Field Notes Colors: Night Sky

I’m continuing on my journey to write about almost every quarterly edition of Field Notes that I have, and today, I’m reaching a milestone. There were a few exceptions I had to make, but with this post, I’m going to consider myself “caught up” and “done” with my original goal. Last time I wrote about Mackinaw Autumn, and this time it’ll be, perhaps predictably, Night Sky, one of my all-time favorites. Timely, too, since this year’s summer edition is about to be released very soon. As usual, this post will be image- and trivia-heavy, with a summary of details at the end. My goodness, these posts keep getting longer and longer. #sorrynotsorry

Night Sky is the summer release of Field Notes from 2013, 19th in their quarterly edition series (called COLORS back then). To say it’s an absolute favorite of mine would be an understatement. It’s an all-black edition of 3 different memo books that have summer constellations printed all over the back in holographic foil. What’s not to like? Apparently, everyone agreed: upon its release in mid-June 2013, Night Sky sold out in a week at Field Notes’ website, becoming one of the fastest selling editions at the time. It even sold out before the previous season’s Colors edition, America the Beautiful, had a chance to sell out. (Both had the same edition size of 15,000 packs). Unfortunately, I was not subscribed to COLORS when Night Sky was released, and was in a rare (and regrettable) period of “buy just one pack and get more later if I like it” state of mind. I remember having to resort to other online shops later, not without difficulty.

Why Night Sky is no. 1 in my book ✶✧⋆

I love Night Sky and rank it #1 in my FN ranking because it’s a black, understated variation on the classic kraft Field Notes, with just enough “oomph” in the form of holographic stars, one of my favorite visual motifs. The seasonal theme, spread out among three different books each representing early, mid-, and late summer sky in the northern hemisphere, is tastefully done without overwhelming the original design (constellations and asterisms are on the exterior back cover only). I’m a big fan of matte French Paper covers, too, and the versatility and practicality of the color black can’t be beat.

Another reason Night Sky is a winner in my book: I may not like summer as a season but absolutely love summer nights. I won’t wax poetic too much about it, but I simply love how the air of summer nights can feel calming and electric at the same time. And I have once experienced a night of phenomenal stargazing, in middle of nowhere (read middle of cornfields in central Illinois) that I think of whenever I look at Night Sky. I’m sure it doesn’t hold a candle to the view at Great Basin National Park in Nevada, where the Field Notes crew shot the Night Sky film, but I still get shivers remembering my own experience. I remember feeling incredibly small, and feeling like the vastness of whatever was up there was going to swallow me up in a blanket of stars. How everything felt like nothing, and vice versa...

I said I wouldn’t wax poetic, didn’t I? Oops. The point is, I love the theme of Night Sky and all the aforementioned details that support it, plus other subtle details like black staples, reticle-graph grid, and the grey ink on black matte paper. I’ll get into these specs in more detail in the next section, but I’ll briefly talk about its body paper here. As with many other older editions, Night Sky has the 50#T version of Finch Paper Opaque Smooth in Bright White, while these days you’re more likely to see the thicker 60#T or 70#T. It does feel decidedly thinner in my hand compared to the newer editions. I don’t hold this against Night Sky. In fact, I actually enjoy how slim and “pocketable” the older editions feel, and how when the spine is broken in, the cover closes on its own. And the paper in Night Sky performs well and feels smooth with my usual gel pens.

Firsts

What sets Night Sky apart from any other quarterly edition of Field Notes is that it features holographic foil. It’s not the first to get foil-stamped; Balsam Fir and Day Game were the firsts (Winter 2010 and Summer 2012 respectively). But it is the first, and the only one so far, to be hot-stamped with silver holographic foil. I love how the stars flash and shine in a rainbow of colors depending on the angle I hold the books. Fun fact: Field Notes originally wanted to print the stars in a glow-in-the-dark ink but it wasn’t “glowy” enough. Thankfully, they instead found a satisfactory alternative in the holographic foil, and I’m so glad they didn’t give up on the idea. I suspect the foil will last longer than glow-in-the-dark ink anyway. Not that I wouldn’t want to see Field Notes successfully incorporate glow-in-the-dark in a future release. But at this point, I’m not holding my breath.

