diary itself; at the beginning of each month, there is a spread like this where a quote is on the bottom left and then some lined notepaper and month overview is on the right:

This particular diary is a day-per-page one, with half a page for each weekend day. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this but the day-per-page with appointments feature is one that will definitely come in handy for a student who has to write down lecture times, tutorial times, etc.

At the culmination of the 2014 diary pages, there is a 2015 year planner where there are two months to a page, some note pages, a few sheets for you to write down some telephone numbers and email addresses and then a personal information page.

Overall, I love the design of the diary - it is stylish, minimalistic and quite light too. However, my only gripe is with the paper used for the pages - as you can see above, it is only 60gsm so I'm not sure how I will get on with this diary. If, for 2015, Daycraft opt for the 100gsm paper they use for their notebooks, I am sure that I will find it hard not to order one of these.

Moving onto the notebook now; this one is part of the new Signature Inspiro range and I opted for the one with the 'Stop Wishing, Start Doing' quote. The other two are 'Today is my Day' and 'Great Ideas Have to Start Somewhere'. The cover is again, faux-leather and the quote on this one is printed in quite deeply - so much so that if you were to run your finger over the text, there is an estimated 1mm indentation.

The page edges are pigmented in a lovely purple hue and provides a nice contrast with the tan coloured cover.

The paper is the same high quality 100gsm used in the notebooks I reviewed a few months ago.

And a picture showing the 'sleeve' that comes with the notebook:

Overall, I really like this Signature Inspiro notebook. I can't say I'm a fan of the way the text was printed onto the front cover (it's a bit too deep for my liking but maybe I'm just being picky as there is nothing else wrong with the notebook!) but I love the contrast of the tan and purple. Furthermore, the quality of the paper is another plus-point and is something that should appeal to those of you that like a notebook with paper that is more than the standard 80gsm (fountain pen users, I'm looking at you).

Lastly, I want to say thank you to Shadow at Daycraft for sending me these lovely samples to review. As always, I am impressed by the quality of Daycraft products and I do take a certain pride in the fact that these notebooks are from a Hong Kong brand - a place that is close to my heart for obvious reasons.

Disclaimer: All views my own and are not affected by the fact that the products were received as samples. I receive no commission from any links used in this blog post and I was not paid to write this blog post.