Making the digital physical: FiftyThree Loves Moleskine

An intriguing collaboration between two of my favourite brands caught my eye this week.

The first brand in this new collaboration is Fifty Three's Paper, a beautifully designed iPad app that allows you to create notes, drawings and pictures.

The second half of the partnership is Moleskine notebooks, that I posted on here. The collaboration called Book allows you to transform 15 of your favorite Paper pages into a real-life Moleskine notebook.

Below I share some insights from this collaboration.

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1. Let's get physical

Book shows how in today's digital world we still crave physical objects we can hold, touch and feel. I believe there are many more opportunities for brands who can transform digital content into physical products. Another example is Stickygram, who transform Instagram photos into fridge magnets and iPhone covers.

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2. Make it beautiful

If people are going to pay to turn their digital content into a physical product, the product in question has to be beautiful. The Book product costs $40, which is expensive. This premium price is supported by an attractive, specially designed Moleskine books, as The Verge explains: "The notebook format was created by Moleskine exclusively for FiftyThree, and when opened matches the iPad’s 4 x 3 aspect ratio. You can choose colors for the book’s spine and back, draw a cover, or go with the classic black Moleskine leatherette finish."

 3. Make it easy

The second important feature of a service like Book is to make it super easy. Millions or even billions of photos are stuck on our iPhones, partly because we just can't be bothered to figure out how to proint them out. With the Book  you can have a simple drop-down menu within the app to let you select, customise and order your Moleskine book.

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In conclusion, even though the world is becoming more digital, we still love physical objects, with Book and Stickygram the first of what I think will be many opportunities to bridge the gap and make the digital physical.