Another major “first” in Night Sky: black staples. It was a no brainer for a black edition, but I appreciate that they went the extra step and made sure that the only things shining on the cover would be the stars. By the way, Night Sky was not the first edition to deviate from the standard silver staples. America the Beautiful from Spring 2013, just before Night Sky, was the first ever Colors edition to do so, with copper-colored staples.

Innards comparison, from left: graph grid in original kraft, dot grid in Pitch Black (1st version), and reticle grid in Night Sky.

Night Sky was also the first to get a reticle-graph grid, a sort of a hybrid between dot grid and graph grid, with tiny cross-hairs like the ones found in optical instruments. A very fitting detail that makes Night Sky even more special. I like both dot grid and graph grid, and this reticle-graph has worked nicely for me so far. Not too distracting as long as I use a dark pen or pencil. There have been only two other quarterly editions that feature the reticle-graph grid since: Unexposed from 2014 and Lunacy from 2016, both fall editions.

One last “first”: Night Sky was the first Colors edition to forego the “Practical Applications” section usually found on the back inside cover. I think it was a sensible design move, obviously to make room for paragraphs of corresponding information on what kind of constellations and asterisms to look out for at different times of the summer (at roughly midnight), like Ursa Major, “The Summer Triangle”, and Cassiopeia. But I like that they didn’t try to cram that on the back cover or the front inside cover. Other quarterly editions that skipped “Practical Applications”: Arts & Sciences, Two Rivers, and Byline. Coincidentally, A&S and Byline are both summer editions, just like Nighty Sky.

Not pictured is the front inside cover, which I’m glad they kept it all black and consistent with the rest of the cover. It makes recording pertinent information a bit tricky but nothing a white or metallic ink can't handle. *gives Lunacy the side-eye*

Additional Notes

By now, I think it’s safe to generalize that black Field Notes are very popular. It’s been said on a few occasions that Raven’s Wing and Night Sky were some of the fastest selling Field Notes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Lunacy (Fall 2016) is also up there. So it was not surprising that Field Notes followed up Night Sky with Pitch Black in November 2013 for their product line-up as a non-limited offering. Pitch Black has gone into a second iteration and looks different now, but the original version was a very close cousin of Night Sky, just like Red Blooded was an off-shoot of Fire Spotter in 2011. Same materials and colors but with dot grid, a new set of “Practical Applications”, and without the holographic stars on the back. Identical to Night Sky when viewed from the front, closed. The new version of Pitch Black looks great but I admit I was a bit sad to see the 1st version of Pitch Black go, because I knew it was as close as one could get to Night Sky.

I already mentioned the film Field Notes made for Night Sky, but I would be remiss if I didn’t direct you to read up on how they filmed it at The Mather Overlook in The Great Basin National Park in Nevada. I haven’t watched the whole thing, nor do I have the right equipment to fully appreciate it, but there’s also a 6+ hour version up on YouTube, where you can watch the stars slowly moving across the sky in real time. (The HD version is up on Vimeo).  Apparently, it was one of the very first 4k videos uploaded to YouTube. It must have been an unforgettable experience filming and seeing the stars at such a location, because Bryan Bedell (of Field Notes, who made the film along with Steve Delahoyde) often mentions it when asked which edition is his favorite (source links below). I love the lengths that Field Notes go to to create videos like this that don’t even show the actual product they’re promoting.

Jim Coudal, co-founder of Field Notes, also often says Night Sky is one of his favorites. Below are some video and podcast links where the FN crew talk about Night Sky, and how they originally wanted to do glow-in-the-dark for it, etc, etc.:

• An Obsessive’s Guide to Field Notes COLORS: Part Five (2013) on Vimeo
• CMD Space #57: Digital and Physical things, with Jim Coudal - Relay FM (August 16th, 2013): about 1 hour and 4 minutes in.
• The Pen Addict #69: Give ‘em Hell Bryan Bedell! - Relay FM (August 27th, 2013): about 18 minutes in.

