Office Supplies and More – Sharpie GIVEAWAY!

My local pen store!

Perhaps you recall mention of my local pen store, Office Supplies & More. I was in there the other day telling the owner, Alan Cohen, about the Pentel Libretto giveaway I was doing, and he decided he wanted in on giving away something too, so he hands me two Sharpie items, fresh out of the box.

Two original Sharpie fine point markers and two Sharpie gel highlighters

I love the store, in spite of Alan’s refusal to get an online presence going, so for all you old-school types, if you’re ever anywhere near the capitol of North Carolina, swing by the town of Chapel Hill and hunt down the store: 1129 Weaver Dairy Rd, Timberlyne Shopping Center, Suite Q, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. The selection is huge, spanning high end to low end, pens, pencils, fountain pens, and a huge trove of Clairefontaine and Rhodia products. If North Carolina just isn’t in the cards for you, Alan has booths at multiple pen shows. This year he’ll be at the Baltimore show in March, the Atlanta show in April, the Raleigh show in June, the D.C. Supershow in August, and the Ohio show in November. Heck, if there’s something you specifically want him to bring to the show for you to buy, here’s the store’s number: 919.929.8595 — he’s got some of the best prices on pretty much everything.

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THE GIVEAWAY RULES!

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1. To enter, just leave one comment on this post any time between now and Monday, February 11th 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. Since I’ll be sending this myself, and I’m not made of loot and dough,and Office Supplies & More is pretty much never going international anyway, I’m limiting this contest to U.S. residents only. Sorry!
2. One winner will be picked at random from the comments section of this post. Make any kind of comment—but only one comment! Comments in excess of one shall be deleted. The comments will be numbered in the order they are received, i.e. the first comment is #1, the second #2, and so on. Because my blog doesn’t seem to number the comments on its own yet, and I STILL don’t will probably never have time/the willpower to fix it, I will again hand-number all the entries in Photoshop (or GIMP, or on my tablet or cell phone or somehow) like I did here. The Random Integer Generator at random.org will be used to pick the number of the winner.
3. I’ll post the contest winner on Tuesday, February 12th. Winner will have one week to email me. There’s a link to my email at the top of the right sidebar.

Smooth Sticks Gel Highlighters 4 PK

Time for something else I've never tried before: dry highlighters.

The Write Dudes were kind enough to send me a box full of exciting samples to try. I went with the Smooth Sticks Gel Highlighters first, since I’d never used dry highlighters before. And the packaging promised “NEW TRANSLUCENT;” I assume the old, opaque highlighters were just rebranded as crayons.

These would be much better suited to life as a company-logo-branded giveaway item at conferences and conventions.

I have developed pretty exacting standards for the design aesthetic I like in a writing utensil (I think that aesthetic could be described as “designed for a Japanese market”); the Smooth Sticks fall into the category most American-targeted products I see fall in: I say in pained tones, “Mm. Isn’t that nice,” and make a very strained, concerned face. The only design advice I can offer is “pretend you want to sell this in Japan”. It’s worked very well for most big pen/pencil companies, who two-facedly sell the most fantastically designed products in Japan, and sell the most early-90s inspired design fiascoes here in America (there are some exceptions. The Pentel Jolt comes to mind).

There they are, mocking you for thinking you'll just be able to highlight things.

Let’s put this right up on the table: these should not be sold as highlighters. There is no category conceivable at which these Smooth Sticks excel as highlighters. I tried them on several types of paper, starting with the type of paper I’m pretty sure spawned the entire need for a dry highlighter—books written on almost transparently thin tissue-like paper.

I wanted to highlight something that everyone could agree with.

Sure, they don’t bleed through the page. And yes, you can line the constantly misshapen end up, if you’ve got a good feel for what the tip of the Smooth Stick has become under your repeated highlightings, and manage to highlight some rather small bits of text. But it isn’t always very easy to line up. In fact, I often felt like the experience of attempting to highlight in a straight line was akin to attempting to put on lipstick while driving down a gravel road at 45 miles an hour.

Do the wave! Wait, no, that's not something I want my highlight line to do.

Since the surface area of the end of the highlighter is constantly being worn down and changing shape, it was often easy to miss where I wanted to highlight, or for the line to be wavy due to the stick being a little too smooth. I feel like an unchanging chisel-edge highlighter reduces the amount of line wobble when highlighting.

Glossy textbook paper, something students might want to highlight on

But one of the biggest problems you’ve surely noticed by now. Look at all the little crayon-like leavings. Some of the flakes are small, but some are veritable nuggets.

If you learn nothing from this post, learn that dishes are the epitome of tightness.

Look at that thing! You could send that to a jeweler and have it made into a cocktail ring, and then put in a museum when you die.

All these little flakes and nuggets are bad news for highlighting in books. They stick to pages, in places you don’t want them to have stuck, and make a mess. This wasn’t an occasional problem. This was just about every time I highlighted anything, I would have flakes, streaks, leavings of some kind beyond the highlighting I wanted. I find that unacceptable in a highlighter.

But I told you these shouldn’t be sold as highlighters. What these are, they are neon, translucent, twistable crayons, and that’s what they should be branded and sold as. I’d have been much more satisfied with the performance of the Smooth Sticks if you’d told me they were crayons. Expand the color line, Write Dudes, and start selling Smooth Sticks Twistable Gel Crayons. It’s a good market to get into; twistable crayons and colored pencils are cool, they’re novel, and people will be willing to pay more for the thrill of TWISTABLE CRAYONS than they’d ordinarily pay for ordinary crayons. But stop telling people to use these as highlighters.

Smooth Sticks Gel Crayons. Now (and only) in COOL NEON COLORS!

SMOOTH STICKS Gel Highlighters 4 PK from The Write Dudes (/The Board Dudes)