About:Blank is a young no-brand design com­pany  that makes min­i­mal paper note­books. Min­i­mal­ism has been one of the key par­a­digms con­nect­ing Asian and Finnish design philoso­phies for a long time now, and About:Blank, with its oper­a­tions divided between the Far East and North­ern Europe (mainly Seoul and Helsinki), is a great exam­ple of this con­nec­tion. Only this time the mutual sense of min­i­mal­ism is taken a step fur­ther than usu­ally. About:Blank’s man­i­festo “Noth­ing is every­thing, full­ness is empti­ness” speaks for itself. The note­books are stripped down of all aux­il­iary ele­ments to the very gist of what they fun­da­men­tally are. Add to this the use of thick, acid free paper, a newly patented bind­ing tech­nique and impec­ca­ble Japan­ese man­u­fac­tur­ing and you have a new clas­sic that is sure to last a good while.

We had the oppor­tu­nity to talk to Seungho Lee, one of the part­ners in the com­pany, that resides here in Helsinki at the moment. See the inter­view after the jump.

Mash­mar­ket: What’s About:Blank and the phi­los­o­phy behind it?

Seungho Lee: About:Blank is the pur­suit of empti­ness that is full of pos­si­bil­ity. We try to keep the essence of prod­ucts and make them good enough.

MM: How did note­book man­u­fac­tur­ing come about? Why are they man­u­fac­tured in Japan?

SL: We have tried sev­eral dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers in Korea to make a min­i­mal yet ful­fill­ing prod­uct, how­ever the out­come did not meet our highly raised expec­ta­tion. After the painstak­ing tri­als and errors, 500 sam­ples of which we still have in our garage in Korea, we were right adja­cent to resign­ing from our aspiration–the bind­ing, the white lines, and even the min­i­mal pack­ag­ing seemed impos­si­ble. As our last try we have vis­ited Tokyo and met our man­u­fac­turer who were exhibit­ing in a book fair. They are based in Nagano, Japan, and they are the only com­pany on earth who can make About:Blank notebooks.

We’ve been try­ing to make a sim­ple and per­fected note­book in every sense, which we believe we have not achieved yet – in other words we think there is still room for improve­ment. In our case, improve­ment doesn’t mean adding things, rather it’s more about con­tract­ing until it is good enough. It is not only about the note­book itself, but rather about the sys­tem of whole life cycle. We know it’s not easy, but we are young, stu­pid and coura­geous enough to challenge.

MM: What do you think are the great­est assets of “clas­sic” note­books in com­par­i­son with all the dig­i­tized alter­na­tives around today?

SL: I won’t go into the beauty of aging prod­ucts and how “clas­sic” paper note­books can carry so much more feel­ing than “dig­i­tized infor­ma­tion” because we all know that. Dig­i­tal devices are great to share and store things, and even to cre­ate. They will evolve mak­ing more and more con­ve­nient things pos­si­ble so that more peo­ple will adopt this way of cre­ation. When a per­son gets an idea, how­ever, paper note­books are always the best media for quick visu­al­i­sa­tion and iter­a­tion. I am sure that there are very few peo­ple today who fin­ish writ­ing a book only on paper, but most of the key ideas and inspi­ra­tions starts from a scratch of paper.

Basi­cally I think they are so very dif­fer­ent – both hav­ing pros and cons. If the world becomes full of peo­ple who can­not do any­thing with­out dig­i­tal devices because they don’t know how to hand-write and hand-draw, it will be a scary moment for me. It’s prob­a­bly too much dependence.

MM: How do you man­age your time and oper­a­tions between the two continents?

SL: It’s not too dif­fi­cult nowa­days with advanced tech­nol­ogy. We have iPhone, Whats App, Skype, Google Docs, Drop­Box and so on – we talk, chat, text, email all the time as if we are in the same city. We just need to know which one gets to bed what time.

MM: Seoul is the cur­rent World Design Cap­i­tal and Helsinki will be the next one. Has this affected your busi­ness in any ways, and if so, how?

SL: Actu­ally not really. How­ever, KIDP, Korea Insti­tute of Design Pro­mo­tion has helped me take the chal­lenge fur­ther with a large amount of grant called “The Next Gen­er­a­tion Designer” pro­gramme. With that help, I could fly to Tokyo, Nagano to find man­u­fac­turer, and to Lon­don, Paris, New York to do the mar­ket research. KIDP is a gov­ern­ment agency, funded by and under the super­vi­sion of the min­istry of knowl­edge economy.

MM: What’s next in the pipeline?

SL: Recently Hyun­sun Park, a fur­ni­ture designer of Fold­ing Chair that has been fea­tured in Mon­o­cle, Arbitare, and Dwell has joined us, and we are push­ing the chair to the pipeline. There is also a desktop-furniture project but we are not sure when we’ll be able to intro­duce both of them to the mar­ket. We are aim­ing at Copen­hagen Design Week 2011.

MM: Thanks for the interview!

About:Blank note­books are avail­able in our online store.

www.itsaboutblank.com

Images by Seungho Lee.