Overall, Night Sky is a great-looking and versatile edition that never fails to remind me why I love Field Notes. At this point, I don’t know if or how any edition will ever top it. If one ever does, then I’ll be very pleasantly surprised and I look forward to that day.

Black staples (from left): Utility, Sweet Tooth, Capsule (AW 2014), Lunacy, Pitch Black (1st version), and Night Sky.

Reticle grid comparison (from left): Night Sky, Unexposed, Starbucks Reserve “Capitol Hill”, and Lunacy.

Quick black color comparison! Top row (from left): Pitch Black (1st version), Night Sky, Night Sky (back view), Just Below Zero, and Arts & Sciences. Bottom row (from left): TEDx Portland, Raven’s Wing, Lunacy, DDC “Pretty Much Everything”, and Drink Local “Stout”. For more “gray” color comparison, please see the Just Below Zero post.

Some Fun (for me) Details

• Night Sky is the 2013 Summer edition of COLORS, the 19th in the series.
• Item number: FNC-19
• Price: $9.95/pack of 3 books
• Edition size: 15,000 packs (or 45,000 books)
• Printed: June 2013
• The old website said 700 subscriptions were available starting with Night Sky; the email announcement at the time said 500.
• Printed by: Service Graphics, Inc., Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.
• Cover paper: French Paper Construction “Blacktop” in 100#C, printed with “Stealth Gray” soy-based Toyo ink and holographic hot-stamped foil.
• Inside covers: printed with the same “Stealth Gray” ink
• Body paper: Finch Paper Opaque Smooth 50#T in “Bright White”
• Reticle-graph grid inside (3/16"x 3/16"): unspecified light gray soy-based Toyo ink
• Edition-specific extras: none
• Belly band: white paper printed with dark gray ink
• Staples color: black
• Film: An Obsessive’s Guide to Field Notes COLORS: Part Five (2013) on Vimeo
• Film: Field Notes: Night Sky Edition on Vimeo
• Film: The Stars and Their Courses on Vimeo (3+ hours)
• Film: Field Notes: The Stars and Their Courses - YouTube (6+ hours)
• How they shot the video: “Walk Out on the Milky Way.” | Field Notes

Don’t blink.

My Favorite “Practical Applications”

There were no “Practical Applications” printed on the back cover of Nighty Sky, but there were some suggested by Field Notes in their email announcement, including:

• Homemade Firework Construction Plans
• Which Orchard Walls Are High and Hard to Climb
• Favorite Quotes from Dandelion Wine (one of my favorite books)

Thanks for reading until the end! What are your thoughts on Night Sky?

Field Notes Colors: Mackinaw Autumn

I’m continuing on my journey to write about every quarterly edition of Field Notes that I have, with a few exceptions. Last time I wrote about Just Below Zero, and for this post, I’m choosing an even older edition, Mackinaw Autumn. As usual, this post will be image- and trivia-heavy, with a summary of specs at the end. Just one post left after this: Night Sky!

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Mackinaw Autumn is the fall release of Field Notes from 2009, 4th in their quarterly edition series. It sits right in between Grass Stain Green and Just Below Zero, so you know how old it is. It’s another favorite of mine, for similar reasons that I like Just Below Zero: simple design and a seasonal theme. Field Notes only made 2,500 packs of Mackinaw Autumn. And when it was announced to the mailing list in September 2009, 500 packs they set aside for their website sold out in less than 24 hours, setting a new record at the time. It’s not difficult to see why it was so well-received. It really is, as FN describes it, “like a shrink-wrapped and pressed collection of fall leaves”, with 3 different delicious hues and a name that recalls the fall foliage in northern Michigan.

