newly ancient

Of all the ways to represent a year, this is by far my favorite. What better way to represent a year than to show a year? A calendar is an ancient idea, yet it is still relevant today. It can show both the big picture and the individual components of a year very well. Be warned though, producing a calendar of the past year is not an easy task. However, with a little bit of work, you can duplicate my annual calendar style.

1. Track your schedule using Google Calendar or a similar calendar application. Include your school or work calendar in it, and update the calendar as days are added or removed.
2. Add the Holiday feed for your region to your calendar.
3. Add a calendar widget to your blog.
4. Fire up your favorite graphics program, which supports symbols.
5. Draw a small square and fill it with a color.
6. Convert the square to a symbol. In Adobe Fireworks, this can be done by right clicking the square and selecting Convert to Symbol with the default options.
7. Draw an equally sized square and fill it with a different color.
8. Convert the square to a symbol.
9. Draw another square the same size as the first two and fill it with a different color.
10. Convert the square to a symbol.
11. Draw a transparent square the same size as the first three.
12. Convert the square to a symbol.
13. Browse to January 1 in Google Calendar.
14. Browse to January 1 in your blog calendar.
15. Choose the most suitable option from the following:
    • If you wrote a post on that day, duplicate your first symbol and put it in a suitable location.
    • If you went to school (or work) on that day, duplicate your second symbol and put it in a suitable location.
    • If you wrote a post and went to school (or work) on that day, duplicate your third symbol and put it in a suitable location.
    • If you did nothing on that day, duplicate your fourth symbol and put it in a suitable location.
16. Look at your calendar, and see if anything especially noteworthy happened on that day (such as graduation or a favorite holiday) and put an appropriate icon on the day. Good sources of icons are IconBuffet and Silk.
17. Repeat steps 13 through 16 for every day in the month. Align the squares to the grid, making sure edges match up.
18. Repeat step 17 for each month, placing a small space between months.
19. Copy each of your first 3 symbols to the bottom of your calendar and create a key.
20. Add embellishments as is necessary for visual appeal.

Why use symbols? If you want to change the color of a square, you can just edit the symbol and all of the squares of the same type will automatically update.

Hopefully, you can see an interesting pattern of you year. Which symbols did you use the most? What months have the least posting or the most? The results might surprise you.

Download an archive of my design file.

This is the fourth installation in a series upon how I produced my annual report. I encourage you to check out parts one, two, and three.