Design Your Own Organiser.... How difficult can it be?

Late one night last week I came across a discussion on the Van der Spek Facebook group. One of the members was asking if 30mm rings existed for the Van der Spek Senior range. They are available with 20 or 25 mm rings at the moment.

People started talking about running polls to see what the demand would be etc. I checked the Krause catalogue on line and they show that the 25mm size is the largest they currently make in that ring spacing.  So that was the end of that discussion.... well not quite!

Petra Van der Spek and the team at Van der Spek do an exceptional job of satisfying most peoples requests for super custom designs. Almost nothing is impossible, the word 'No' is never used.

There are some ground rules though. Firstly you must accept that the rings for your special custom organiser must be available and they have to have them in stock. And secondly you have to realise that departing massively from the existing designs is going to cost more, how much more will depend on the design and the extent of the leather work involved.

So having told people the ground rules our discussion continued. If you wanted a larger capacity organiser than an A6 with 25mm rings, you could just use two of them? Simple solution.

I suggested going for a duplex design, something people aren't that familiar with because Filofax stopped making them many years ago. But is there any alternatives to the previous duplex design?

Essentially a duplex is an organiser with two ring mechanisms so say two 20mm giving you 40mm overall capacity, or may be a 25 mm and a 20 mm in the same organiser etc. Sticking to the sizes available. But how to arrange the two ring mechanisms?

So I grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil and I started sketching some very rough outline designs of what various ideas might look like.

This is what I came up with:

I then looked at each design in detail.

So it looks fine closed, but when you open it as in the drawing below I straight away realised a flaw with this design. The pages look fine on 'each side' but when they overlap with each other, imagine trying to write on the page that is over the other set of rings.

So that design was put to one side...

So the next design is more or less the same as Filofax Duplex with an overlapping cover and the ring mechanisms at each side so that the pages don't overlap when closed.

Then when you open the duplex you can see four pages all at once. Within the cover you could have pen loops and credit card slots etc. The way in which the contents can be turned independently of each other it means you can have your diary viewable at the same time as say a set of note pages or task/project pages.

So continuing on to the next design.

This seemed an obvious solution of combining two organisers but....

Again they don't work when you try to open the organiser, nothing would lay flat and it would be a nightmare to use.

And finally this one... which actually already exists owned by Janet Carr made by Mulberry

I always think of this one as a 'Push me Pull You' type design!  It's effectively a back to back design.

But I wonder when you are using this design what happens when only one side is open, again we have a potential issue with being able to write on the open side as it would be unsupported. But it is a novel design and credit to who ever thought it up originally.

So out of the four ideas I came up with only one is a really practical solution, although I'm sure there are other ways of using two ring mechanisms in an organiser that I've not thought of yet.

[Update] I've got permission to include this picture as well from Julie J on the Facebook group, it extension on some of the ideas above and shows how to make a compact duplex that as far as I can see would work.

[Update 2] Thank you to Gmax for the photo of the Duplex he owns which is in line with the comment he made earlier. Notice the press studs in the covers to hold the two halves together when 'folded'

Have you ever thought about designing your own organiser, even one with just a single ring mechanism?