Finland Calendar

Design Research ・ Typography

The goal of this project was to create a calendar designated to a specific city. I chose Finland, Helsinki and including the aspect of the Northern Lights which is unique to that country.

Overall, this project took a lot of trials, reiterations and printings to come up with the final product. It was a very challenging yet fun, detail-orientated project.

Requirements for this project:

Events/Holidays
Highest/Lowest Weather Temperature
Sunrise/Sunset Time
Longitude/Latitude
Language (if not English)
A Unique detail

Softwares:

Adobe Illustrator

Draft One

This was one of the first ideas I had come up when brainstorming calendar ideas. At the start of this project, I struggled a lot of choosing one path and choosing one idea to commit and improve on. But, this calendar idea began the spark to my design process.

Draft Two

I had many concepts in my head for this project and so, it was hard to focus with one concise design.

This idea meant to imitate a (star) compass that only showed the important events of each month. It was printed in 3 layers (outer, middle, inner). It meant to move in circular motion.

It was an unconventional calendar idea but it missed a lot of important aspects of a calendar. While the execution wasn't perfect, the idea of following an unconventional route continued.

After much reflection and feedback, the process began to follow a linear route.

12 slots to represent each month, these are shots of process work to get the lining and point size correct.

Outline layer (part of the planning process). This helped with alignments.

The front cover. The dots in the middle are meant to represent stars. The idea was that there would be holes and when spinning to a month, certain dots would show up showing a constellation that is seen during that month.

This part of the process was trial and error to get correct alignments and refining the design of the calendar.

The biggest challenge was integrating the stars and finding a plausible way to incorporate it into the design. I struggled with aligning them properly to work with the calendar. Incorporation of the temperature and sunrise/sunset time also went through different placements in the design.

Final Design

The final layout of the calendar with all elements of the project incorporated with the design.

The constellations are presented subtly behind the days of the week (See close-up photos below) with the name of the constellation at the bottom. The language is in English and Finnish. There is a slot for each element: