Posted by David Senesac on December 1, 2007 at 4:05 PM
A few days ago I created my annual single sheet calendar for the coming year of 2008 now a month away. The calendar is a marketing freebee for personal use for web users visiting my site. The link to the calendar is on a sub-page link at my below homepage. I thought the process might amuse some of you small business photographers here.
Once the file is downloaded onto a person's hard drive, there are simple instructions on the download page to print out the 2000x1500 pixel image for a 10x7.5 inch at 200ppi print. Thus it will fit within a standard 8/5x11 sheet of paper. The background image captured with my little 7mp Coolpix 7900 is Mono Lake at dawn on October 9th this fall from the US395 scenic viewpoint south of Conway Summit.
Building a calendar each fall is a process I look forward too. Since I have strong Photoshop graphic skills going way back to 3.0, I prefer to make my own versus the many canned "make yer own calendar" applications available. I peruse my images from the year, looking for something colorful with considerable open sky areas that text will display against crisply. Choosing a background image is of course the most interesting decision. After selecting a base image, I'll Photoshop process then downsize it to about a 10 inch width at 200ppi print sizing that provides a reasonable resolution for text on a calendar printed on consumer inkjets. There are many Interenet sites providing yearly calendars. I just copy and paste calendar text from one of those sites into Notepad since that is already set for Courier that one needs to keep the alphanumeric characters column aligned. Then edited that in Notepad for easy copying one month at a time and pasting into the Photoshop Text tool for input atop the image. After getting all the month text in individual month layers atop the base image, I spend a lot of time moving them around, changing the font size, evaluating how it looks this way or that, and tweaking the font colors so the text stands out nicely.
The calendar source I chose this year also had moon phase days for each month and holidays, so incorporated that too. For the moon phases, I copied some tiny moon phase figures onto my clipboard using the freeware MWSnap screen capture program and then pasted them into their own file with a transparent background. Thus was then easy to select any of the four black phase figures and paste them in four per each month beside the specified days. I then link merged all the many moon phases layers pasting them into one "moon" layer. On a text layer, I added some fancy text for a large 2008 heading at top. Then finally added my business name and Internet URL down below in non-distracting locations. Thus ended up with .PSD file with the base image on the background, 12 month layers of text, one moon phase layer, and one layer for the 2008, business name, URL text.
Posted by David Bostedo on December 1, 2007 at 7:18 PM
Looks good David - neat idea. I like how the text color changes against the sky gradient. One odd thing I see though - October, November, and December are out of order with respect to the rest of the months (shouldn't December wind up lower right?) and they are aligned differently than the rest of the months.
Posted by David Senesac on December 1, 2007 at 9:50 PM
I looked at Oct-Nov-Dec in the same orientation as the other months but decided on this variance just on a slight whim to be novel. Anything to be a bit different than usual canned calendar applications haha. You may notice Ja-Fe-Ma then Ap-Ma-Je then Ju-A-Se all have slight diagonal offsets from left to right top to down sequences while Oc-No-De not only changes the month top to down sequence direction but also offsets diagonally from left to right. One reason I did that is the top corner is opposite where 2008 comes in and that corner is appropriately dark for winter reflecting the year going out. I considered that people would normally expect any organization of months to follow some consistent pattern whatever that might be. But then I also reflected on how as long as there is some method of orderly adjacent sequencing, then people are not going to be bewildered going from month to month. In other words the key need is to have previous and following months placed next to each other and to not be too odd in sequencing such that one would spend an extra moment looking for something. My calendar last year had an even greater area of sky so I made a half moon month sequence from top left that curved down towards center about one-quarter above the image base then swung up to the top right corner. And in the past I made other more conventional patterns like this but without the variation. I'm amused someone so quickly noticed this, thanks. ...David
Discussion
3 repliesOnce the file is downloaded onto a person's hard drive, there are simple instructions on the download page to print out the 2000x1500 pixel image for a 10x7.5 inch at 200ppi print. Thus it will fit within a standard 8/5x11 sheet of paper. The background image captured with my little 7mp Coolpix 7900 is Mono Lake at dawn on October 9th this fall from the US395 scenic viewpoint south of Conway Summit.
Building a calendar each fall is a process I look forward too. Since I have strong Photoshop graphic skills going way back to 3.0, I prefer to make my own versus the many canned "make yer own calendar" applications available. I peruse my images from the year, looking for something colorful with considerable open sky areas that text will display against crisply. Choosing a background image is of course the most interesting decision. After selecting a base image, I'll Photoshop process then downsize it to about a 10 inch width at 200ppi print sizing that provides a reasonable resolution for text on a calendar printed on consumer inkjets. There are many Interenet sites providing yearly calendars. I just copy and paste calendar text from one of those sites into Notepad since that is already set for Courier that one needs to keep the alphanumeric characters column aligned. Then edited that in Notepad for easy copying one month at a time and pasting into the Photoshop Text tool for input atop the image. After getting all the month text in individual month layers atop the base image, I spend a lot of time moving them around, changing the font size, evaluating how it looks this way or that, and tweaking the font colors so the text stands out nicely.
The calendar source I chose this year also had moon phase days for each month and holidays, so incorporated that too. For the moon phases, I copied some tiny moon phase figures onto my clipboard using the freeware MWSnap screen capture program and then pasted them into their own file with a transparent background. Thus was then easy to select any of the four black phase figures and paste them in four per each month beside the specified days. I then link merged all the many moon phases layers pasting them into one "moon" layer. On a text layer, I added some fancy text for a large 2008 heading at top. Then finally added my business name and Internet URL down below in non-distracting locations. Thus ended up with .PSD file with the base image on the background, 12 month layers of text, one moon phase layer, and one layer for the 2008, business name, URL text.