Over the past week, I’ve been helping a non-profit put together a yearly thank-you calendar. I’ve been using Scribus, and so far, it’s been going very smoothly.
Scribus includes a nifty “Calendar Wizard” that lets you generate date grids for any month or year. But though the Calendar Wizard works well, I found that it didn’t support all of the features that I would like. Therefore, I spent a little bit of time and put together my own template.
In addition to a date grid, the template includes modified styles for the weeks, days and months (set to use the Linux Libertine typeface); the lunar phases; common North American Holidays; and miniature calendars for the preceding and following months. I’ve also added image placeholders for all of the different pages.
Using this template, you should be able to create a handsome, interesting calendar in almost no-time. Though I had a “fine arts” feel in mind, it seems to work well with funny cat-pictures. The sample pages shown here were all created from the template.
(The images in the examples were taken from Wikimedia Commons and from the Creative Commons photos posted on Flickr, though I converted them to black/white. You can probably tell that I’ve been pretty influenced by Nick Brandt. These are not the images that will be used in the thank-you calendar. Just pictures I’ve been practicing photo-manipulation techniques on with GIMP.)
Because it might be of interest/benefit to other people, I thought that I would post the template here. The download file below includes everything required to make the template work.
To install, copy it to your Scribus Templates folder. (The templates folder is included in your Scribus user folder. For Linux users, this is usually a folder called “.scribus” in your home directory. If you wish, you can change it from the “Preferences” dialog.) Because the template was created with Scribus 1.3.9, you will need that version to make it work (or, alternatively, you will need to use the SVN version).
Downloads
2011 Scribus Calendar Template (Formal). A formal calendar template for users of Scribus covering January to December 2011. The template includes a calendar grid, the lunar phases, miniature calendars for the preceding and following months, and common holidays. By default, it uses Linux Libertine as the typeface, though this can be adjusted using the available styles. (Typeface bundled with the template.)
The template is released under a creative commons, attribution, share and share-a-like license. If you make any changes or enhancements to the layut, please be kind enough to provide a link in the forum. That way, everyone can benefit.
Example Layouts
