Right before the holiday season I picked up this unique notebook with a pretty brilliant method for creating tabbed sections then promptly forgot about it.  It is made by a company called Mark’s Refined Products and called the Uroko Notebook (via Jetpens) which comes in your choice of an orange, black, white, or green cover.  It has a really unique way of dealing with creating sections with tabs, so lets take a closer look.

Upon initial inspection the Mark’s Refined Products Uroko Notebook looks like a pretty standard notebook with minimal branding other than the name embossed t the bottom center of the front cover.

A closer look though reveals four embossed rectangles with open tops in the upper right hand corner of the notebook cover.

When you look at the top edge of the closed notebook, now you can see that there is definitely something different about it.  The first three inches of paper coming out of the bound edge of the notebook are flush with the top of the cover, while the next four inches past that are actually cut off and just shy of half an inch more shallow from the top edges of the rest of the paper and the cover.

Upon cracking open the Uroko Notebook, the lay flat binding and pages reveal the well kept secret of how the notebook covertly allows you to create your own tabbed sections.  As was foreshadowed by the embossing on the cover as well as the cover wrapper (which I intentionally ignored so I could build up the description) that pretty much spelled it out.  The top right corner of each page reveals four rectangles that are scored along all but the top edge.  Each also has a grey strip running across it that gets progressively darker on each from left to right.

Every one of the 64 pages in the Uroko Notebook has these four tabs scored into them which allows you to pick any page you desire to create a new section by simply punching out the left, right, and bottom scoring and folding the tab up so that it sticks up from the rest of the pages.

Once you fold each tab up, you can now pick and choose where you want each section to start.  If you are just keeping running logs of information as I plan to do in some of these sections, you can just fold a tab back down once you fill the page, and pop up the tab on the next page so you can quickly find your most current page in that section.  I did find that in order to label the tabs, the best approach was to flip the page to the backside and write the label out before punching it out and folding it up.  Once you have the tabs punched out and flipped up in the Uroko Notebook, you don’t have anything behind them to provide support while you are trying to write on them.  Also keep in mind you should stick to using the grey shaded area and a small area just below that for your labeling or else you won’t be able to read them if you go much lower.  The great thing about this design besides the fact that its easy to fold in and then deploy new tabs is that once a tab is deployed, its also protected from getting banged up or torn because of how low they start off before being folded up.  Once folded up they do not extend past the edge of the flexible card stock cover.

Marks Refined Products Uroko Notebook Writing Sample:

I found the B5 size, 64 gms bright white paper with grey 5mm square ruling to be very nice to write on.  Its got a super smooth surface and everything from my Pelikan M805 with Medium nib to a .25mm Pentel Slicci gel ink pen glided across the page with ease and with no visible issues regarding how the ink was laid down.

My only disappointment with the Mark’s Refined Products Uroko writing experience was that the back of the pages experienced enough show through of most of the inks to be a bit of an issue for me.  I always try to use both sides of a sheet of paper to avoid waste, but in the case of this paper, the show through was a little more than I’d like to see and definitely would cause some distraction if I wanted to write on the second side with anything other than pencil or a light color (ie. orange) gel ink pen with a sub .5mm tip.  My fountain pens with blue black ink as well as any gel ink pen with dark ink or a tip above .5mm showed through enough to be a distraction for me.   At the end of the day, the Mark’s Refined Products Uroko Notebook (via Jetpens) offers a pretty flexible and unique way to create a flexible and custom tabbed notebook experience that is worth checking out in my opinion.

©2016, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.