Pixiq

November is that time of the year when everybody thinks about calendars. Either to know which day it is or for collection, this is something everybody wants. Well, dont' just wait for someone to offer you a calendar.Do your own this year.

Either to share with family and friends, sell to clients or simply hang on the wall in your office, with your best photos, a calendar is something we all come to want to have. And possibly do ourselves.

You can go down the street to the nearest printing shop in your city and get your calendar done with the templates they’ve on show, or you an order those online calendars with software “do it yourself” that somehow looks like “one size fits all”. I’ve done it different ways, but soon found out that I liked better to do my own calendars. Even if printing them on a commercial printing shop. But you can also print them at home on a good printer.

When I started I was not very good with inDesign (I am not, yet, but I do understand it better) so I had to use what was available. Photoshop was a time consuming experience to do calendars, and usually when I finished doing one year’s calendar… a new year was already at the door. I needed a solution.

There is a lot of software to make calendars. Some are bad, some are good. Most of them, especially the cheap ones, let you do calendars but… there is not much to choose from, and the creative options are limited. I’ve tried lots of programs. The recent editions of Photoshop Elements have some nice solutions, the program Zoner Photo Studio Free software that I mentioned in a recent article here at Pixiq also works. But Iam using SmartDraw as my unique program to make calendars.

SmartDraw is more than a program to make calendars. In fact it is a great tool to have in the office – even a pohotographer’s office – to do a lot of things, from invoice layout to diagrams, from floor plans to charts. I’ve used it do flyers and also to do collections of pages with information for the students at my workshops (more about this another day). After creating the file you can save it as .pdf, .jpeg, and many other formats.

The selection of calendars in SmartDraw is not very big, but it’s good enough if you’re pressed for time and need a calendar fast, be it a weekly or monthly solution, or a whole year calendar. There’s enough there to satisfy most people. But because the program let’s you change layouts any way you want and has a vast selection of colour themes (besides letting you creating your own), clipart, and layout options, the only limit to what you can do with it is… your creativity. So, this year again, I am doing my calendars using SmartDraw.

Give it a try, there a test version for download. I bet you’ll never use any other tool to do you own calendars.