Super Easy 2012 Vector Calendar

With the new year which is approaching quickly anyone is looking for a beautiful brand new 2012 calendar.

The ideal and most flexible thing is preparing a vector one so that you can scale and transform it maintaining a good quality print.

A custom shaped calendar could also be a perfect new year gadget for your customers and you can set free your imagination to create wonderful ones.

During this tutorial I'll give you few steps and tools to get the goal and prepare your new 2012 calendar.

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe Photoshop/Adobe Illustrator CS+
Difficulty: Beginner
Estimated Completion Time: 1 hour

Download Source Files

Calendar Hexahedral Template from Cartonus.com
Watercolor Brush Set form Premium PSDFan

Step 1

For our purpose we firstly need to download the 2012 calendar template from cartonus.comCartonus’ site makes available for free a wide range of mock-up and templates for packaging or merchandising to download. The provided high quality files, in .ai and .eps formats, are really accurate, structured into  appropriately named layers easy to use and modify.
Once downloaded, open the 2012 Calendar Hexahedral .ai file in Illustrator.
The pre-set document size is for A4 print. Since we are talking of vector document you can resize it as you need without quality loss. I suggest shaping your calendar at least in A3 size, otherwise it will be really hard to read even for eagle eyed people.

Step 2

I want to apply a bit of color to the calendar. You can choose the palette as you want. In our example I’ve taken inspiration from seasonal photos, something of blue and snowy for the winter, light green for spring, orange and cold for the summer and brown and gold for autumn.
I’ve decided to create my palette by using the Adobe Kuler online tool.With Kuler you can create the palette from an image, picked up randomly from Flickr, or uploading your own shots.
By varying the Mood you can change the set of color having a brighter or darker or anyway different set.

Otherwise you can create your palette starting from a definite color. Input the basic color codification fields and play with the available options.
If you are registered to the service you can also save your palettes and download them as Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) files.

Step 3

Once you have saved and downloaded your swatches go back to Illustrator and open the swatches window. Click to open the options menu.

Step 4

Go to Open Swatch Library > Other Library and choose the folder where you have downloaded the .ASE files. The new swatch set will appear in your Swatch Window.
Add a new layer and rename it as ‘background squares’
Move it beneath the grid layer one

Step 5

Open the grid layer and look for the second level layers which contains the month backgrounds. Select them all then drag and drop those levels to the ‘background squares’ layer.
Check if you have moved all of them properly by toggling the layer visibility (the small eye icon on the left)
Perfect. You have now all the backgrounds on a different layer.

Step 6

Lock all the layers except for the backgrounds one. This will avoid you accidental date and numbers nudge.
Select one of the background rectangles by using the Direct Selection tool. Change the color as you want.

Step 7

Lock now the backgrounds layer and unlock the numbers grid one.

Step 8

By using the Selection tool draw a square in order to select more than one object in an area. Change the color of days and month.Do the same with all the twelve months.

Step 9

Select the complete grid layer content and change the font with one that is suitable with your personal style.

Step 10

Because of the template from Cartonus.com is fully editable, you can also change the 2012 color and customize the words by placing your logo or name.
This is our final result in Illustrator.
The first part of our customization is done. Let’s move now on Photoshop to add some extra decorations to our calendar.

Step 11

In this case I want to give a watercolor look to my calendar so I need a watercolor brush-set to download and use. To set up my tutorial I’ve used the brush that I’ve created exclusively for PSDFan and that, as premium member, you can download from here. PSDFan provides a lot of useful stuffs and great tutorials to the members for few dollars. The high quality of the goods worth the membership fee and I suggest to subscribe it to get these tools available for your graphics works. Otherwise you can find watercolor brush-sets available for free just surfing a little bit. Just remember to find high resolution brushes so that the printed result can be of high quality too.
Before importing the .ai file into Photoshop I strongly suggest being aware of the final size you need to print to be sure that you are going to work raster in the proper final size.
Run Photoshop and import the .ai document in a new document.
During this step pay attention to resolution and color mode settings to avoid a low quality artwork. In order to be print properly you have to select a resolution of 300 pixel/inch at least and CMYK as color mode. Once you have selected the right options click OK.

Step 12

The artwork will be opened in a new document which has transparent background. Rename this level as ‘calendar’.

Step 13

Add a new layer beneath the calendar one, rename it ‘bg’ (stays for background) and fill in with white.

Step 14

Add another empty layer between ‘bg’ and ‘calendar’ and name it ‘watercolor’.

Step 15

Select the Brush Tool and open its options. Go to Load Brushes and look for the watercolor brush set that you have previously downloaded. Add the brush to your available set.

Step 16

We need now changing some brushes options.  Open the Brush window and play with Shape Dynamics, Scattering and Color Dynamics. Here below you can find the settings that I’ve used.

Step 17

Brush all around also changing colors and varying brush size.

This is my final result.

free download ester liquori design 2012 PDF calendar (2.5 Mb)

Step 18

Cut the calendar shape by following the guidelines. If while you are cutting you are trying to guess what are useful for those two little hooks than go to Cartonus and, in the page dedicated to the calendar, you can also find a short video which shows you how to cutout and fold the shape to bring your calendar to life, solving also your curiosity about those hooks.
Here below a picture of mine ^__^.The calendar created during this tutorial is free to download. Grab it and Happy 2012!

free download ester liquori design 2012 PDF calendar (2.5 Mb)