Daytimer(Tm) Style Pocket Calendar

I'm a geek from the get-go, but I also love handwriting, color and paper calendars. I like the Daytimer™ pocket size, and used the concepts I've learned on other "Layer Your Own" products here to improvise a beautiful, personal calendar. A number of people have asked me how I do my pocket calendars, so I wrote this mini-tutorial. Here is my Calendar album.

The pages as you see them are 7.5" x 6 3/4" (2250 pixels x 2025.)

The left side of the planner pages is intentionally generic, so that as you print it double-sided, you don't have to worry about the "date match" as you put it together. At the month boundaries, I do get a mismatched color set, but it doesn't bother me. In other words, you will get a July "left" with an August "right" hand page at the month boundary when printing double-sided. I don't mind this, but if you do, you'll end up needing to keep the colors the same throughout the year.

There are Shapes for the notes, shopping, and "look up" lists, and then similar shapes for the day blocks on the right. I used rectangles with rounded corners, in a light-medium gray, experimenting with the radius until I liked the look. Align and Distribute tools set the spacing and alignment to be consistent. PS, PSE, PSP, Photo-Paint and Publisher all have tools for this technique. Once these were placed and sized correctly, merge the layers together. I clip the pastel "overlay" paper(s) to this layer.

There is a layer with the basic labels for the blocks. Once the individual text labels are written for Notes, Monday, Tuesday, etc, these are merged into one layer.

The dates took some work. (understatement) There are 37 (!) layers, and I turn on the appropriate one to create that week. The first 24 are the most straightforward: Week_1_7, Week_2_8, ..., Week 24_30. The layers are labeled just like that, so they're easy to identify later. Then you get to Week_25_31 AND Week_25_30_1 for the 31 and 30 day months. You also need Week_26_31_1 and Week_26_30_2, and so on until you finish with Week_31_1_6. For the end of February, I did not create a special set of weeks ending in 28 & 29--I just erase part of a layer, and turn on/reposition another layer for the beginning of March. That's an option for the 30 day months.

Creating the date layers takes time. Once they're done, it's easy to turn one on and one off to create the specific weeks. Some of the software tools allow you to group layers and "close up" the group to minimize clutter in your layer palette; that's handy.

There is a separate layer for each of my regular appointments, Soli Deo Gloria choir practice, Rotary meeting, church choir, customer demos, etc. I turn applicable layers on/off as needed, for instance Soli Deo Gloria choir doesn't practice during the summer or between the Christmas concert and early January. The layer is turned off for those pages/weeks. If I forget to turn a layer off, or a regular appt is cancelled, it's easy to just draw a line through it.

You can also include some of the Boutique's Scrap Simple Layer Your Own calendar/organizer products as layers, resizing them as needed for other pages such as "To Do lists," Emergency numbers, etc.

At this point, it's a good idea to SAVE the Template file, and possibly even write-protect it. You don't want to accidentally delete important layers and re-save it without them.

I open the template and save it for the week to print, usually for the first week of the month, e.g. 2010_0801_0807.psd. I add a background paper, a Months scrapsimple paper, and various overlay papers and start playing! This is the fun part. Once I like the design, I re-save the file for each week in the month: 2010_0808_0814, 2010_0815_0821, etc. It takes me about an hour or so (now) to create the four or five week files for the month, and add the "once a year" dates.

For birthdays, holidays, etc, I just add the text as needed, and delete them for the next week's calendar. When you're done, save to a JPEG file at full resolution (300 dpi) for printing, and at 72 dpi for web display.

I've made a template in MSPublisher, and drop the 7.5" x 6 3/4" image in so it's positioned exactly centered left to right, 1/2" from the top edge on 8.5x11 paper. I place the high resolutoin JPEG images for the weeks on this template, one on each page. This is much easier to print than smaller sheets. I use Hammermill Color Copy 32lb paper, which takes color well and has a beautiful texture for writing. It's not easy to write on photo paper.

Pay close attention as you print. I usually do weeks 1, 3 and 5 for a month, and make sure they are bone dry. Then I carefully put them back in the printer, stacked appropriately, to print 2 & 4 on the back of 1 and 3, and Week 1 of the NEXT month on p.5.

I cut them out, and then cut them in half vertically. You can use a Daytimer or other standard ring binder; I use the Circa notebook tools; with a "circa/rollabind" punch and rings to put them in a THIN notebook.

The cover is made with translucent quilting template plastic . I only carry around about 3 months of calendar at a time, plus contacts & a few sheets of paper, so I use the 1/4" discs for this. It's very compact, and I write in longer-term appointments on the last (left-hand) page of this set. These notebooks work like the old "rolladex" contact cards, or you can just use a ring binder. The calendars are quite sturdy, and hold up just fine in/out of my purse all the time.

I'm a longtime fan of the circa notebook system. It doesn't look like it would be that sturdy, but it's great. You can add and remove pages at will, but they hold up beautifully. Here's a link to the Levenger Circa site: http://www.levenger....6-888|level=2-3 and the RollaBind site: www.rollabind.com. I use these for all sorts of notes/notebooks. The punch is expensive, but lasts forever, and I got a second one for my office on eBay for about 60%.

I hope this tutorial is helpful for those of you who like other sizes of calendars. I try to be concise, but as I can see, it's gotten LONG. Let me know what you think, and please let me know if you find errors, so I can fix them. Enjoy!

J9Buckles, on 06 June 2010 - 07:20 PM, said:

Oooh - cool stuff! Here's the perfect set of templates for a project like this!

Erica's:ScrapSimple Digital Layout Album Templates: 8.5x11 Plan On It
and ScrapSimple Digital Layout Album Templates: 8.5x11 Plan On It 2

They're both 8½ x 11 but could be resized for a "purse-sized" planner.

Janine, you are so right. When I started this project, I didn't really understand Layer Your Own products very well. I didn't understand that I could pick & choose layers to use. Since I use this for work, I needed a little bit more streamlined design. The trick is figuring out which layers to use, since 8.5x11 is a very different proportion than 3.75x6.75. I'm sure I could do it now, but wanted to share the general instructions, and the observation about buying templates being easier than this, to answer the questions I'd received.

As you can tell, I'm still a (barely) recovering perfectionist, control freak! :whew: