| Calendar's Anyone |
Have you ever done one of those custom calendar’s before? You know where you take one or more photos and build a calendar with them to give away to someone. Well I have seen these before but I had never tried it, that is until this weekend.
I found Staples to be about the cheapest with costs starting at $9.99 so I decided to give it a try. I put together a calendar with a picture on the cover and a picture for every month except one month that had two pictures. It was real easy to do and I had no problems. I inserted some custom dates and submitted the calendar online. Piece of cake.
I received a call that things were ready to pick up the following day at 6:00 but I was busy standing around outside for 2 ½ hours in mid 20s temperature but that is a different story.
When I picked it up I was a little disappointed. Now if I had payed attention I would have noticed that the program cropped my photos for me. With a little bit of work I could have either cropped the photos the way I wanted or adjust things so it would not crop. Well it bothered me enough that I redid things and set it up so the pictures would not be cropped. I pick that up this morning.
Now I decided to look around a little more and I found Zazzle. It was amazing what they allowed me to do. You had a choice of three different sizes of calendars, a single page or a page per month, about 20 different actual calendar layouts, a cover photo and a back page, etc. They did not seem to be a size limit to how big a photo could be. Staples would not allow anything larger than 4 megs which several of my pictures were. They also made it real easy to fit the photo so there would be no cropping. You could also set a background color per page if you wanted. You were able to have more than one photo on a page if you wanted and you could do anything you wanted with those photos. Staples only had three templates to use for placing photos. You could insert 1 or more text messages on the calendar too in tons of colors and fonts.
The down side. First cost, it was double the cost of Staples. You have to do all the work yourself. You can not just drop a photo on a page and it looks good. You have to size it and place it where you want the pictures. When you get use to it that was not to bad. The text was easy to insert so if you wanted to tell people what the photo was, no problem but the bad part you had to decide what size, color, font, and position. So that is flexible but I had to keep setting the font I wanted and the size and it was tricky trying to get things placed to were it was safe from being truncated in the printing process. What made it worst was you were viewing the calendar as this little tiny thing so it was hard to tell if you had thing placed where you wanted without blowing it up. When it was blown up you could only look at it and not customize it. The program was also a little unstable as I managed to crash things twice. It was then that I discovered you can save your work and I did that every time I got a month finished. I also noticed the program was doing an automatic backup for me too. Once I found out how to back up my work the program never failed again, go figure. To put special dates on this calendar you needed to place wording on the calendar yourself. On Staples you just told it what words you wanted on which day and it did it for you... much easier for Staples. One thing that bothered me too no calendar layout had those little prior or next month calendar inserts on the calendar page. I like those little inserts.
Anyway it took me some time to put together a calendar with Zazzle but then I had a little learning to do. But I think the calendar I put together was a much better looking calendar. Was it worth the extra cost... you know since it lets me build it the way I want I think it is worth while.
Anyway I just thought I would share. If you want to create a simple calendar Staples works well as would OfficeMax and probably any office supply place. If you want to do something more there are options for that to such as Zazzle. Just do not forget, if you are doing this for a gift sometime you need some lead time to get the calendar back.
Well off to work. Have a great week.
I found Staples to be about the cheapest with costs starting at $9.99 so I decided to give it a try. I put together a calendar with a picture on the cover and a picture for every month except one month that had two pictures. It was real easy to do and I had no problems. I inserted some custom dates and submitted the calendar online. Piece of cake.
I received a call that things were ready to pick up the following day at 6:00 but I was busy standing around outside for 2 ½ hours in mid 20s temperature but that is a different story.
When I picked it up I was a little disappointed. Now if I had payed attention I would have noticed that the program cropped my photos for me. With a little bit of work I could have either cropped the photos the way I wanted or adjust things so it would not crop. Well it bothered me enough that I redid things and set it up so the pictures would not be cropped. I pick that up this morning.
Now I decided to look around a little more and I found Zazzle. It was amazing what they allowed me to do. You had a choice of three different sizes of calendars, a single page or a page per month, about 20 different actual calendar layouts, a cover photo and a back page, etc. They did not seem to be a size limit to how big a photo could be. Staples would not allow anything larger than 4 megs which several of my pictures were. They also made it real easy to fit the photo so there would be no cropping. You could also set a background color per page if you wanted. You were able to have more than one photo on a page if you wanted and you could do anything you wanted with those photos. Staples only had three templates to use for placing photos. You could insert 1 or more text messages on the calendar too in tons of colors and fonts.
The down side. First cost, it was double the cost of Staples. You have to do all the work yourself. You can not just drop a photo on a page and it looks good. You have to size it and place it where you want the pictures. When you get use to it that was not to bad. The text was easy to insert so if you wanted to tell people what the photo was, no problem but the bad part you had to decide what size, color, font, and position. So that is flexible but I had to keep setting the font I wanted and the size and it was tricky trying to get things placed to were it was safe from being truncated in the printing process. What made it worst was you were viewing the calendar as this little tiny thing so it was hard to tell if you had thing placed where you wanted without blowing it up. When it was blown up you could only look at it and not customize it. The program was also a little unstable as I managed to crash things twice. It was then that I discovered you can save your work and I did that every time I got a month finished. I also noticed the program was doing an automatic backup for me too. Once I found out how to back up my work the program never failed again, go figure. To put special dates on this calendar you needed to place wording on the calendar yourself. On Staples you just told it what words you wanted on which day and it did it for you... much easier for Staples. One thing that bothered me too no calendar layout had those little prior or next month calendar inserts on the calendar page. I like those little inserts.
Anyway it took me some time to put together a calendar with Zazzle but then I had a little learning to do. But I think the calendar I put together was a much better looking calendar. Was it worth the extra cost... you know since it lets me build it the way I want I think it is worth while.
Anyway I just thought I would share. If you want to create a simple calendar Staples works well as would OfficeMax and probably any office supply place. If you want to do something more there are options for that to such as Zazzle. Just do not forget, if you are doing this for a gift sometime you need some lead time to get the calendar back.
Well off to work. Have a great week.
Posted by barman at 8:02 AM::
Lemme see the calender!!!!
my mom did this a few times on her own computer. she's ahead of her time.
You know I would send you a link G-Man but I can not seem to get it to work. If I can than I will.
Lime. I have thought your Mom was ahead of her time many times. She was quit the streat smart person for sure.
So are you gonna share with us what your calendar looks like?
and Im sorry but what is zazzle?
Gab I am not sure how I might show it but we will see. Zazzle is just a web site that sells a lot of services, many of which are things working with photos. One such part of their service is making custom calendars. They are at www.zazzle.com. I will play with snapfish tonight and see what the whole process is like.
I wrote the people that do Zazzle with some suggestions. They basically blew me off. I guess I will not be using their product. I did do the same calendar with SnapFish last night. It was much easier to use and could do more than Staples. Of course it is not as capable as Zazzle but I think it is a great compromised. Good news, anyone should be able to produce a decent calendar with SnapFish.
I used to buy blank calendars from CurrentInc.com
You would then glue stick a picture on each month, or series of pictures, or even draw some of the months!
Believe it or not, I used to hand make a calendar for my sister every year. I would hand draw each month, all the numbers and months etc. Then I would do paper collages, watercolors, pastels, fabric or whatever...something different on each month.
Guess which month was always my favorite?
October, because of Halloween of course!
Have an awesome Thanksgiving, Bryan
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