noble. note
noble. crafters · 2022–
A leather pocket notebook that snaps onto the back of an iPhone. It has a machined aluminium frame, and the pen slides shut and clips into the spine. It travels on the phone, so it is hard to leave behind.
- 24 g the titanium pen about the weight of an AA battery
- 0.05 mm steel sheet on each side of the cover thinner than a human hair
- 3 to 4 N how hard the spine holds the pen, against the pen's own 2 to 2.5 N so the pen opens as you pull it out
- 18 magnets in the back cover set in a ring that matches the one on the back of an iPhone
I started noble. crafters with industrial designer Tomás Rivero, who leads the industrial design from Buenos Aires. I work on the design, on making it buildable in a factory, on the brand and on running the company.
The cover is top grain vegetable tanned leather over a machined 7075 aluminium frame. Inside the back cover sits a ring of eighteen magnets that matches MagSafe on the back of an iPhone. Behind them is a sheet of magnetic steel that makes the pull stronger. That steel is 0.05 mm thick. A layer of microfiber covers it on the inside, so the page rests on a flat surface.
The pen slides open and clips into the spine. A small steel ball holds it at each end of its travel, at about 2 to 2.5 newtons. The clip in the spine holds harder, at 3 to 4 newtons. Pull it one handed and it slides open first, then comes free.
The first version was machined from 6061 aluminium and it wore away. The pen is held by a stainless steel ball pressing into the frame. Steel is far harder than aluminium, and 6061 is a soft alloy, so every time the pen slid the ball dug into it a little more. So we changed the metal. 7075 is aluminium mixed with zinc, close to twice the strength at almost the same weight. It is harder to cut, so every part takes longer on the machine. It holds now.
Two Kickstarter campaigns paid for the tooling. The first raised $27,029 from 263 backers in 2023. The second raised $61,289 from 646 backers in 2025. The store has since shipped more than two thousand units worldwide.
