Sorta Blog

Lifehacker did a really nice writeup about Sorta, saying:

"The Sorta is a bit of a combination between a binder and a traditional notebook, and brings the best of both worlds to the table—it's small enough to carry around with you, but flexible enough that adding and removing pages is easy."

Aaaaand now I have a gazillion orders to fill. O_o

After 30 years working in the telecom industry doing technical wiring and circuit testing in Denver, Colorado, Dusty shifted to more creative endeavors including founding Firehouse Quilts, a clever,  uplifting non-profit dedicated to supporting firefighters. She also teaches the fascinating, meditative art form known as Zentangle. She uses a Sorta Black Bookcloth Notebinder filled witha dozen sheets of Watercolor Paper.

She uses the Sorta as a constant artistic companion, ready to provide a fresh drawing surface to create Zentangle drawings (which she calls "Zs") wherever she goes:

Companies across the globe routinely ask Paul to help develop their businesses and make the most out of new, innovative technologies in genomics, neurotechnology, and microfabrication, to name a few. So yeah, he's kind of a big deal. He uses a Yellow Original Notebinder filled exclusively with Square Graph 5 stationery and Yellow Dividers. 

He uses his Sorta to take those every day business notes that don't necessarily need to become part of the permanent archives:

Available now: dot grid graph paper, with fine points just faint enough to provide guidance without upstaging your work. 

Good friend and elder Sortan Jacob Holloway does digital strategy & design by day (with his consultancy Convergence) and draws fantastic sketches of his favorite sci-fi obsessions by night. Here, characters from Mass Effect.

Jacob uses a black leatherette notebinder loaded with unlined and graph paper.

Via Colossal the YoonCo blog.

A product made fresh just for you is special; with customization, it becomes even more precious. This awesome dad could’ve accompanied these humble sandwiches with a text, Instagram pic, or designer Ziploc bags—instead, he opted to draw on the bags themselves. 

An interesting study via Salon finds that reading on paper edges out screens (e-ink, LCD, and so on) when it comes to understanding and recall. The reason seems to be that a sheaf of paper, so tactile and easy to scan, taps into primal geolocating instincts where screen reading provides only abstracted location cues at best, i.e. scrollbars and laggy pagination. A book presents a series of physical landmarks for us to navigate by.

Based on observations during the study, Mangen thinks that students reading pdf files had a more difficult time finding particular information when referencing the texts. Volunteers on computers could only scroll or click through the pdfs one section at a time, whereas students reading on paper could hold the text in its entirety in their hands and quickly switch between different pages. Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. “The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything in between and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension,” Mangen says.

Aaron Kovalcsik's Monkey Chow comic art strikes that tricky balance between cute and edgy with ease to create quirky, snarky, and a bit morose characters that you just want to bring with you everywhere you go.

"Items on To Do lists tend to get stale almost the instant they're written," Ben explains. "I used to have 'Record Album of Children's Songs' on my to do list, and it stayed there for months and months." 

"Half my Sorta is To Do lists. The rest of the 25 pages I use as freeform scratch to brainstorm story ideas while I’m out and about. I jot down whatever comes to mind whenever inspiration strikes, without worrying about whether it's good or not."