I’ve seen this new service from Bond all over the internet over the last few days so I thought I’d share in case anyone out there missed it. Most of the places I saw posting this missed out on some of the detail and there is a little bit more to this than just some sketchy (pun intended) robo-signing trickery. It seems to be a much more personalized service that they offer. Check out the Bond Handwritten Notes video first for yourself though:
After watching the video myself, my first thoughts were: 1) Wouldn’t using a slightly less expensive fountain pen instead of a Montblanc be a little more practical and get results that were about 99% if not 100% identical and 2) there is the scene where the nib is being dipped into the ink, this also seems a bit impractical. I’ve dipped a fountain pen nib in a bottle of ink before and sure you can write a few strokes with it, so I’m assuming this is for show? I’d think that it would be much more practical to rig something up that just feeds ink into the pen body, some sort of hydraulic controlled ink distribution maybe? Besides the additional options that they offer on using various handwriting samples (including your own) they also offer the ability to send via text messages that you submit to them
Their options for handwriting styles are pretty cool, it looks like they have actual writing samples from Nikola Tesla and Sigmund Freud from historical samples I guess, and then the other writing samples offer a pretty nice variety of options. Personally I like “Casual Bruce” myself so I did a little test sample on the site, which is kind of cool:
Personally I like the way that the Bond Handwritten Notes look online, how it translates in person is a different thing, but for now I just wanted to check out some of the options and see how they looked. I’m a little disappointed with the “Insert Emoticon” option as all it does it put in a star, and I’d be much more impressed if you had a few different ink colors to pick from. I don’t think they need any exotic inks to pick from, but at a minimum I always think blue ink always looks more “real” when looking at automated or copied signatures and writing. Black just always seems like it is more likely to be fake to me. Maybe offering blue, a darker green, grey, brown, or burgundy would give these a little more of a personal feel, although I’m sure that switching out ink between orders might get expensive if you have to have multiple Montblanc fountain pens loaded up with ink and ready to go instead of rinsing them out. 🙂 It looks like these cards and other similar options cost $2.99 each with I think is fairly reasonable for such a unique and seemingly nice quality product.
The other two options that they offer (in beta at this time) are having your own actual handwriting used. For the first option, you basically give them a sample of your handwriting in a scan and they train their robots to learn your handwriting, this will set you back $199. For the second option, it works the same BUT they actually have handwriting experts that will “spruce up” your actual handwriting before the robots learn it, which I know I could certainly use, but that will set you back $499. Overall I really like this concept and think its pretty cool, which may not be a popular opinion among writing enthusiasts. I definitely prefer doing the personalized one-off note, but for situations where you need to crank out a large quantity and you were going to use something that is traditionally a bit less personal, this gives you the option to step it up a bit and do things in a bit more of a warm and personal way. Check it out for more details and information over at Bond. I did also just order one of the Bond Handwritten Notes samples to have mailed to me, so as soon as that shows up in the mail I’ll be sure to update the post here and share a picture or scan of it.
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