5 Ways to Make your Calendars Look More Complete

Every look at a print calendar and feel that something is missing? The dates are all there, the calendar printing looks great but there is still that certain something that you think should be there. The sense of completeness in calendar printing is a tricky thing to achieve, but more or less it is basically down to detailing your calendars so that they don't look plain. If you want to know how this is done, here are five simple tips you can try out.

1. Adapting different color indicators – Most people are used to calendars that have different color indicators for special dates. A lot of printer designers forget to do this sometimes and focus only on marking the date through an extra reminder in the text. However, it is important that you apply these different color indicators so that people can easily glance at a calendar and immediately identify the key dates of interest. Without it, that sense of incompleteness can set in and people will have a harder time noticing important dates of interest in your custom calendars until it is too late. So make sure you adapt different color indicators when printing color calendars.

2. Using mini clip-arts – Besides color indicators in calendars, you can also add more detail to your calendar printing by adding small clip-arts or symbols within the calendar design itself. For example, you can place an image of a flag on the date box for independence day or it can be a turkey on Thanksgiving. This adds some small detail and a theme to that particular date that basically enhances the perception of the times and festivities ahead. Moreover, it just looks great in a way since all the other days can look boring. That picture can add that extra little thing that makes the color calendar look complete.

3. Adding shadow effects – Also, I find that shadow effects on pictures, borders and some text can actually enhance the calendar's design making it look more detailed and complete. Adding shadows lifts the design element and emphasizes the importance of it in the calendar design. I find that it is great to do this on images and borders since people will have a subtle compulsion to look more closely at images these way.