The place, or the sky above it
Personalised A5 vegan-leather notebooks, £17.99
A map says where without saying anything else. Search for the place that matters, whether it is a city, a street, a park or a postcode, and the cover redraws around it: the map, the name, and the coordinates underneath. Add a date and you get the other one: the exact sky over that place on that night, drawn as a chart, which is the version people buy for a birth or a wedding.
Both of these are fine linework, and fine linework is where printing shows itself and engraving does not: the map and the chart are cut into the hide by a laser in-house rather than laid on top of it. They are also the two covers on the site where the preview earns its keep most obviously, because nobody can picture what their own street or their own night sky is going to look like until it is drawn on the cover in front of them. Once you are happy with it, this is the rest.
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A place, or a place and a moment
That is the whole choice. Search any place on earth and the map redraws around it, with the name and the coordinates beneath and a line of your own under that. Add a date as well and you get the other cover instead: the exact sky above that spot on that night, drawn as a chart. A map is the right present when the answer to what happened is a place, and the chart is right when the answer is a moment, which is why it is the one people buy for a birth, a wedding night or the evening somebody proposed.
Search narrower than you think you should
A whole city draws as a mesh of roads with nothing in it you would recognise. A street, a park, a stretch of coast or a postcode draws as something the person who lives there can point at. The rule of thumb is to search for what you would tell a taxi driver rather than what you would write on an envelope, then look at the preview and zoom your thinking in or out from there. It costs nothing to try three, and a shape that turns out disappointing is a shape you find out about on screen rather than in a box.
The line underneath is the part people forget
Both covers carry text below the drawing, and it is doing more work than it looks. The coordinates alone say where without saying why, which reads as cool and slightly cold. A short line of your own underneath turns it into a record of something: where we met, the night you arrived, the house with the bad boiler. Keep it to one clause, because the drawing above it is the thing somebody is meant to look at and a sentence will always win a fight with a picture. Spell dates out in full, since the cover will outlive whatever short format felt obvious this year.