MONDAY BLOG: Floating Like A Feather with Platinum's new FLAF Nib! ✒️

Discover the new FLAF nib that’s redefining smooth writing—see why pen enthusiasts can’t stop talking about it.

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June 15, 2026 11:26am EDT

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Laura's Blog

Floating Like A Feather with Platinum's new FLAF Nib!

After two very intensive articles, I decided to keep this week's short and sweet. Have you ever heard of the FLAF nib? If your answer is no, I'm not surprised! This silly-sounding acronym belongs to a very special 14 karat gold nib newly engineered by Platinum Pens, the quiet one in the "big three" Japanese fountain pen triumvirate: Pilot, Sailor, and Platinum. It was released with very little fanfare at the end of March, and I've seen almost no discussion about it online. Of course, that only made me more curious to try it for myself, so I could understand what it's all about and share that with you.

FLAF is not a typo for "flat," as Google and my spell-checker seem to think. Nor does it have anything to do with the Florida Air Force, as my jokester friend suggested when I mentioned what I was writing about. FLAF means "float like a feather," and the nib is named that because writing with it is supposed to make your pen feel like a feather floating over the paper. Does it really? I was eager to find out, but first I had to learn a little more about the pen that features the FLAF nib, Platinum's brand new Travia.

The Travia "Travia” (not "La Traviata"... that's an opera) is a coined name that combines the words "Tradition" and "Via"

("path" in Latin), and Platinum says it's "built on the heritage of writing culture shaped by those who came before us," but "represents an evolving road that extends straight into the future." The Travia belongs to the #3776 Century family, developed by the late writing

expert Haruo Umeda in collaboration with Platinum's design team with the goal of creating the ideal fountain pen. Unlike the classic cigar-shaped #3776 Century, however, the Travia adopts a more contemporary flat-top silhouette.

Its design echoes the #3776 Century Decade, a beautiful limited-edition pen that introduced the FLAF nib and was released in 2022 to celebrate ...

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MONDAY BLOG: Floating Like A Feather with Platinum's new FLAF Nib! ✒️

Discover the new FLAF nib that’s redefining smooth writing—see why pen enthusiasts can’t stop talking about it.

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