Digital tools may one day replace traditional creative media altogether, but we’re definitely not there yet, and Moleskine is doing a good job of straddling the old and the new with its software tie-ins. A new partnership today brings its sketchbooks support for Adobe creative software, letting you turn your sketches into fully manipulable vectors via the Moleskine Smart Notebook app and Adobe Creative Cloud.
Notebooks that work with the service include special alignment indicators printed on the corners of the pages to help the app better translate the sketches into usable vectors, without distortion or skewed angles regardless of whether or not you can get a perfectly head-on capture with your iPhone’s camera. The resulting vectors will provide both .jpg and .svg output, for use in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.
It’s true that there are a lot of different options for sketching digitally these days, including smartphones like the Galaxy Note 4 that sport their own stylus, and stylus accessories like the Bamboo line from Wacom that work with iPhones and iPads. But a Moleskine notebook has significant advantages – besides just offering artists a great tactile experience. It doesn’t require battery power, for instance, or a data connection, or an investment greater than $33.
Speaking as someone who likes to sketch, this looks like a great tool, and one of those things that has long seemed a distant dream. If the app can produce really good .svg files, it could amount to a genuinely indispensable tool for the modern artist or designer.