Cover...

January, February, March...

July, August, September...

April, May, June...

October, November, December...

Delivery...

The completed calendars were delivered to Sue on Monday 5th December - the day of the final Brighouse Pride meeting before Christmas. Perfect timing!

Final pages...

It took a few weeks before Gary returned from holiday and this delayed me from completing the artwork. Eventually, Sue and Gary managed to get enough advertisers interested and I was able to complete the final pages and sent them to the printers on November 3rd.

Netherton Cross Printer...

I visited the printer armed with a set of proofs, my laptop and the artwork and all relevant files on a CD-ROM.

This is the stage at which you can suddenly find the printer cannot use your artwork and you have to redo something or, occasionally, start again. Hands on hearts time!

Thankfully, they said that everything was in order and they would begin printing ASAP.

The relief I felt was immense.

Nearly there...

It took a few days for me to draw all the adverts and place them into the relevant spaces; several of the companies had specified that they had to go onto a particular month. I played around with the positioning of them to ensure that each month had a variety of different trades displayed and that the adverts complemented each other.

I then carefully placed the scanned images of the children's pictures into the correct month - they had already been decided upon by Pride members - and added the correct child's name. This in itself was an issue that had not been fully resolved as we were still awaiting a decision on whether we could use the full name of each child or only the first name. Plus, we were still waiting for a definitive list of all the names anyway! The details eventually came through and the full names were allowed by the school.

The cover was designed quite quickly - the only problem was in deciding on a title for the calendar. I chose to call it "Brighouse 2009 - our town through young eyes". Slightly corny, but in the abscence of any firm details from the Pride, I had to use something or the cover would be, at best, anonymous and possible even confusing.

The first 9 months plus cover were now ready to show to Sue. I took a trip to her office armed with a set of prints and my Apple Mac to see her. Sue was delighted with the look of the pages and gave the thumbs up for me to send the artwork to Netherton Cross.

I returned to my studio and prepared the files for print and burnt a CD to take to the printers.

Getting somewhere...

I set up the first file for the artwork in InDesign, using an A4 page with 3mm bleed all round - as stipulated by the printers. I then created the boxes required to hold the various components required on each page - images, adverts, log, dates etc. These were then arranged to suit the demands of my client and to make best use of the available area.

I then set about choosing a font to reflect the mood and style of the children's pictures. I believed that a Sans Serif or Serif font would be too "formal" for the theme and looked at many handwriting type of fonts. I eventually settled on "Handwriting Dakota Regular", as this had just the right shape and character that I wanted.

Using Illustrator, I redraw the Brighouse Pride logo from a scan I had made of an earlier calendar; this took several hours for me to accurate reproduce it. This was then placed into the correct box in the InDesign document.

The file was then copied and renamed for each month - January through December - with another file made for the cover; this would be the one page that had a different style.

The file was then converted into a PDF and emailed to Sue for her inspection. She replied that it looked great and was exactly what the wanted. I had set the artwork on both a white background and on a yellow background for Sue to choose which she wanted. The yellow background was much better for showcasing the images and complemented the theme of primary school and, therefore, Sue decided to go with this one.

Illustrator was also used for creating the artwork of the advertisers so far confirmed and I set to on these. Some were easier to do than others, with an average of 45 minutes taken on each one. Several adverts from the earlier calendar were obviously put together by the printers as some of them shared similar choices of fonts and the designs were very close. As time was important, I made the decision to redo some of the adverts myself as I did not have sufficient time to contact all of the companies to discuss their needs.

I also rang the printers to discuss the timing difficulties with them. They gave me a boost by saying that if I could get the majority of the pages to them within the week, then they could accept the final pages once we had filled all the advertising space. This was a great help to me as we had by now managed to get enough advertisers on board to fill 9 pages.