Since their founding in Massachusetts in 1888, Ampad`s legal pads have evolved from a simple tampon with a stitched top to stapled, rubberized, or spiral-bound varieties in various ways. Color options range from yellow to white and lavender to green. They are available in dozens of sizes and quantities. The possibilities are seemingly endless. A simple search on the website Staples.com returns 287 results, all of which are different permutations of that first pad 132 years ago. With recycling now common across the country and more and more people needing optimism and inspiration in their lives, the right-wing yellow bloc could come alive again in the near future. Some people also use wired notebooks. In addition, doctors sometimes prefer to use personalized notepads to write prescriptions for their patients. If you work in a sales organization, you can also purchase legal block holders and custom letterblocks to write notes at a meeting or conference. Using a custom legal block with your company logo also makes an impression on people attending a meeting.

I`ve been doing some research recently and couldn`t find a consensus opinion on why the color is going. I`ve heard that it`s possible that the dye was used to mask a poor quality paste mixture, but the same goes for the bleach used to make the paper white. He`s not alone either. Many people swear that the only thing they use to write are legal blocks. There is something about them that leads to confidence and creativity, but how did they come about and why are they called legal blocks? Today, I prefer a bright yellow for scratch paper and a black on “wheat” for my xterm windows. In North America, plain paper is available in a variety of semi-standardized sizes. Keep in mind that all legal blocks have a vertical line drawn 1-1/4″ up and down on the left side of the paper to create a border: some believe that writing on a yellow block is easier to read than writing on a white block. But Israel Abramov, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College and a color vision specialist, rejects this theory. Legibility, he says, is more about contrast — how ink color interacts with paper color — than paper color.

The scenario with the highest contrast is black ink on white paper, although Abramov acknowledges that yellow paper might be preferable in terms of readability under certain conditions. “If the light is too intense, the paper can be dazzling and yellow reduces glare,” he said. Another idea is that because the papers were mostly composed of different pieces of paper, the yellow color was added to create the illusion that the sheets were a uniform piece. Yellow was perhaps the simplest and cheapest stamp on the market, always close to the color white. In the late 1980s, companies were pushed to recycle waste paper. At that time, many recycling companies only accepted white paper, which was more cost-effective. Law firms and other businesses faced a dilemma: not recycling or staying away from the yellow legal notebook. The Los Angeles city government decided to remove yellow notebooks altogether to earn $50 to $80 a ton by recycling only white paper.

The American Paper Institute reported a decline in color paper purchases from 16% in 1974 to 10% in 1988. Since then, recycling has evolved to accept paper in almost any color, and the recycling rate has doubled since 1990. In 1900, a judge asked Holly to add a red line along the left side of the paper so she could add additional comments to her notes. This distinct vertical line, always 1.25″ from the edge, makes a Legal Pad a Legal Pad. Regardless of the color, a legal block officially deserves this designation if it has that vertical line on the left. Everything else is just a notepad. Note: A “legal block” does not mean that the paper size on the block itself is a legal size (8-1/2″ W x 14″L), although it can be ordered this way. A legal stamp simply means that the paper on the stamp has a vertical line that creates a 1-1/4″ edge on the left side. True, the shade of a yellow notepad differs from a sea of white, and it is possible that the color was chosen precisely for this purpose. A subjective study of Switzerland from 2005 shows that yellow is one of the most stimulating colors. It was ranked number one behind the red. Considering that it would be much more difficult to read something written on a piece of red paper, it is possible that yellow was chosen to make you think.