One of our favorite people, Interaction Design czar Brendan Dawes, is using some of our favorite software, Evernote to catalog his FIELD NOTES.

For each Field Note book I simply scanned (…) each double spread (…) Then I made a new notebook in Evernote and dropped them in.

Here’s the killer thing though. Evernote indexes handwritten notes and makes the text searchable. It’s not perfect but it now means that my Field Notes archive is now searchable. It also means that they’re always with me; on my iPhone, the web or on my desktop.

Evernote made their own custom-branded FIELD NOTES way back in October 2008, we’ve always known that Evernotes and FIELD NOTES were a match made in heaven.

Here’s an incredible specimen I dug up in recent travels around the nation. All the way from Rutland, Vermont.

I have a good buddy who grew up in Rutland by the name of Pat Bridges. He’s the longtime Editor of Snowboarder magazine, and he’s come a long, long way since his surly days on the mean streets of Rutland. Hell of a writer. Funny as hell. Wittier than you. Every time I think about Pat and his Rutland upbringing, I think about his story about his youthful, near-death experience with “Rocky Mountains Spotted Fever.” But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Pat Bridges. Rutland. Old memo books. Good stuff on a Friday, people.

You may remember we made some custom FIELD NOTES for our friends at Threadless and they ran a contest on flickr a coupl’a weeks ago. One of the ten winners, Kyle Kastranec, posted some photos of his winnings and shared his winning entry:

So I answered the question of how I would use a custom 3-pack of Threadless Field Notes with this:

I will use the first to plan a chest painting for every single Cleveland Browns home game next season.

I will use the second to document my vintage t-shirt collection (via precise color facsimiles) for future generations to envy.

And I will use the third to help me memorize the name and placement of every human organ in case I decide to become a doctor.

We will certainly follow up with Kyle to see the finished notebooks, especially the chest painting sketches, matched to photos, matched to Browns’ final scores. Thanks, Kyle!

We’ve been crazy busy with custom editions lately. Aside from a few “logo jobs” like these, we did Kids’ “Neon Ice Pop” FIELD NOTES for J.Crew’s “CrewCuts” kids’ store, the aforementioned Threadless books, and a couple other colorful runs we can’t talk about yet, not to mention our upcoming limited-edition Spring 2010 COLORS set, which will be available soon for presale to our e-mail list. Sign up at the top of the left column of this very page!

As always, drop Michele a line if you’re interested in customized FIELD NOTES!

The March 2010 Vanity Fair features a great feature story about beloved Chicago filmmaker John Hughes. Throughout the article, David Kamp describes Hughes as a lifelong writer and note-taker. Page 263 features a Dan Winters photograph of part of Hughes’ extensive collection of notebooks, and just inches from the original handwritten script of The Breakfast Club (A Mead spiral notebook labeled “Detention”) sits a familiar-looking kraft-paper-covered memo book. Most of us here at FN HQ grew up with Hughes’ films, and ever since he placed his first order, we’ve been fantasizing about what great ideas Hughes shared with his FIELD NOTES.

UPDATE 2/25: Aaron Draplin reveals a bit more about Hughes’ relationship with the DDC and FIELD NOTES, and promises to share the whole story someday.

Ladies and Gentleman, we bring you none other than Clint David Walkingstick.

If that isn’t just about the best name ever, I don’t know what is. Nevertheless, Clint’s on to something with his cunning use of our “FN-09″ General-Purpose Band of Rubber: “A good way to keep the cards tight and right.”

Clint’s a busy guy. He makes shirts, runs a lively blog and is a graphic designer with a way with words.

I’m gonna give this one a try here in Berlin. I’ve got my cards, a Field Notes Band of Rubber and an iron will.

Thanks, Clint David Walkingstick. That is one hell of a name.

We’re maybe not as hip to the new sounds as we used to be, but we know getting written up on Pitchfork still means something. According to the ‘Fork, we’re featured (or at least pictured) in The Report, a new zine/DVD/cassette/compilation thingy published by Chocolate Bobka. We don’t recognize a single damn artist on the tracklist, so it’s surely great and we’re ordering it right now to get in on the ground floor, like we wish we had with Slay Tracks.

P.S. Yes, that’s Jane’s Addiction in their trailer. Ironic? Not sure.

Speaking of our fingers, and their placement on the pulse, we’d never really thought about what boots match nicely with FIELD NOTES, but SLAMXHYPE kindly tells us we look good with Mark McNairy boots. McNairy seems to be all about reinventing the classics, so the pairing makes sense to us.

Thanks, to you, and you, and you, and YOU.

What the Field Notes Brand Corporate Grain Elevator would look like, if there ever were such a thing. From the LoC archives.

We got a nice package in the mail today from our friends at J Crew, their latest catalogue. When we got to pages 94-95 and saw that our Field Notes Memo Books were featured with such iconic brands as Timex, Sperry, Ray Ban, and Belstaff, we just about fell over. J Crew has been with us for a long while, they started by carrying us in their awesome men’s shop, The Liquor Store in Tribeca and we sure do appreciate their support. Oh and our kids dig them too.

Eben Lindsay took a few photos and wrote us. Fishing that day was fantastic. We were at the Lower Stanislaus River outside of Oakdale Ca. It was the kind of beautiful California weather that, as an East Coast transplant still amazes me in January. The fishing was good for January, and the light was great for photography. At lunch I took a few minutes to make some notes in my FIELD NOTES about what flies were working and what parts of the river were productive. When I got home I sketched out the best pool and made notes about the current and where in the pool the fish were holding. Thanks for that.

There’s a lot of stuff in the works at FIELD NOTES MIDWEST and NORTHWEST facilities. Both factory floors are humming with the sounds of non-robotic labor. This might be a good time to sign up for our mailing list, over there on the left. That is all.