Creating a calendar

My wife (who is a Senior Deputy District Attorney) is preparing for a major homicide trial at the moment – it starts on Monday, January 6, for an estimated 8 weeks – and so spent New Year’s Day at work. I was left at home and, after having tidied up, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Yes, I could write some code, but I was in more of an artsy fartsy mood. Ideal thought: since it was the first day of the year, design and make a calendar.

OK, so there was a bit more to it than that. As an attendee to (I think it was) Microsoft Build this year, we were given a free year’s subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. Yesterday, I’d decided to upgrade my main laptop by reinstalling the latest versions of a whole bunch of software, including said Creative Cloud. Hence I had the up-to-date versions of Photoshop and Illustrator to play around with. All I needed was a project. Every year I create a photo card using Photoshop that we send to family and friends as a New Year card (this year we’ll probably get around to sending it well into January with this trial and all) and we use Walgreens photo processing to print off a set.

Which brings me to another point: all these large stores (Walgreens, Target, Office Depot, etc) have photo processing at remarkably cheap prices. I mean, nutty prices. With a coupon, it cost me just over $20 to print off 40 copies of our New Year’s card at Walgreens, and they throw in the envelopes to boot. That’s in the “let’s try it out, if it doesn’t look good, we’ve not lost a great deal of money” territory. So that prompted me to think about designing a calendar with a photo per month and get it processed at wherever. (Note I’m not talking about the calendar designs these places tout: send them 12 photos and choose a layout and they’ll print a calendar. I’m talking about creating a calendar from scratch.)

So I fired up Illustrator and started to mess around with the design of the month details. Adding the photos would just be a matter of selecting the ones I wanted in Lightroom and exporting them. I decided on a 5×7 landscape layout, since that’s a standard photo size. The photo for the month would take up the top 3.5 inches (so it would be in a 1:2 ratio) and the bottom 1.5 inches would be reserved for the month name and the days of the month calendar. Here’s an example of a finished month:

Once I’d decided on the layout, creating each month was just an exercise in tedium: making sure that the calendar for the month was correct was the most precise bit (“30 days hath September, April, June and November, …”). Each photo I wanted to use was exported from Lightroom as a 1050×2100 image (which is 3.5×7 inches at 300dpi). One final check for spelling, and then I exported each month from Illustrator as a JPG, ending up with 12 JPGs.

Then I tried to upload them to the photo service I was using. They were all rejected: “Not a valid JPG file”. What? They displayed just fine on my machine. After doing a bit of searching for maximum photo file sizes (these images were big), I suddenly had a thought: I’d created the Illustrator files to use the CYMK color space (they were going to be printed, right?), maybe they should be normal RGB JPGs. I flipped each month’s finished image JPG to RGB and the photo service accepted them. A couple of hours later, I had the printed images in my hand.

We have a little clear acrylic sign holder in our kitchen holding a calendar from a previous year, so I just put the prints in this holder. It makes for a lovely personalized calendar.

Now playing:
Yello - Distant Mirror
(from Motion Picture)

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