Anyone ever had calendars printed?

Whitney Simms

For inktober I’m going to make a calendar. I’m going to let each month have three days worth on prompts. Have you guys ever had one printed?

Nyrryl Cadiz

@Whitney-Simms this is really smart!

Kristin Wauson

I used to make two calendars per year (for 10 years!) for my job when I was a graphic designer. It was very tedious and they are kind of expensive to make if you go the traditional route. They were printed on an old school printing press and I designed the layouts from scratch in InDesign, but I bet there are easier ways (hopefully cheaper ways) to do it now using automatic templates and stuff and print on demand. I think Kiri Leonard Ostergaard (not sure if I spelled that right) did a unicorn calendar a while back. You could google and see if she posted any info about how she did it. If I recall she did a kickstarter to pay for it.

Whitney Simms

@Kristin-Wauson YeAh. I’ve got to google it. I’m hoping it won’t be too bad. I’ll even check out the local printers for front and back, 14 pages color, spiral bound. I kinda want to pitch it as 12 prints with a calendar attached! You can frame them each month after you use the calendar. Who knows. But I want to create a monthly pattern that would work for cards, a calendar and fabric. I just need a color scheme that would work for all the seasons! Yikes

ArtofAleksey

Idk much about the business end of this, I heard from “comic lab podcast” that calendars arent the best idea as a product mainly because after it’s a different year, you have to account for all the loss in profits on the ones you can never sell again. Not that you cant reuse the art but that you cant sell those anymore and have to print new ones every time. They take a lot of art, have to change it to keep it interesting and you’re never sure how many to print. Having never tried this myself i have no idea on what solutions you have found and what works but I wanted to bring this up because I got excited about a calendar idea until i heard this side of things.

Whitney Simms

@Aleksey yeah! I totally get that. Calendars are risky. It would be a super small amount. I may even print them at home. The big inktober item would be a set of 16 cards. 12 of the monthly designs and then maybe 4 birthday cards. People always ask if i have a set of birthday cards! The 31 set was a beast to print last year! Not everyone uses notecards, so I’m hoping to broaden my clients to offer a few more items. Like a buy the set and you get so much off the total. I may even get “pre orders” to know about how many to print. Then I was thinking a set of 5x7 prints for the year would something else to use the designs on. That way you can change out the design for the season. Fun right!!! And if the calendar is too expensive, I may only offer it as an add on once they’ve bought something that I make more profit from.

Those are my thoughts. Did I leave out anything that may be an issue with the calendar? Please, I’m all ears.

I hope my little patterns are going to be cute. I better get stepping on my 600 thumbnails. Ha!

ArtofAleksey

@Whitney-Simms ohhh i see so your main goal would be something useful to a greater clientele and a calendar would be like a “limited amount offer get them while supplies last” sorta thing? Cause that’s pretty clever

Whitney Simms

@Aleksey absolutely! Totally limited time offer. I have people that like my work, but don’t send notecards. Honestly, I don’t either. I can never remember to mail the things. And I haven’t had much success with prints or originals... yet. Ha! I really love stationary, so I think my work fits best on that vs hangable work. And no one has wall space in their kitchen these days. The floor plans are too open. And I draw a lot of food!

ArtofAleksey

@Whitney-Simms Id like to get better at drawing food for my comic idea.

TwiggyT

I had a calendar of family photos printed by VistaPrint, and they did an OK job. The good thing about using a print-on-demand service is that there's no overhead and they often have the calendar grid pre-designed...that's a life-saver. I think Redbubble offers calendars, and they probably offer you a little more control over the design than Vistaprint, but I could be mistaken. I'm sure there are other POD services that offer them, too, if you look around a bit.

Whitney Simms

@TwiggyT thanks for the tip. I haven’t found too many that are POD. Just order 50 or 100. But I don’t think I’ll sell that many. I’ll check out those two sites. As long as I make a little profit we are all good. I just want them to look pretty

MirkaH

I thought about getting calendars done too, but its expensive, and then you have the useless overstock of the ones that didnt sell. If you have a nice printer at home, would it be possible to design a nice one, printed on nice paper, and then you only print out the ones that you sell, maybe making the calendar a postcard size?