Launching a Photography Calendar or the journey of starting a personal business.
The cover of my 2023 Scenic Landscapes Calendar
This year has marked a huge year of growth in my personal life, as clichéd as that sounds, a year to really remember! I’ve been on a course of mental, artistic and physical growth and maturity that has made me incredibly happy and I owe a lot of it to many of the new friends I have made this year. Having strong allies behind me is really important, the ones that motivate me to be a better person in every aspect, ones that keep me in check and help me when I need them. I’ve obviously made many of these new friends through the hiking group I frequent - Trek/Fit. It’s because of the hikers that I went on the very interesting journey of creating a wall calendar. Something that I hadn’t previously considered as I mainly focused on my Print Store but now I’ve really opened my eyes and I now see many new opportunities to capitalise on my photography and filmmaking skills.
Creating a custom calendar is definitely a new challenge and thought me a lot about design, photography and how to run a business. The idea came about quite late and I didn’t have much time to faff about as we were nearing the year end, apparently printing suppliers get incredibly busy to the run of Christmas so I had a definitive deadline on the run up to the holidays.
After scouring the internet for various calendar suppliers I quickly understood that I wasn’t very happy of the solutions and availability of calendar designs. When I started looking for the right supplier I did what any business owner would look for - something that is cost effective, easy to implement and which is good quality to be happy to put my name behind. In terms of the actual design I found that most suppliers have their own online templates where I can just drag and drop my photos and be done. The issue was that I really didn’t like any of the design templates, they didn’t represent my brand sensibilities in any way which meant I had figure out how to design a calendar and quickly!
The 2023 Scenic Landscapes Calendar
Creating a custom calendar is definitely a new challenge and thought me a lot about design, photography and how to conduct business.
A view into Canva’s design tools.
How does one design a calendar or anything else? I turned to Canva! If you haven’t heard of Canva well I only learned about it very recently but it seems like its becoming my go-to design platform for social promo content and graphics but one can do so much. I see that they are on a path of major expansion to their capabilities and even adding those super fashionable text-to-image AI generators. I find many different uses here and fortunately they have a massive library of calendar templates which I could adapt however I wished. My biggest concern was about not having to create the actual calendar dates and grid for every month from scratch. Fortunately there are ready made templates updated for 2023 from which I could grab the actual months and drop in my project and get designing. I kept everything quite minimal and as I wanted to focus on the photos.
The design tools in Canva
Talking about the photos - it was great looking back on the year. It made me feel quite happy to reminisce on all the adventures from travels and all the good memories. It was a bit hard to pick 12 photos out of thousands but I managed to match most photos with the feeling of each month. The cover I selected was from a November hike to the South Downs National Park, actually quite a few photos on the calendar were from there during various points of the year - sping to autumn. The South Downs is actually a massive park stretching through big parts of Southern England.
Using the guides inside of Canva I managed to set a template for where I wanted elements to sit and I could really quickly iterate on colours and fonts and change them as I refined the calendar design. Once I had the right template I managed to fairly quickly create the rest of the months. I want to open up a little bit about the process as usually people only get to see the final result of products, photographs etc. The reality with this is that I went through about 6 major design changes while settling on this one. I was open to feedback so I sent the designs to friends I trusted and who I felt had good taste. I went from a landscape oriented calendar that featured mostly the photos and deemphasised the calendar bit but that was quickly shot down by my trustees. I then picked a wiro-bound approach where the calendar is split in half with a spiral. I was quite settled on that design and everyone I showed it too was happy. I found a great UK supplier who had good prices for bulk orders and ordered my first proof with them to see how things looked in my hands. I did my first physical proof but when I got I didn’t like the hole punch approach as it felt a bit cheap and like it won’t hold up for a year. I decided to change and have a solid A3 format with a spiral at the top and a little ear for hanging on a wall.
Once I reached my final design I placed a small batch order with my supplier Team Calendars who I found to be very professional, quick to print even during the busy holidays period, and with great value. Before I received my first orders I had to think about the next step - shipping!
I run my website on Squarespace which is one of the most popular website builders out there. And because of that many services have special integration with Squarespace websites - to my pleasant surprise Royal Mail included! They have a special service called Click&Drop which is tailored for businesses who ship things in bulk. The service has an integration with Squarespace which means that once a customer places an order on my website, Click&Drop automatically picks that up along with all the relevant information such as the customers name, address and telephone number and creates a database that I can use to batch apply postage labels, pay and then print them in any office. This has made it very easy for me to deal with shipments at scale and have a trusted company handle my customers orders.
I sent my first batch of calendars to my clients just before I flew to my parents home for the holidays. I’ve already heard back and it’s an amazing feeling to have happy customers message me with photos of something I’ve created living on their kitchen walls that’s going to be with them for a whole year. This is something very personal that they will use to mark important events and dates for them. I feel very humbled because of this and very grateful for the great support I’ve received in these new endeavours. All of this has really inspired me to be the best artist I can. I see a great opportunity of growth and as someone said:
The point of being an artist is that you may live.... You won't arrive. It is an endless search.” ― Sherwood Anderson.
It’s been a very interesting journey doing this and I have learned a lot. I’ve starting to think more like a business owner - what my goals are, what type of customers do I want to have and how to create meaningful experiences for them but also how to deal with suppliers, shipping, profit margins etc. I’m already very excited about the 2024 calendar and the adventures that would contribute to the photos used for it. I would love to scale up and from the things I’ve learned before I will definitely make a head start towards the end of summer for that.
Soon I will be launching a new service on my website which I am very excited about which would mean I would be able to work with people more directly and produce some great content together. I’m looking forward to telling y’all about that in 2023! There’s some hints already across the website!
Thanks for reading. Have a happy and prosperous 2023!
The tools I use
