Topic: Calender Design Tips

Hey guys,
I've been charged with coming up with an informative calender design that features daily events for my job. We have a design that is about 2 years old and it is tired as Garth Brooks mullet. I have a couple of ideas but I wanted to explore all options, see a few other designs, get some tips, etc. before I invest several hours designing it.

Here is what we have now...
http://playhpc.com/images/nov06.jpg

I think it needs alot to keep it interesting. Any suggestions?

thanks!

Looks plenty busy enough to hold intrest.
Is it a web application or a poster ?

It's actually a mailer. I've started laying it out a bit, just wanna try and get as much input from someone "graphically knowledgable" as I have my co-workers that are clueless and will make suggestions based on cuteness instead of "cool design looking" ... :-)

what's the difference between "cuteness" and "cool design looking"?

I think you might wanna focus on getting the *calendar* to conform to a theme. Calendar being the gridlines, date numerals, the events in grid boxes and month headers.

Once you have that unified you can add your big eyegrabbers for big events you wanna promote more.

For example your boxes have say 3 events and those are differentiated by color. Crazy color. Well if your gridlines, numerals and week headers are black, you could use eventOneBlack, eventTwoDarkGrey, eventThreeMediumGrey etc. A simple monotone gradient. People will read the days so don't cram too much color into one day, just unify the calendar grid, make it a base for the other crap.



(Edited by JKMabry on 12-12-2006 04:00)

Yeah, those are my thoughts as well, JK.

Keep the calendar itself fairly simple - avoid the 'cool looking design' stuff for the basics.
Focus on
1) readability
2) Clarity of purpose

Then throw in the 'cool design' elements on a case by case basis.

As for making the actual layout look good aside from the individual elements - Keep it light, keep things spaced out. Keep it all simple is all I can suggest. Keep the colors subtle, or at least limited in number. Keep the hard black lines to a minimum....

And don't try to reinvent the calendar