Thursday, January 23, 2014

Awesome Year-at-a-glance Calendar design


It’s that time of year again. I’m considering an altogether different approach for a calendar with a non-traditional layout featuring vertical columns for the months. It’s not my idea, but it is quite ingenious. I have to give the credit to Caroline Jourdes for her creative and unique calendar design that allows you to see all of your notes for the month at a glance. The design is pretty cool and buying one of these is much more cost effective for me than taking the time to make my own and then print it.

Making a Calendar in Indesign
That being said, if you’re making a calendar for a client or your employer, designing a calendar in Indesign can be quite tedious if you don’t have the right tools. Painstakingly making a box for every day of the month out of a table, then adding the dates, making sure they’re correct, and triple checking to see if they line up with a real calendar can be a pain. I’ve seen people take the time and effort to create grids out of lines and adjust them accordingly in sort of a homemade matrix in an app like Adobe Illustrator. Unfortunately these rarely work out as expected. It always seems like a lot of overkill when you need to make edits and if you accidentally select a rule or a box unintentionally it can be disastrous if you aren't familiar with the program. It’s easy to critique until you have to make a calendar yourself. 

Speaking of which, one of my clients had asked me to make a calendar with the full year on a single side. After thinking about this for about two seconds a quick Google search found the Javascript for Indesign called the Adobe Indesign Calendar Wizard. This awesome little plug-in takes a little getting used to, but I can attest that I’ve had success using it in Indesign from version CS4 (Adobe Creative Suite 4) all the way through CC (the Adobe Creative Cloud edition) on Macs and PCs both. Through trial and error it’s easy to figure out what will work and what won’t for the calendar layout in the plug-in. It's a one-shot deal though, so you have to remember your settings when you want to reproduce the same result (like next year perhaps). If all else fails take a screenshot before you make it happen.

The Adobe Indesign Calendar Wizard script creates a single month calendar quite effectively on a single page. While I’ve tried to create a calendar in an existing text box in a current document with the plug-in without success, in a pinch I was able to create a 12-page monthly calendar in one new Indesign document, export it as a single PDF, then import each page back into a larger file (24x36 poster). At a glance, hanging on the wall it looks okay as your standard run of the mill branded 12-month calendar, but it's not as cool as Caroline’s Calendar.

Styling the calendar
The Adobe Indesign Calendar Wizard plug-in even builds the paragraph, table, and character styles necessary to jazz up the design, so not much effort is involved in tweaking the layout if you're familiar with styles. During tweaks, if the styles change to the point the calendar doesn’t fit in the text box there is a handy script to resize the calendars included in the script set. Very cool indeed.