Calendar Printing With Your Logo

Three formats and their logic

A wall calendar is the most visible — it hangs in the office and every employee sees it, not only the person who received it. Its drawback is that wall space is limited and competition high. A desk calendar sits on a desk within one person's daily field of view — fewer people see it, but more often. A pocket calendar is the cheapest and suits mass distribution, though the chance of it being kept is lowest. The choice depends on whether you want many people once or one person many times.

• Wall — many people, shared space
• Desk — one person, daily view
• Pocket — mass distribution, low retention
• Choose: many once, or one often

Grid planning — the part most often forgotten

A calendar is an attractive object, but first it is a tool — and if it fails as a tool it will not stay on the wall long. Three practical requirements: date figures large enough to read from two metres (on a wall calendar); room in the cells for notes if it is a working calendar; and weekends visually distinguished. A common mistake is design so dominant that the grid becomes small and unreadable — such a calendar gets replaced within a month by a more functional one.

• Dates — legible from two metres
• Room for notes — if it is a working calendar
• Weekends — visually distinguished
• Design must not overwhelm the grid

Ordering deadlines

A calendar is a seasonal product with a hard deadline: it must reach the client before the end of December, or its value collapses in January — the wall space is already taken by someone else's calendar. So ordering should start in October or November: the design cycle, photo selection (if photography is used) and printing together take several weeks, and December production load peaks. Starting in September is the most comfortable and allows unhurried work on the design.