I’ve always had a thing about calendars, and judging by the number of companies that issue calendars for promotion it would seem I’m not alone. However I’ve never found the right format that works perfectly for me. My mother has. Every year she buys a standard wall calendar featuring Inuit Art, with a grid of squares below. It hangs where she can see it, it looks good, and she can write several things to do on it each day.
Somehow this has never worked for me. Things that hang on the wall are not things I use and with calendars of this nature I find I usually forget to turn them for a couple of months before I even notice.
So the quest for the perfect calendar is ongoing. I’m not talking about a daytimer where you need to write either what you’re going to do or what you have done minute by minute, but something that looks good, and which you pay attention to to actually keep track of what day it is.
In 2001 I bought this calendar at MoMA. How could I not? It is so designerly, so beautiful, and charmingly interactive. In fact, I was so taken with it that I never used it, except to remove the tabs for a couple of important dates. Similarly, in 1998 I bought a Phases of the Moon poster/calendar. Great poster, lousy calendar.
Then there’s the appointment calendar. Every year between December and January we get them from paper companies, stock houses and printers (mostly the companies with the big bucks to print such a thing). Many are lavish, some are beautiful, often they are over-designed in an attempt to be unique, sometimes they are a hideously ugly, shocking waste of resources (doesn’t it break your heart to throw a 100-page 4-colour document directly into the er, recycling bin?). For a few years I subscribed to the Italian Art magazine FMR, published by Franco Maria Ricci. I was surprised and delighted, come the new year, to receive this gorgeous appointment calendar:
I did actually use it for a year, but the following year … well, the thing about a book like this is that it tends to get closed and then lost on my desk.
OK, we’ve received calendar cubes and pyramids and all sorts of 3 dimensional pop-up things we can’t name … some of them are like groovy puzzles that flip into different shapes and configurations. Most of these are unbelievably ugly and only barely functional as calendars.
Then there’s the now-ubiquitous CD-case desk calendar. The first time I saw one of these was for … some kind of California Parks thing, I think, and the second time was that embossed/debossed/diecut/letterpress extravaganza from … I want to say Getty Images, but it had no photography: it had braille, I think, and sign language, and semaphore and morse code … anyone remember it? Anyway, I loved it, and then my company did some for a few years and I even did one last year.
But it sat on my desk and I never used it. I can’t write on it, so it just sits there and gathers dust ‘til I remember to change the card.
A few years ago (1999?) FPG sent out a digital calendar which I really liked. It was a little app that sat in your task bar and each day it showed a new picture, showed the month with an arrow to the current day, and you could view past or previous months easily. It’s still running on my PC laptop and it’s a good little reference if you have your computer on and don’t need to write anything down.
Last year I “invented” the near-perfect calendar (for me). I call it the blotter calendar. It sits on my desk and I doodle on it, take notes on it and write stuff on the dates. Of all the calendars this is the one I’ve used the most. Alas, it does have an unfortunate tendency to get lost under a pile of stuff which I have to keep clearing away. If I keep it clear all the time it takes up too much desk space.
Sigh. I’m still searching for the calendar that is so elegant and well designed that I use it every day, that tells me at a glance where I am in the month and what’s coming up, gives me room to write a few things down and never gets lost. The perfect design has yet to cross my desk.
but the pages were such a heavy stock, I barely wrote a thing on them... was too afraid the ink would rub off on the art on the other side... 
I've seen an oversized black and red calendar that Pentagram designed, at least the "firm on record" under the design credit was Pentagram. ee-yow! what a discussion Heller started. love it!
Anyways, this calendar is beautiful in a classy-minimal-good type kinda way. Its huge!! I want one for this year! I can see writing on it or sticking stuff to it as a month passes... boy i bet it looks great after some usage. Lots of white space... at least that is how I remember it.
i really want one, if anybody has the know-how on locating one of these, i would really appreciate that info. As an independent contractor, who is working on his portfolio, I could really use it to track my activities, something that is there all the time... reminding, showing growth and age.
I can't get into iCal for personal stuff, when i had a F/T gig it was very useful, but it lacks real-world impact on a personal level.
Or you could always go with Puppies! Everybody loves puppies!!
On Jan.06.2004 at 10:34 PM