Every year I send Christmas cards to all my wonderful clients with a calendar of the next year on the back. You never know, somebody may pick one up and think of putting some design business my way, that’s the idea anyway!
I’m a bit late this year but I’ll be artworking it up this weekend and then writing them over the week to make sure they get there at least a week before Christmas.
Calendars are quite tricky things to do – not all months have the same number of days, not all months start on the same day and, while most months require 5 rows of weeks (Monday to Sunday) to complete, some months refuse to play the game and require 6 rows of weeks. Even worse, February 2010, requires only 4 rows of weeks as it starts on a Monday!
(OK, I can see this may not be the most fascinating subject for a blog post but graphic designers find this sort of thing really interesting!)
A calendar you can use for any year!
I have found that putting the relevant date into the appropriate place in the calendar a tad annoying. There’s 365 of them to do so, who wouldn’t? So I have hit on a great solution to help my fellow graphic designers to successfully set up a calendar for all the years to come … linked textboxes!
So, as you can see above, the dates are all linked. So if you want January to start on a Saturday (which it will in 2011) instead of Friday, you type 27 and hit enter in the box before where 28 is now. Enter moves the text to the next linked text box so that all the dates will shift over one day. It’s an awful lot better that moving them over one by one!
Download the PDF and Adobe Illustrator (AI) file for the 2010 Calendar
Please click on one of the icons below to download the calendar.
The AI was produced in CS3 and the document color mode is RGB. You will need the Trebuchet MS font loaded. I tried to save it in a legacy format but the linked text boxes would not work.
Please let me know if this has been useful for you. And if anyone wants a Christmas card contact me with your address and I’ll send you one through the post! Happy Christmas!
Thank you i tried and it was very helpfull
Gonna come in handy for me! thanx bro!
Thanks so much for sending me your card Rob, it looks fab, and the calendar is a great idea – definitely one Christmas card that will outlive the 12 days!
Thanks for the linked text boxes tip… genius!
Merry Christmas!
Hi Ella, absolutely no problem. You were the only one that asked! Thanks for describing my linked text box idea as “genius”. Who says that word is overused!
Thank you – I needed something for my new Sony eBook reader
An interesting use, Beth, glad you like it!
wont work here the enter part…if i enter the box besides it gets emptied
but bro i want to start Saturday first what will do
“wont work here the enter part if i enter the box besides it gets emptied” – not really sure what you mean here. The text frames for the month dates are only big enough to hold two digits so if you put more in the box will empty. Hit return between dates to jump from one box to the next.