Design a 2021 Calendar Page

Your calendar design makes maximum use of both photo and dates by enlarging them to their full potential. The pastel-coloured, Worcestershire morning mist is used as a background light enough to make the calendar dates stand out. Being so large there’s enough room within each rectangular space to allow for notes of engagements to be written. The only thing stopping a top ten entry were your light dates, left mistakenly visible behind the blank spaces.

What a great atmospheric calendar. The petrified, oak forest of Mundon, dramatically captures your Hobbit themed almanac. Featuring September as the birthday month of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, and the same month the book was published in 1937, is an apt choice. I wonder if the director could have saved time and money by visiting this part of Essex instead of travelling across the world to New Zealand to film the Hobbit trilogy. Selecting a fantasy font compliments your sepia-tinged, Middle Earth landscape and cleverly authenticates the calendar’s storybook setting.

This is a beautifully-constructed, richly-coloured still life of a Thanksgiving table full of enticingly-tempting food and wine. The horizontal autumn shot is ideal for the run of calendar dates displayed, in one continuous line, over the top of your scrumptious still life setting. It’s unusual to see days of the week positioned underneath dates (rather than on top) but that’s exactly what makes your attractive text that little bit different.

Your series of impressionistic calendar photos immediately stopped me in my tracks. I particularly liked this one of the solitary tree growing out of what looks like a lavender field. The sunset sky reminds me of a JMW Turner expressionistic, watercolour painting with the tree resembling a tall ship sailing over a stormy blue sea. Your idea of including two small months either side of January is a very practical addition. Well done for using artistic licence to transform your photo into a work of art.

This beautifully designed animal calendar is packed full of interesting information yet has enough white space around it to allow the page to breath. I like the use of the pale orange taken from the spotted, chital deer, colour palette. There’s also a very welcome distribution, of light, medium and bold text throughout the layout. This very peaceful dawn image would be a delight to look at every time one wanted to confirm what day of the month it was.

What struck me about this calendar design was the use of dual languages. The full horizontal stretch of the Cantonese and English languages have been used to good effect complimenting the vertical coloured lights of the photograph. Your panoramic night shot of the Lek Yuan Bridge reflected in Hong Kong’s Shing Mun River is a dynamic choice for your ultra wide calendar. One would never get tired looking at the intricate, almost abstract, photo details throughout the month it was hanging on the wall.

Early November is a the perfect month to capture the last remnants of rich, autumnal colours. You have made good use of this time of year with your beautiful photo of gold and red leaves bidding farewell to the end of the season. The large Art Deco typeface set against silhouetted branches looks like a line of complimentary-coloured foliage. The black base supporting your calendar photo works well to separate the white weekdays from the red weekends - even viewed at a distance.

Apart from being a good photograph within a strong page layout I chose your entry because you were the only photographer to create a fully assembled calendar. The inclusion of the spiral bound, wall mounting was that extra piece of originality I always look for when judging a photo challenge. Paying attention to detail by adding a realistic finishing touch your entry has deservedly secured a top ten place.

Any excuse to display a piece of abstract art on a wall is a good excuse. To combine it with the functionality of a calendar is a very reasonable excuse. Your photo, created with the help of Photoshop, lends itself incredibly well as the background to your reversed out numbers and letters. This is a far cry from the landscape and animal themed entries and I selected it because, apart from being an aesthetically pleasing image, you purposely created something completely different.