Copyright © Mikkel E. G. Hansen

2017

Personal Annual Calendar

How it started

I've been using an online calendar to keep track of my schedule and events for a long time, which is hugely practical! Although what about the little things? You know... such as birthdays, mother's day or perhaps an anniversary?

It's quite inconvenient adding these little things to an online calendar again, again, and again... so why bother?

Oh well, I'm sure hope I won't be forgetting something important...

Let's discover!

A lot of things were discovered in the making of this project. Just to begin with, how do you make a calendar? What should it look like? Where should I go for pictures? How do I plot in all of the actual content?

Wall Calendar mockup
Graphics Design Print Production Photo/Video

Automation

How hard can it be?

#1

Create a functional template from scratch that is printable on my home equipment.

Some paper was harmed as a result of this process.

#2

Figure out when, what where and how to take desired pictures that's relevant to each indi­vidual within in a year.

#3

Make an actual design that's aesthetically pleasing and consistent with my existing items.

#4

My DSLR is quite trash and requires a lot of patience. ALL images need to be corrected to compensate for this.

#5

Oh f*ck... I forgot about the actual content! How do you make this work without havinig to plot in everything manually?

#6

How do I modify and distribute this to potential customers?

The end result

Of course, no matter how smart my document is, I still needed a way to be able to manually adjust for specific events others would would like to have.

Since the calendar entirely depends on an Excel sheet, why not just… let those people fill it out themselves? There’s probably a million ways they could screw up, but again, it’s an excel sheet and it’s super easy to fix.

Automatic formatting

InDesign formats text based on simple conditions

Highly copy-pasteable

Each month is filled out with a single copy-paste from Excel

Lets others do the dirty work

Others want custom content? Fine! Follow the guide and plot it in yourselves!