How To Make Personalized Poster Calendars

By Author: Kaitlyn Miller
Total Articles: 90
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Would you like to give out custom calendars to your family and friends this Christmas? You can easily do the calendar printing at home if you have a computer and a printer. It would be nice if you have a laser printer at home but if not, a good quality inkjet printer will do, as long as it is big enough to print on a poster size. But if you want your calendars to look nice, then you can just do the layout and have it printed at a desktop publishing shop or a printing press.

Here is what you can do. You can do this layout using graphics design software like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw. However, if you do not know how to use either of the two programs, then you can also opt to use Microsoft Word.

Set the size of the page to 11” x 17” after you open a Word document. This size is also called the tabloid size. Save the file with an easy to remember filename. Look for the file of nice recent family photo that you had. Import this in your document. Adjust the size to fill up the space. Use constraints when enlarging photos so that they will be scaled and not looked stretched. Distorted photos will make your design ...
... very ugly.

Most printers can print a bleed page but if not, leave a margin of ¼ inch on all sides. If you know how, you can style the picture. In Microsoft Word, you can super impose a white outline that is about ½-inch smaller than the image all around. It is like the inner outline of the image. You can also write some text over it, like your greeting, the event, and all your names. You may also include the name of your recipient for a more personalized touch. However, you will have to change the name of the recipient every time you print a piece.

As for the calendar area, you can research online for many free calendar templates available. You can easily download them or copy them from the site. You can choose from the many options offered, such as having the weeks start on a Sunday or a Monday. You may also find that some templates have already colored the national holidays in red. You can find all these online. If you have made a choice, save the calendar as an image and insert it in your document below the photo. Just make sure that you copied a high-resolution template because you are making a poster size calendar.

Adjust the spaces of your design. The edge of the calendar outline should butt perfectly with the edge of the photo. Do not leave hanging edges because that will make your design look haphazardly done. Even if you are only giving them away to family and friends, the least that you can do is to make the calendar layout look nice.

Print your calendars on stock card so that it is will not be easily crumpled and it will really be like a poster that people can tack on their boards or wooden walls. If you are not able to print your custom calendars at home, then save your design on a thumb drive or CD and bring it at the print shop. They can always do poster sized calendar printing because most of them have big sized laser printers. You may just have to canvass for the price though.

For more information, you can visit this page on calendar printing