Front View of the Rhodia Dot Pad with Black Cover

I seem to have lost track of time with this “new” Rhodia Dot Pad, which was given to me by Karen from Exaclair a few months ago now.  Being that it is a unique new perspective on notebook page ruling, it is still certainly worthy of a closer look though.

Rhodia Dot Pad Back

The Rhodia Dot Pad has the same distinctive color contrasting cover as the other notepads in their bloc line of notebooks.  Each notebook in this line come with a heavy stock cover that has scores along the top of the front cover to facilitate for easy fold over, which is kind of the office supply geek version of the comb over, but much cooler.  As you can see from the first photo, the dotpad notebook from Rhodia is bound by two staples at the top of the cover.  The Rhodia Dot Pad reviewed here measures 8 1/4″ by 5 13/16″ with the actual writable surface area per sheet being about 7 1/2″ by 5 13/16″.  These are now also available in 3 3/8 ” x 4 ¾ “, 8 ¼ ” x 12 ½ ” and 16 ½” x 12 ½ ” sizes as well.  The small violet dots that make up the ruling (you will see them in the writing sample below) are evenly distributed both horizontally and vertically at a spacing of 5mm on both the front and back of all 80 sheets of 80g paper in the Rhodia DotPad.

Rhodia DotPad Writing Sample

It was interesting to write on this paper because I had read many reviews of people saying it was easy to get used to and it was really not all that different.  Personally I did find it a bit more difficult to adjust to.  I found some folks saying it took like 5 seconds, but for me it probably took about 3-4 lines of writing text to really adjust, which is clearly not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.  I also found that for some reason I was writing a bit smaller than I normally do on regular ruled paper, my best theory is that I was paying so much attention to each dot that I focused on writing a bit more neatly and therefor smaller.  The paper itself holds up fairly well to most pens, as you can see, I tried a Sharpie Pen, Uniball Jetstream, and a super-duper top-secret fountain pen that has not actually been released yet.  Each of the pens wrote very smoothly across the Rhodia paper with no feathering and only a minor bit of show through on the other side.   I think I am a bit spoiled by the great 90g paper that Rhodia uses in their Web Notebook because I kept finding myself wishing that they had used that paper for this notebook instead.  With that said, it is still better paper than you will find in almost any other notebook out there.  Overall, I think the biggest benefit to this style of ruling is that it is much less distracting than normal grid lines or rulings, so if you have ever been bothered by traditional lines, and blank paper has left you writing in hills and slopes, the Rhodia Dot Pad may just be that happy medium that you have been looking for.

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