Design your way

You see a calendar design and you like it. But did it ever cross your mind to design your own calendar?

Almost all of us thought of designing a calendar at some stage of our childhood, but the traditional roll-page month rectangles are now far behind us.

Instead, creative artists are coming up with all sorts of interesting calendar design ideas, and use those as excellent tools for marketing promotions.

The market readjusted from simple poster calendars to o-coil wire artworks, cards, magnets, and saddle stitched calendars, to name a few. In fact, custom-made calendars depend mostly on what the customer wants, and that explains the fascinating diversity.

If you have in mind sending calendars to your clients and business partners, think of it as a unique opportunity to promote your brand every day during the year. Hence, your calendar must grab attention and stand out immediately, and you must abide to a number of basic rules and indications on how to create one.

How to design a calendar that everybody will adore

Choosing a suitable theme for the calendar design

Your first task while learning how to make a calendar will be to pick an engaging theme and concept. Wrap up few creative ideas, and consult your colleagues to choose the best one. Ideally, you should go for something that will appeal to target users, but still make it obvious that it is your company that has issued the calendar.

This will mean using images, colours, graphics, and fonts that remind of your company, but used with care in order not to make the calendar too serious and corporate. Viewers will be looking at it daily, so you better go for something that will surprise them over and over until December.

Choose the number of months on a page

Common calendaring options are 1 month, 2, months, 6, or all 12 months per page. You can choose any of these, as long as the numbers on that page are readable enough. For legibility purposes, businesses mostly go for a single month per page option, so that their message will be properly conveyed, and feature a different product image on each page.

Therefore, before you design a calendar, think of the goals it should achieve.

Define the number of pages for the calendar design

Once the number of months per page is settled, decide whether you want double-side prints or not. If yes, use also environment-friendly materials, and you will communicate in such way your commitment to Green practices.

Define and ‘pack up’ your message

Themes and elements do say a lot on the message a calendar conveys, but since this one is used primarily for business purposes, you should highlight your company’s image, and pick a theme that goes along with your brand.

Choose images with care

Images matter the world to your calendar, but that doesn’t mean that you should overwhelm users with too many of them. Instead, apply the less-is-more rule, pick few high-resolution and high quality photos, and make sure they will be attractive to the end user.

Avoid everything that loos crowded, messy, or distractive, and go for elegant, generic pieces you will either make yourself, or download in high resolution.

For the purpose, of course, you’ll need the right to use the image, so it might be a good idea to consider pictures that already appear on your leaflets, brochures, and posters. In such way, you will also reinforce brand awareness, and monetize the effort you’ve invested in your calendar. The better these images look, the more the calendar will pay off in the end.

Manage your space properly

Depending on the size of the calendar you’re designing (wall, table, or pocket one), distribute content and images accordingly, and balance between pages that look too plain and too overwhelming. It is the only way to make a calendar eye-catchy, and have enough space to promote the achievements and services of your company without sacrificing actual calendar elements.

Select a functional date display

This is a good practice for those interested to make a unique calendar – the piece should be readable, attractive, and yet very practical. As it will be applied all year long, the accent is on functionality, and that should be your leading motif when working on the date display.

Promoting your company

Business people use calendars not only to check, but also to memorize important dates and appointments, and that’s where your opportunities are hidden. The calendar should help you promote your company and its upcoming events, so that users know when they can take advantage of your sales and exclusive offers.

Turn the calendar into a portfolio

Since you’re already using your calendar to promote the work of your business, why not including some more of it, and creating a great portfolio? For each month, you can showcase a different masterpiece you’ve created, be that a dress you designed, or a stunning bathroom you remodelled.

This is most useful for companies with wide range of products and services, which report calendars being a very important part of their marketing strategy.

Choosing a printing technique

Once you have your calendar designed and ready to hand out, think of the printing strategy. For the purpose, consult an expert on techniques that would suit you best, and that match both the style and the theme of the calendar.

You will most likely be asked to choose between glossy and matte paper, and to select a binding mechanism: wire-o-coil, stapled, or saddle stitched calendar.

Keep your goals clear and achievable

It comes without saying that in the world of calendar design, great appearance is only a part of the process. Your goals should also be to make that calendar useful to the viewer, and to find a way to sneak in the promotion of your business.

This means pretty much that you need a powerful and captivating calendar that motivates people to look at it, and that inspires particular feelings for your brand and your products.

This is why corporations spend a lot of money on their branded calendar design, and it makes perfect sense knowing how many leads, prospects, and sales it can generate.

Add interest

Calendars should always be interesting, and perhaps even leave little something to the imagination of the audience. This will require a good understanding of what that audience likes and enjoys, so that each and every one of them will find a suitable place to hang that calendar.

