Custom calendar: how to prepare it and when to order

Calendar season runs from September to December, peaking between mid-November and Christmas. It is not a stock issue: it is that in those weeks every company giving calendars to clients arrives at once, and the queue lengthens for everyone.

The right moment to bring your photographs is the first half of November. That leaves days for a printed proof, for correcting a wrong date and for redoing an image that does not hold up in print — things that happen nearly every time, and that cannot be done in the run-up to Christmas.

Arrive after 10 December and you will usually still get them, with two limits: paper choice narrows to what is in stock, and there is no time for a proof. If the calendar is a corporate gift with your logo on it, that proof is worth having.

⚠️ A detail that gets missed: if the calendar has to be posted to clients, add courier days to printing days — and in December couriers are the slowest link in the chain.

Twelve months plus the cover. You can use the same image for two adjacent months, or put two smaller ones on a single sheet, but that is the starting count.

Resolution. You need 300 dpi at print size: for an A4 calendar that is roughly 2,500 × 3,500 pixels. Photographs taken on a phone from the last few years are fine; those downloaded from Instagram or WhatsApp are not — those services recompress and resize, and what is left is enough for a screen but not for paper. If you have the original, bring the original.

Orientation. Choose all landscape or all portrait. A calendar that mixes them forces half the photographs to be cropped, and cropped faces show. If there is one vertical shot you really care about, save it for the cover.

Cropping. Every photo will be cropped to the calendar's format: leave room around the subject. A group photo with heads touching the edge loses somebody once cropped.

Choose each photo for the month it will hang in, not for how good it looks.

It sounds obvious put like that, and yet it is the most frequent mistake: the best photographs go at the front and the rest trail behind, producing a calendar with a beach in January and snow in July. Someone looking at it for a whole month notices, and it stops feeling made on purpose.

A few practical anchors:

• Seasons, first of all: cold light and interiors between December and February, bright outdoor shots from May to September.
• Moments in your business: for a company, the month of your trade fair, the season opening, the harvest. A client who recognises their month looks at it differently.
• Birthdays and anniversaries, if the calendar is for a family. A person's photograph in their birthday month is the detail that makes people say "they thought about it".
• December deserves the warmest image you have: it is the month the calendar is given, and the page everyone flips to first.

The grid looks like the automatic part, and it is where the mistakes that cannot be fixed after printing hide.

• Italian public holidays shift year to year for the movable ones: Easter, Easter Monday and Carnival move. Reuse last year's file untouched and Easter lands on the wrong day — it happens more often than you would think.
• Leap years: 2028 is one, 2027 is not. A February with an extra day means reprinting.
• The week starts on Monday in the Italian convention. Templates downloaded online are often American and start on Sunday: everything shifts by a day and the grid is wrong without looking wrong.
• Your own dates. This is the real reason to have a calendar personalised: company shutdowns, tax deadlines, fixtures, shift patterns, birthdays. Send us the list and we will suggest how to highlight them without cluttering the grid.

If we do the layout, we check the grid twice — but only you can supply the list of your dates, and it is worth preparing before you bring the photographs.

Desk means rigid card folded into an easel with a metal spiral at the top: it stands on its own, takes little room, flips one month at a time. It is the corporate gift format, the one that stays on a client's desk for twelve months — which is the whole reason custom calendars exist.

Wall is larger and the photograph matters more than the grid: offices, waiting rooms, workshops. Here the paper weight goes up, otherwise the sheet sags once hung.

On the spiral: metal costs a little more and gives that finished-product feel; coloured plastic is cheaper and holds just as well. On a calendar meant as a gift, metal shows.

One last thing, worth twice the technical advice: before running the full print, ask for a proof. A calendar is twelve pages seen by one person for an entire year, and a mistake invisible on screen — a crop that cuts off a head, a crooked date, one photograph less sharp than the others — shows immediately on paper and stays there until December.