Review: Rhodia Goalbook Bullet Journal Notebook

The Rhodia Goalbook is a customizable dot grid notebook. The Goalbook’s format is generally marketed for bullet journaling and creative planning which makes this Rhodia’s answer to the Leuchtturm Bullet Journal notebooks. If you are still looking for a new bullet journal notebook, you should definitely read more to see if the Rhodia Goalbook is the right bullet journal notebook for you.

Notebook Specifications

• Softcover
• 5.8 x 8.3 inches (A5)
• 120 dot grid numbered sheets
• 90gsm ivory paper
• Available colors: Black, Chocolate, Taupe, Beige, Anise (Lime green), Turquoise, Sapphire (blue-violet), Iris (lavander), Purple, Lilac, Raspberry (magenta), Poppy (red), Tangerine, Orange, Yellow, and Silver

Cover and Overall Look

The Rhodia Goalbook has a faux leather softcover which is nice and thick to protect your notebook. It has the signature orange elastic band that keeps your notebook shut and the Rhodia logo embossed at the front.

I’m not so much a fan of the brand stamp in the front – I prefer that they keep it at the back.

I usually kept this notebook in my purse and I was careful with it most of the time. Unfortunately, the cover was easily damaged. Here’s what it looked like after 2 months.

Paper Quality

Just like all Rhodia paper, the paper on the Goalbook is fountain pen friendly.

It boasts a 90gsm paper so there was no bleed-through, feathering, and minimal ghosting. The only time that it really bled through was when used a flex fountain pen (which dumps a lot of ink).

Pens I’ve used: Tombow Dual Brush Pen, Tombow Twintone Pastel, Noodler’s Ahab

Index

Just like the Bullet Journal notebook, the Rhodia Goalbook has dedicated pages for the index or the table of contents. In case you are not familiar with the Bullet Journal, the index is basically the table of contents of your notebook. Having a dedicated page for the index is great because that reduces the amount of time to setup an index page.

• Read: Bujo Basics – What You You Should Understand About the Index

Perpetual Calendar

The Rhodia Goalbook is undated which means you can start using it any time of the year – I just prefer starting fresh for the new year. It has 2 types of Future Logs. The first one is similar to Ryder Carroll’s Future Log and the 2nd is designed vertically with all the months and days printed out. 

If you don’t find this useful, you can check out the blog post about the other ways to use the Goalbook’s perpetual calendar.

Pages

The Goalbook has ivory vellum paper which in this case, more yellow than the cream paper of the Leuchtturm1917. I didn’t notice this when I first bought the notebook but this was a huge letdown for me.

The dots on this page are darker* and thicker than the Leuchtturm and that was something I didn’t really like.

*I purchased this in 2018. The newer versions of the Rhodia Goalbook have lighter dots.

 The pages on the Rhodia are numbered, just like the Leuchtturm1917 so indexing will not be as tedious compared to some dotted notebooks in the market. 

Overall Thoughts

I use fountain pens for bullet journaling but I don’t like the Rhodia Goalbook for as my own bullet journal. I tried using this for 3 months but there were a few things I couldn’t get past.

Despite not liking it, I gave this notebook an overall score of 8.5. This is still an excellent notebook. The paper quality is great because it can resist different kinds of markers and pens so it’s a nice alternative especially for creative bullet journalists.

What do you think of the Rhodia Goalbook?

Disclosure: This product was purchased by the author. Photos are ours unless otherwise stated. All opinions expressed here are the author’s own and are not in any way influenced by the aforementioned organization. For inquiries, please visit our Partnership and Advertisements page.