A personalized The Staccato Slur bookmark actually was created a very long time ago already, but it got lost and I never had the will to remake it. Last week, a fortunate burst of creative energy meant that I was motivated to re-craft the bookmark again for my personal use. After all, the current practice of me using my Kinokuniya privilege card as a bookmark meant that sometimes, when purchasing new books, I would conveniently forget that the card had been left in my book, at home. And why not re-create it? It doesn’t exactly take very long, and at the end of it, I have something creatively personalized to show off.
I already had a hobby of making bookmarks since secondary school, perhaps. Initially, it was just printed paper pasted on top of recycled thin paperboard, sourced from the leftovers of used foolscap paper packages. It wasn’t very durable and the prints faded or got smudged quickly over time. Eventually, it evolved to a stock paper base to give it better durability and hardness, coupled with printed paper, protected by adhesive laminate. Still, it was cheap to produce them and relatively professional-looking if done patiently.
Layout for print was done digitally using Inkscape, but here’s the image I exported to show you better:
Back to back
It’s quite simple actually, being just a layout of pre-existing elements. This is how it looks in camera. The images have been resized and sharpened lightly to try and compensate for the poor visual quality otherwise:
In Use: The Front Side of the Bookmark
In Use: The Reverse Side
The lucky book that gets to embrace the bookmark in this picture is She Came to Stay (L’Invitee) by Simone de Beauvoir.