Crafting a small portfolio to hold a set of cards, by the nerdy artist method

In order to live up to its name, my Useful Calendar has to be both informative and have a pleasing form. That means I spend about as much time researching and fact-checking it as I do on designing and creating it. And being the nerdy artist that I am, I enjoy both of these functions equally.

The 2016 Useful Calendar : a lot of info in a small format

This year I gave myself the design challenge to create a new holder for the calendar cards, because I changed the dimensions from trading card size (2.5" x 3.5" — 64 mm x 89 mm), to 1/8 US letter size (2.75" x 4.25" — 70 mm x 108 mm). This allows a wee bit more room for information and design, and also reduces the fussy trimming and waste, since the strips I cut away were too small to use for any other purpose.

This change required a new pocket to hold them. I used to make the pockets from assorted scrapbooking paper reinforced with packing tape. It made for a durable and reusable pocket, if a little funky looking: you could see the tape overlaps and serrated edges. But I wasn't interested in just making a larger version of the same thing. 

I decided to make something of a portfolio-style holder. I am not a professional package designer and I have no idea how they would go about designing this. So I drew instead upon my experience as a tailor and occasional dressmaker many years ago. 

When designing a dress, I would begin by draping the fabric on the client (I made a wedding dress modeled after a photo in a magazine this way once). If I wanted to make multiples of the design (I did not, in that case), I would then measure everything and transfer that information to a pattern.

"Draping" the cards with scratch paper to make a packet for them

So I began by "draping" my stack of calendar cards with a piece of scrap paper. I creased all the edges and then measured everything. I used those measurements to create a pattern in the Adobe software called InDesign.

A screenshot of my InDesign file of the card holders.  The light blue lines are guides based on the measurements of the folded scratch paper.

From there it's printing, scoring, cutting, creasing and folding; using an Exacto blade to cut a (curved) slit for tucking in the flap, and a corner rounding punch to, well, round the corners. 

The paper packets in various stages of production.

Since I decided to use a light gray 67 lb cover stock (a bit lighter weight than the cards, which are printed on 80 lb cover stock), I designed a cover to print on white labels. The label size that worked best for this was made for name badges, and, much to my delight, I managed to find a version from Avery that's entirely recycled and chlorine free. 

You can see more views of the cards (also printed on recycled cover stock, btw), and even buy them with their nifty paper packet, from my Etsy shop here.

You may have noticed a few bees in the photos above. The theme of the 2016 Useful Calendar is 12 wild bees. More information about that is provided on this page: About the Bees.  (Which you can also find in the upper right corner of any page on my blog.)

The Beginnings of the Useful Calendar. But, wait: Aren't All Calendars "Useful"?

I was getting ready to do a little show-and-tell about some design innovations I'm working on for the 2016 edition of the Useful Calendar, when it occurred to me that I should probably first give you a little background on this annual project of mine—the story behind it, and why I call it the "Useful Calendar."  It has changed quite a lot since I began it 10 years ago. 

The first Useful Calendar in 2006, and a few other early editions, on letter-size card stock (cartridge paper)

Introducing the Useful Calendar

I've been compiling the Useful Calendar since 2006, when it was a free promotional item for readers of the Minneapolis Observer, a monthly newspaper my husband and I used to publish. I had seen promotional calendars from other businesses, and felt that they weren't informative enough or convenient enough in format to be truly useful.

I included dates that I thought would affect planning, and put it all on one page, so that a person could glance at this calendar and quickly see not only the date of Easter, or day of the week for the 4th of July, but also major local events that can obstruct traffic and parking, and cultural events that a considerate person might want to know about so they don't plan a community potluck luncheon in the middle of Ramadan, for example.

At the same time, I did not want to clutter it with what I considered to be frivolous or promotional events, even those that promote worthy causes. So, no Coffee Day or cancer awareness, or even Black History Month. Because I wanted it to fit on a page and still be a readable font size.

And that's why I called it the Useful Calendar.

How a Calendar Led to an Etsy Shop 

Soon after I created the first Useful Calendar, the Observer went out of business. We then launched a much smaller publication called MOQ (Minneapolis Observer Quarterly), a literary zine about "exploring the bucolic city," and I continued to create the Useful Calendar under this new moniker and give it away to subscribers and others to promote the publication. Really, though, I made it because I found the calendar useful and I hoped others would too. It was too much work to create it only for myself.

In 2009, I also made it into a set of cards, because I really liked the idea of having a smaller, pocket-sized version of the calendar that I could keep in my purse. I made them the size of Artists' Trading Cards (ATCs, 2-1/2 x 3-1/2 inches), because I was into those at the time. I then designed and made a paper pocket to hold it, and laminated it with packing tape for durability. 

An assortment of pockets with the 2014 calendar cards

This innovation was, in truth, also all about me, and what I found useful and pleasing. But I truly hoped that others would think so, too.

So I launched an Etsy shop, which I called Arty Didact, reflecting the way I like to combine art and information (i.e., didactic art), the calendar being a primary example of that. I have steadily added many different products to my shop, to the point of it becoming rather too eclectic, but that's another story.

The 2011 version introduced the Chinese zodiac animal as a theme, and included a few planetary notes, plus made-up names for the full moon dates, which are circled.

When working on the 2011 edition, I was pondering what to illustrate the calendar with, when I hit upon the idea of using the Chinese zodiac animal. It was the year of the rabbit, and the drawing I did for that year's calendar soon became the iconic image for my Etsy shop.  

Just as selling the calendars led me to open an Etsy shop,  opening an Etsy shop changed who I was making the calendars for, which led to further changes in the focus and format.

Read the rest of the story here.