Design

Apart from featuring high-quality images, a good calendar also needs to be professionally and attractively designed. With a well designed cover, you’ll attract buyers, while the individual calendar pages need to feature great motifs in order to delight each month anew.

CALVENDO supports you in submitting a professionally designed, complete and convincing calendar project. To that end, our editor is equipped with numerous design templates featuring predefined title page layouts that are easy to use and free of charge. Click here for a step-by-step guide how to use these design templates.

In addition, you’ll find various design options for your calendar projects in our online editing tool. You can also design your own cover with an editing software such as Photoshop or InDesign and then upload a jpeg.

For further information on cover design, please take a look at our free of charge video tutorial.

Here are a few tips and things to consider when choosing a cover motif:

What should you achieve with your cover?

* Your cover should be eye-catching and attract attention. It needs to make potential buyers interested in and curious about your calendar. It’s not a contents page but rather like a nice gift wrapping.

* Your cover image should fulfil your buyers‘ expectations, i.e. it needs to align with your calendar’s title.

* It should be representative for your product in its entirety and visualise the topic of your calendar as a whole, not just one aspect of it.

How to achieve all of the above?

* Choose punchy images, i.e. clear, eye-catching, core motifs that visualise your topic well.

* Simply putting a motif in the centre can be boring. Instead, cropping your image and working with a specific detail can be very effective.

* You can also combine several images.

* Whatever you do, make sure that your cover image has a sufficiently large calm area because this is where you want to place your title in large, easy-to-read letters.

Good to know: Your cover image does not necessarily have to be included in your calendar and feature on one of the calendar pages!

For further information on cover design, you can also take a look at our free of charge video tutorial.

First and foremost, the font needs to be large enough to make the title easy to read because the product images in online retail catalogues (e.g., Amazon, VLB, Nielsen, Sodis) are usually very small.

Please read through the following pointers:

* The font for your title phrase can easily be large enough to stretch across the entire cover – but make sure to respect the margin.

* Make sure to use a font that creates enough contrast with the background, e.g., choose white or a very light colour if your background is fairly dark.

* It’s advisable to always place your copy in a very calm image area, e.g., if your image shows a boat and clear skies, don’t put the title on the boat but on the parts of the image that show the sky.

* Test your cover on your screen by displaying it in thumbnail size: Can the title still be read?

You’ll find more practical guidance in our free of charge video tutorial on cover design. Take a look!

Unless you have a whole lot of experience with the visual effect of fonts, do a few tests. Ask some friends how they perceive the different fonts.

There are fonts that

• appear distinguished and elegant, such as Gardener or Times New Roman, and can therefore be widely used;
• come across as technical, such as Upright, or
• are very matter-of-fact, like Arial. These fonts are suitable for everything relating to technology, the history of technology or natural sciences;
• have a personal touch and are almost intimate, e.g., handwriting or related fonts like Roughly Write. They are basically suited to everything that signals emotion.

You can also use our CALVENDO design templates with predefined title pages and fonts in order to make sure that your cover fulfils all the requirements. You can find a step-by-step guide how to use these design demplates here.

Each and every of your images needs to match the theme of your calendar as it is presented in your title phrase on the cover. And the more specific your theme is, the better.

Think of your calendar as a product that’s telling a story: Don’t just drop in images at random but compose them one after the other and think about why an image might fit with a particular month. Depending on the type of content, the motifs can, for example, reflect the seasons and you can match the images with the time of year: January may show a winter landscape and May a flowering meadow. Or July could feature an explosion of colour while the December image might evoke a contemplative mood.

Think about how you can compose an inspiring and exciting calendar because everything that is already boring when given a quick flick through does, unfortunately, not become more interesting when hung up on a wall for an extended period of time. However, while variety is important, you need to make sure that your images as a whole share one pictorial language.

Take some time when choosing a calendar grid – the section of the calendar page displaying the dates. The calendar grid that is pre-set in the CALVENDO editor is not necessarily suitable for your product. You’ll find many different options provided, so play around and try different calendar grids before deciding on one!

Things to consider:

• Which option corresponds best with my images?
• Which form and which colour enhance my calendar’s message?

Small calendar grids, for example, leave more room for the images and appear more discreet, while larger ones are easier to read.

Please also refer to our free of charge video tutorial on calendar grids and picture captions.

The power of colors is hardly to be underestimated: Each color creates a different atmosphere, even if the differences are very nuanced. Strong contrasts may express more liveliness, milder contrasts can be more harmonious. Saturated colors may be good for accents, pastel tones for subtlety. Choose the colors for your calendar grid in such a way that they express your message in the best way possible.

You can also take a look at our free of charge video tutorial on calendar grids and picture captions.