It hit me on December 30th: we still didn’t have a calendar ready for 2013. So I spent a couple of hours on New Year’s Eve morning and a few more the next evening putting together our fourth homemade calendar. As always, we’re sharing the template so you can download and personalize it with your own photos and captions. We’ve been doing this every year since 2010, evolving the design along the way.
Over the years these calendars have become more decorative than strictly practical — a small tradition we look forward to each year. The format started in 2010 as a long, skinny layout with bright, bold text. In subsequent years we experimented with different concepts: playful phrases and inside jokes, personal facts tied to each month’s number, and last year we introduced photos, pairing each month with a favorite black-and-white image from that time of the previous year.
This year’s design blends several of those ideas: witty little lines, personal touches, and black-and-white portraits. The result feels like a culmination of the past few years — playful, intimate, and photo-forward.
I’m biased, but this calendar is my favorite so far. The captions are mostly quotes from our little girl, culled from a series of short clippings we keep called “Clara Conversations.” Those lines remind me how funny and surprising she can be. While the Instagram-style images and the spoken quotes don’t always come from the exact same moment, together they capture the personality of our chatty kid — and they make me a little sentimental every time I flip a page. One favorite: when Sherry said, “Helmets keep the head safe,” Clara insisted, “Helmets keep the head face!”
As in past years, I created a downloadable, editable version of the calendar that you can customize in Photoshop. Each layer corresponds to a month, so the easiest workflow is to show one month’s layer at a time, add your photo and text, then hide that layer and move on to the next. If you’re new to Photoshop, there are plenty of tutorials and guides available online that walk through basic layer editing and text placement.
For typography, the calendar uses a combination of a scripty typeface (similar to “The Only Exception”) for the quotes and a bold display font (like “Homestead”) for the month headings. The month headings are already set in the document so you won’t need to change them unless you want a different look for your own project.
Below you can see all twelve months at a glance. Because the captions are a little small in the overview image, here’s a clear list of the quotes we used — starting with January:
- “Mommy’s awake! Now I can scream!”
- “He has pretty hair like a lady.” (About Scar from The Lion King)
- “It’s Cinderinda!” (What she calls Cinderella)
- “I’m a little teapot, short and shout. Here is my cupcake, here is my shout.”
- “Don’t be shy. Be friendly!”
- “I smell like strawberries!” (Her reply when we said she smelled like she had a dirty diaper)
- “Helmets keep the head face!”
- “Baa baa, black sheep, have you any chickens?”
- “We have to go to Home Depot to change your diaper.” (Said to one of her dolls)
- “I don’t have a beard. I just have a little chin.”
- “Daddy’s workin’. Don’t bobber him.”
- “Her name will be Santa Claus and she will bring me toys.” (Said while pretending to have a little sister)
Printing is simple: we use standard cardstock in our home printer (an HP Photosmart C4780). After printing, a quick trim with scissors and a hole punch at the top makes each page ready to hang. The finished result is a personal, photo-filled calendar that doubles as wall art.
What about you — how are you keeping track of dates this year? Do you prefer a decorative printed calendar in one spot and a separate functional calendar elsewhere, or have you gone fully digital? If you try making your own custom calendar, it’s a fun, low-cost way to preserve memories and make a practical item feel special.