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Firsts

After 34 of these quarterly editions, it’s hard to wrap my head around this but Mackinaw Autumn was the first fall edition. There have been other notable fall editions people often talk about, like Raven’s Wing (2010) and Drink Local (2013), but I think Mackinaw Autumn is the most fall-like one out of them all. I mean, the suggestion is in the name itself, but even without it the three cover colors – red, orange, and brown – evoke the autumn vibe well on their own, especially with the brown ink for the text.

Which leads to the other major “first” in Mackinaw Autumn: it was the first multi-color edition in COLORS. The first three editions (Butcher Orange, Butcher Blue, and Grass Stain Green) were all 3-packs of identical books, but Mackinaw Autumn next got 3 different cover colors in its pack. Perhaps not a flashy “first” by today’s standards but it was a major one, as it paved the way for many, many future multi-color editions (see a list of them somewhere in here). In fact, according to the first COLORS recap video, the crew at Field Notes liked how Mackinaw Autumn turned out so much that they went with the same approach for the following season’s release, Just Below Zero.

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Just as with the first three limited editions, Field Notes went with their favorite, Michigan-based French Paper cover stocks for Mackinaw Autumn. Pop-Tone “Tangy Orange” for the red one, Construction “Safety Orange” for light brown, and Pop-Tone “Orange Fizz” for orange. Or as Field Notes calls them “Burnt Red”, “Running-Board Brown”, and “Harvest Moon Orange”, respectively. (They never specified which is which but this is my best guess). According to the aforementioned video, Aaron Draplin, whose family is from northern Michigan, selected these colors for Mackinaw Autumn, and I think they make a very harmonious set. This might shock some fellow FN fans but I’ve never been a big fan of color orange in general. I think it’s just okay but I quite enjoy it in Mackinaw Autumn, especially the “Burnt Red” one, which I’d describe it as red-orange. There’s something about that rich but muted color that lets the wonderful fibrous texture of the matte French Paper shine through and remind me of dried, fallen leaves.

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The rest of the features in Mackinaw Autumn are pretty “classic” as I’d like to say, that we see in several of the following COLORS editions (see my Just Below Zero post for elaboration on this). The body paper inside is the then-standard Boise Offset Smooth paper, and for the graph grid, they used the same light brown color “Double Knee Duck Canvas” that’s in the standard kraft memo books. It might seem like an underwhelming color choice for a limited edition but it’d be hard to argue that it doesn’t go well with all the warm colors on the covers.

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Light brown graph grid and matte cover. Check out the texture and folds on it.

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Simple white belly band with item number FN-01 and “Graph Paper” as the title.

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Silver staples

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Covers are colored all the way through the paper.

Overall, Mackinaw Autumn is a very straightforward edition without many bells or whistles, but that’s why I like it (see how it fares in my FN ranking here). It has all the simplicity and practicality of the original Field Notes but with the warm, rich shades that I enjoy so much in the fall season. In Mackinaw Autumn, like many other “classic” editions, colors get undivided attention, and I’d love to see Field Notes interpret the fall season with another set of colors.

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Same paper (from left): Inside cover of Shenandoah’s “Chestnut Oak”, National Crop’s “Wheat”, Mackinaw Autumn (brown), Mackinaw Autumn (orange), Mackinaw Autumn (red), and Sweet Tooth.

Side Notes

A quick “first” in the COLORS subscription: Field Notes started adding two standard kraft 3-packs (one Graph and one Ruled) as bonus items to the yearly subscription starting with Mackinaw Autumn.

And a few more notes on the cover colors of Mackinaw Autumn. French Paper’s Construction in “Safety Orange” (the light brown one) is also used in National Crop (Spring 2012) much later in the quarterly edition series, in its “Wheat” book. It reappears in the fall of 2015, too, in Shenandoah’s “Chestnut Oak” book as the inner half of its duplex cover (see the photo above). I love how unrecognizable the paper color gets in different contexts, especially if the logotype is printed in a different color, as in the case of Sweet Tooth (Spring 2016) and Mackinaw Autumn’s “red” book. They both use French Paper’s Pop-Tone “Tangy Orange” but Sweet Tooth is printed with red metallic foil, while “Burnt Red” is printed with brown ink. I don’t know how other FN fans feel about it but I personally welcome seeing these old colors reinterpreted in newer editions.