Relevancy will help you make your calendar more interesting – if you’re selling luxurious cars to passionate care fans, depict some interesting moments, and showcase your best pieces.

Leave blank spaces in your calendar design

By useful, we don’t only mean readable, but also writable calendars. A usual business user will likely leave notes on the calendar to remember an appointment (we all do this for birthdays and important events!) so make sure he/she has enough blank space to do that.

Better yet, if you’re running an appointment-organized business, think of interesting ways to inspire people to make and add appointments with you.

Think of sustainability

In the overall number of pages, consider also the front and the back cover of the calendar. To make it cheaper, you can always opt for a double sided calendar, and print it on sustainable paper to show your customers how much you care about the environment.

Long calendars and why they’re a good idea

For starters, a long calendar won’t fold in the middle as dates and images do, as it has a plastic coil on top to secure it, and you can flip it month by month. From a user’s perspective, this means lots and lots of space to place notes.

Such calendars often come with a banner on top, then the dates, and the ending blurb in the bottom section. The upper banners can be also date calendars and photos, as long as you size them appropriately. Depending on how you’ve chosen to decide a calendar, you can fit in different styles and ideas, and ensure the calendar feels differently each month.

Little desk calendars and why they’re a good idea

Who said that good calendars should hang on a wall? Smaller, desk ones are obviously more practical, usually produced in triangle formation, and designed to enable the user to flip pages month by month thanks to the coil on top. These calendars save a lot of space in small and crowded offices, as they’re only few inches long, and still wrap up all important information.

Plus, they are easier to reach and more readable for people who don’t have the time to move around the office and check them.

On a desk calendar, you can also include the brand’s logo and contact info in the bottom section, so that each time the user flips a page, the data is clearly visible. This way, they will remember you, and very likely contact you in future.

Magnet calendars you can put on the fridge (or any metal surface)

Once you’ve completed all standard calendar forms, prepare a magnetic one people can stick on their fridges and other metal surfaces. These calendars are just perfect for office environments, restaurant, food deliverers, bars, and similar venues.

On them, you can also imprint the name and contact data of the brand, and users will find it easier than ever to contact you for your services.

Writing your own story

Plan the content first. In order to do that successfully, answer the following questions:

What’s going on with your company this year?
How can the calendar contribute to that event?
What changed in your company last year, and deserves to be made visible on the calendar?
How can you make each month stand out?
Who’s the calendar designed for?
Will the users relate easily to your story?

Working with your company’s colours

Colours matter a lot to your brand, and it is therefore essential that they will appear on the calendar is well. Some brand have done such a good job choosing a palette that it takes nothing but the colour itself to indicate that it is them who are distributing those calendars.

In other cases, the colour of the brand is the one that dominates, accompanies with the logo or slogan used in other marketing tools.

Use your original artwork

Even if we wanted, we could not discourage a designer from digging into the thousands of free, royalty stock images available on the net, as we all know this saves time and money. Still, a calendar is a one-time possibility to do something enormous for your brand, and there are so many options firms work with nowadays that a classic, mediocre calendar may simply take you off the scene.

Plus, it will always be a challenge to find images that genuinely represent who you are and what you do, and it is always better to go for new ones nobody has seen before.

Make symbolism work for you

Descriptive and high-quality images are the best way to communicate what you’re offering without cluttered explanations. Still, it won’t help repeating the same display practice year by year. Instead, you can rely on symbolism to bring something interesting and unexpected to your design, and to enhance the quality of your content.

Show what you’re capable of when designing a calendar

With calendars, there are no right and wrong decisions. Once you see through engaging visuals, your focus should switch to the brand – does your calendar actually help you sell more? If it does, you’ve done the right thing.

Keep looking for ideas

The functionality of your calendar is as well your main priority.

This is why you should never stop collecting insights on what users like or expect from calendar design, as for instance extra space for writing notes. Keep your previous ideas in the loop to see what went wrong with them, and consult experts and colleagues before you make a final decision.

Ending thoughts on calendar design

Those who follow these tips will very likely obtain awesome results – an inspiring, memorable, and effective marketing tool, instead of a useless client gift that will end up tossed in a box.

This calendar will be appealing and functional, and leave enough space for the user to make notes and stay in control of his schedule. If you are not exactly in your most creative phase, don’t worry – a photographer or an experienced illustrator can help you achieve your goals.

How to make a calendar for the first time? In order to be successful, your calendar needs to fulfil two basic criteria – aesthetics and relevance.

If you manage to balance between the two, and come up with a unique solution, the audience will simply adore what you’ve done. Better yet, it won’t take long for you to return the investment!

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