(last edited on August 15, 2014 at 12:06 am)
“What to make that’s quick,” I thought to myself as I faced another day of product-making. I have a lot of ideas, but I’m finding that some of them require more preparation than I think I want to spend. I’m averaging about 3-4 hours total on these daily product bursts: about 90 minutes for the actual design work, then another 90 minutes for creating the package, attendant screenshot, and writing the post itself. So today, I figured I would save some time by revisiting my old Text Strip Calendar from 2007. This was based on a calendar I used to put in my planning text file so it would be always visible when I was typing. I also used to tape a printout on the bottom of my monitor for easy reference.
Unlike most horizontal strip calendars I’ve seen, this is more like a number line than a bunch of traditional month-based blocks, so it’s a bit truer in spirit to the “candybar of time” Compact Calendar; I guess you could call this one a “licorice strip”. It would be cool to make a spool mechanism and have a calendar you could unroll. That might be a fun novelty product for the future, if I could figure out how to make it.
As it turned out, making this text strip calendar took longer than planned…nearly two hours! There were fonts to test for legibility when printed, and I ended up having to manually enter-and-format the data because what I got out of Excel was too cumbersome to reformat. I also added some registration marks so it would be easier to use a cutter to make the strips. But here it is!
» Download Horizontal Calendar Strips (US Letter)
Adobe Acrobat Reader is recommended for printing. The built-in "Mac OS X Preview" and "Chrome Browser" PDF viewers do not always draw dotted lines correctly.
Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2014
I am challenging myself to create a new product every day for the month of February 2013. The Challenge Page lists all the products in one place. Check it out!
Enjoy!
4 Comments
Yay Dave! I wish there were sheets of labels (instead of just the full-sheet label) that would work perfectly for this. Hmm.. a mostly-uncaffienated thought on how to make a spool calendar (or maybe my labels): you might want to look into measuring tapes. I have some that are labels/stickers… and I’m pretty sure there are printers set up to do custom runs, a calendar is a unit of measure.
Penny: Oooo, thanks for the idea! I’ll look into it!
Your horizontal strips quick view calendar inspired me and I created a desktop background, it probably needs a little work, but it will do just fine for now. I’m always needing a quick calendar to look at.
http://flic.kr/p/dStTYc
Luke: That’s pretty cool!