The Love of Notebooks
/I LOVE stationery. There are certain tech tools that make my life easier, but at the end of the day, I still love writing. With a fountain pen. on paper. in a notebook. or on simple stationery paper with a fine tooth to it. There is a special process that happens when you commit words to paper, rather than simply tapping a keyboard.
Here’s a snapshot of my current notebook:
Back in the day, when summer was drawing to a close, kids were excited about their new school clothes & backpacks but I was freaking out about school supplies. Who remembers TrapperKeepers? New notebooks, fresh crayons, pencils and folders.
These days, I have a notebook that I have nicknamed my Production Bible. It’s my daily companion.
Here are some things I love:
Moleskine notebooks & Rhodia notepads are popular these days and can be found in any bookstore. But my heart belongs to the Leuchtturm1917 notebooks. These have a similar look to the Moleskine - hard cover, elastic band closure, and fold-out pocket in back. However there are a few key details that set the Leuchturm1917 notebook apart, at least in my book (pun intended).
- The front page has a content page.
- The pages are numbered, so you can refer back to a certain project easily, using the Content page.
- It comes with STICKERS. (Refer back to my love of stationery in this entry) - they are essentially labels for the spine of the notebook, making it handy for archiving your notebooks,
- You can add a pen look to hold your writing utensil. These cost $2 extra, but it keeps my travel fountain pen in place. I like to get contrasting or complimentary colors to liven this up. (I may live in NYC but I love color)
- They offer a DOTS pattern, rather than just lined, blank or graph grid. If find this gives me more flexibility to use the pages as I want. To make my to-do lists, but also make a sketch if I want. (Yes, you read that right.) I like drawing my boxes myself. And then there is the ultimate satisfaction - checking off a box. DONE! And on to the next task.
There's a particular kind of confusion that shows up in production offices lately, and it isn't about budgets or call times. It's about a handful of terms — usage rights, likeness rights, digital replicas, AI training, derivative content — that have started appearing in the same paragraph of a contract, often used as though they mean roughly the same thing.
They don't. And the gap between them is quickly becoming one of the more consequential distinctions in commercial production.
This vocabulary comes largely from entertainment law, a world most photographers, stylists, producers, and models were never trained to navigate. It's being absorbed into advertising and commercial contracts faster than most of the industry has had time to build a shared, plain-language understanding of what it actually covers. The result is a lot of very careful people signing very specific language without a clear sense of what they've agreed to.
So it's worth slowing down and taking each term on its own.