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Top row (from left): Nixon (2015), Ambition, Cherry Graph, Drink Local “Bock”, Tournament of Books (2016), Sweet Tooth, Mackinaw Autumn, and Tournament of Books (2015). Bottom row (from left): Arts & Sciences, Red Blooded, Ambition, National Crop “Sorghum”, Drink Local “Amber Ale”, County Fair, and Starbucks Reserve Coffee Origins “Africa”.

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From left: Mackinaw Autumn, Butcher Orange, Drink Local “India Pale Ale”, National Crop “Wheat”, Mackinaw Autumn, Original kraft, and Shenandoah “Red Maple”.
 

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Mackinaw Autumn (top row) compared to similar but much “bolder” colors and non-solid colors on the bottom row. From left: Expedition, DDC Irregular Issue, Workshop Companion “Electrical”, DDC Pop-Up Shop, Neon Ice Pop, Starbucks Capitol Hill, Unexposed, and TEDx. Some of these are neon, even though they don’t look like it in this picture.

Some Fun (for me) Details

• Mackinaw Autumn is the 2009 Fall edition of COLORS, the 4th in the series.
• Item number: FN-01 (later FNC-04)
• Price: $9.95/pack of 3 books
• Edition size: 2,500 packs or 7,500 books
• Printed: according to the old official website, September 2009. Back cover says “7,500, October 2009.”
• 500 3-packs were available through the FN website.
• Subscriptions back then were $129, and FN started adding the bonus of 2 3-packs of kraft memo books with Mackinaw Autumn.
• Printed by: Service Graphics, Inc., Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.
• Covers: one of each color below, printed with unspecified brown ink:
  • “Burnt Red”: French Pop-Tone in “Tangy Orange” 100#C
  • “Running-Board Brown”: French Construction in “Safety Orange” 100#C
  • “Harvest Moon Orange”:  French Pop-Tone in “Orange Fizz” 100#C
• Body paper: Boise Offset Smooth 50#T in “White”
• Graph grid inside (3/16"x 3/16"): “Double Knee Duck Canvas” light brown ink
• Edition-specific extras: none
• Belly band: thin, white paper with black ink and title “Graph Paper”
• Staples color: silver
• Film: Dum Dah Dee Dum: Field Notes COLORS Subscriptions on Vimeo
• Film: An Obsessive’s Guide to Field Notes COLORS: Part One (2009) on Vimeo
   

My Favorite “Practical Applications”

“Practical Applications” in Mackinaw Autumn are the same as the ones in the Original kraft books, but there were some suggested ones at the old website, including:

• Sketches for award-winning Jack-o-Lantern designs
• Lecture notes and/or Beer Pong tournament brackets
• Planning for canning and making jams.

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Related Links

(I can't believe all these links from 2009 still work! Yay!)

Pocket Blonde: Comparing Colors: Field Notes
A very old FN color comparison post (with Mackinaw Autumn) that makes me feel a whole lot better. I’m not alone, and I certainly wasn’t the first.

Scription: Meet Autumn
Another blast from the past but check out Patrick Ng’s beautiful photos of Mackinaw Autumn paired with leaf-shaped sticky notes.

We Love: Field Notes | We Love You So
Mackinaw Autumn was featured at this blog made for the Where The Wild Things Are movie.

Review: Field Notes Mackinaw Autumn | Super Fun Time
A review from a fountain pen user’s perspective.

We Get Mail #1: Field Notes | Flickr (by Keith Bolland)
An “unboxing” photoset of Mackinaw Autumn subscription package.

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What are your thoughts on Mackinaw Autumn? And what’s your favorite fall edition from Field Notes so far?