2012 Calendar Progress

This past Thanksgiving break was a week of immense frustration with the calendar project. My initial idea was to make a "Commonly Misspelled Words Calendar" with a different word for each day. I worked on that idea for about six hours knowing within the first hour that it wasn't working. It looked like a jumbled mess on the page. It was visually bland. I tried different fonts, alternating colors, different sizes, column widths, alignments, you name it... Needless to say, I walked away defeated. I even said to myself, the Panthers at least scored 7 against Alabama, but I have nothing.

The next day, I reevaluated just what it was that I wanted to accomplish with this calendar. I simply wanted to design a calendar that would exhibit the beauty of type. It didn't need a gimmick. With that renewed vision, I got to work.

The idea became to allow the days and weeks of each month to determine the placement of each letter of type and then to number each letter accordingly. The result shows the uniqueness' and aesthetic qualities of various typefaces. One of the beautiful surprises was the resultant negative space and counters of each letterform.  It not only draws your attention to the letterform itself, but to the space around it as well. The typefaces for each month were chosen based on two criteria: 1. I liked it/used it often, 2. It had a bold. Color became an important factor. Each month's colors are intended to capture the feeling of the month or that time of year: cold colors, warm colors, spring colors, fall colors, etc. The days of the week are included at the bottom for 2 reasons: to show off the type in lowercase form and to let the viewer know that the days and weeks are laid out in order even if they don't line up like a traditional calendar.

Here are a couple of examples:

"People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it." - William Faulkner