In praise of the black notebook

Article by Hope Whitehead, former intern at HeyYou (now working with us as a junior strategist and copywriter)

It was a series of chance encounters and connections that led me to the yellow stairs at what was then the entrance to HeyYou. When I arrived for my first day of intern work, I was presented with a black sketchpad and with no explanation except that everyone else had one and I would need it. As the world's least responsible collector of notebooks, I felt certain this most recent addition would last about a week before I began to forget about it. 

Linkedin - which, as a 'digital native', is the only way I now mark the passage of time - tells me that nine months later, I am still in possession of the notebook. I use it every day. It comes on holiday with me. I moved to the UK for university and my trusty book came with me so I could work remotely. We are friends. You could write a buddy movie about us and it would be like the first half of From Dusk till Dawn. 

Of course, there's more to this must-have stationery item than simply its way of making my desperately uncreative self feel like part of the cool, artistic set. It's been the consistent part of my time at HeyYou, and it's the best record I have of what I've done, and what I've learned. As an intern, I got to work across almost all the main segments of the business, (thankfully for our clients, I did not dabble in design), figuring out where my skills fit, and figuring out about the industry as a whole. 

Starting out in this world of design, advertising and PR has been a big learning curve. My undergraduate degree is in English literature, not marketing or business, so I didn't even consider this industry when I was thinking about my next steps after graduation. It turns out, however, that spending three years thinking intensely about words is a really great foundation for the kind of work I'm now doing. Copywriting, I learned, is not just what makes it to the final design, to the packaging, the billboard, and so on. I get to play with words in presentations, pitches, and press-releases. Often I get involved right from the start of a brand's or concept's journey with HeyYou, where often we're called upon to think of potential names for things. The scrawling pages of my notebook are a record of this process, which is one of my favourite parts of the job. What's in a name? Some of the best ones start with a big brainstorm, although I'm not sure that's the answer Juliet was looking for. One way in during that process for me is tracing the etymologies of the words one might associate with the brand or product. Certainly it's an approach conditioned by a degree that constantly asked me to think about words from every angle, but when a brand ended up selecting an Old English word for their product, it felt like the right one. 

This degree also qualified me to be the office's unofficial (and often unsolicited) proofreader, and as part of that I get to see a lot of the creative output develop. One of the best feelings is seeing my words make the final cut, although learning to be a part of the collaborative creative process means being okay with those times when they don't make it through. That's cool, those projects live on in my notebook, and they might get picked up one day. I've got a number of puns I'm very proud of which never made it out of the pages, because I wrote them for a brand that didn't use them. I learned one thing pretty quickly: always ask for tone of voice guidelines. When I wrote that copy, I didn't even know they existed, so none of what I thought were my best lines made it. Months later, when I needed the guide for another project, there it was: 'no puns'. Well, there's no accounting for taste.

It's not often we wax lyrical about a book without any words in it. But the black notebook, in my eyes, is pretty special. It's a place where ideas have the freedom to come to life on the page, where your creativity gets to develop, before anyone else sees it. The weird, the silly, and sometimes even good ideas all get their start on the blank pages of that book. 

When I look across the room at meetings, or even pop over to visit someone else's desk, I know it's not just me. The black notebook may be full of scribbles, mistakes, and sometimes just nonsense, but it's also a testament to growth and learning. More than that, I think it's something which at HeyYou means you're part of the team, no matter who you are or where you're at. Interns, designers, partners: the black notebook is our great equaliser.