This calendar was inspired by a small problem I have with traditional year-at-a-glance calendars like the one here. I like having a calendar that shows the entire year on one page, but there’s so much data that when I try to look up anything, I get lost in a stew of tiny numbers.
So, what could be done to make the year-spanning calendar more readable? I applied two ideas: (1) reduce the amount of data that is presented and (2) present it with a more graphically intuitive layout. If nothing else, this should at least permit the numbers to be a bit larger.
Reducing the Data
A typical calendar month fills, in essence, a 7 by 7 grid – seven columns for the days of the week, and five rows for the weeks plus two more for the month name and weekday headings:
JANUARY Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
The first idea came from a schedule I happened to see many years ago for a set of educational seminars. Those seminars took place only on workdays, so the printed schedule omitted Saturdays and Sundays. This idea shrinks the calendar to five columns wide:
JANUARY Mo Tu We Th Fr 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 10 11 12 15 16 17 18 19 22 23 24 25 26 29 30 31
This led to two further refinements. First, it’s noticeably easier to infer which column is which on a five-column grid that on a seven-column grid, so I decided that the row with the headings for the days of the week could safely be dropped. Second, if I abbreviated name of the month, I could tuck it into the vacant zone that appears in either the first or the last row of the number grid. Now the calendar is down to five rows high:
1 2 3 4 5 8 9 10 11 12 15 16 17 18 19 22 23 24 25 26 29 30 31 –JAN-
With a little thought, you’ll see that the day numbers of every possible month fit comfortably into a five-by-five grid, with a bonus that we avoid the problem that conventional calendars face with months that spill into six weeks. For these months, a conventional calendar either has to add a sixth row, or more commonly, squash two days into a single cell on the last row, leaving you with what appear to be fractional dates: 23/30 and 24/31.
Presenting Graphically
Putting a frame around each month, adding light grid lines, and choosing a nice font turns the calendar into what I think is an attractive visual image. Some people think it resembles a bingo card.
The fact that the month name almost always occupies a larger cell sets it off visually from the day numbers; showing the month name in a different font style completes the effect.
From time to time there is no large cell to hold the month name. In fact this happens whenever the month starts on Tuesday and has 31 days. In 2018, the month of May is like this. This calls for a bit of creativity – maybe abbreviating the month name more severely or showing it in a smaller font.
Making the Year
Finally, I assembled the months and decorated with headings to produce the year-at-a-glance calendar. Of course it’s necessary to show the year, “2018”, but it’s also helpful to include a text like “Mondays to Fridays” to explain what those month grids are all about.
As is often the case when you have a little extra time after finishing a project, I found myself experimenting with added flourishes: font effects for the year heading, and a sarcastic comment typical of geek humor at the bottom.
I opted for a grid of three rows and four columns, with the months progressing vertically (e.g., February is below January). This is not the usual arrangement – most calendars have the months of the year running in rows much like the days within each month – but I chose this arrangement for two reasons.
First, the calendar divides the year into four quarters, which reflects how the business world likes to organize things. If I was in school, which divides each year into three terms, I would have opted for a different arrangement.
Second, this arrangement appeals to the geek in me, because it hints at the “shattered patterns” in our calendar system. A shattered pattern is what you get when an elegant, life-simplifying pattern is muddled but not obliterated by the realities of astronomy, history, and plain old human caprice. In our calendar system, the alignment of days-of-month with days-of-week almost, but not exactly, repeat in three-month cycles. The above calendar arrangement reveals this nicely: by scanning across the top row, you see that January, April, July, and October all start on Sunday or Monday.
The Calendar in Action
I designed this calendar for my work life (it is a workday-only calendar, after all). I printed out a larger one to put up on my cubicle wall. It makes a nice accompaniment to the month-by-month calendar (a store-bought calendar of traditional design) that’s also on the wall.
More usefully, I printed smaller ones to paste inside the front covers of work notebooks. It’s not uncommon for me to find myself in a meeting with no calendar in sight, where people may want to talk about plans and dates. At such events, it’s handy to be able to flip to the front of the notebook and eyeball the weeks and months ahead in a single swoop.
Tech Note
These calendars are manufactured by a program written in Perl. The program is about 300 lines long, of which 100 lines are templates of HTML and CSS code. The Perl program accepts an optional year number and the name of a file containing dates of holidays, and generates a calendar formatted as an HTML file.
Bonus Insight
January of any year has the same calendar layout as May of the previous year. If you are one of those people who delays buying calendars so you can get them for half price in January, this insight is for you. If you haven’t yet bought a calendar for 2018, simply take your 2017 calendar, flip it to the month of May, and now you have a calendar that is good until the end of January, 2018.
Sleepless Afternoon 