Is this not the best calendar that has ever existed? Back in November, Hank Green and Jenni Powell emailed me asking if I could design the Men of YouTube calendar they were putting together to sell during the Project for Awesome and of course I had to do it. If you didn’t manage to get one during the Project for Awesome, they’re still available for a short time over on DFTBA. Keep reading for more photos and some thoughts on the design process!
The cover of the calendar was tricky, since we didn’t want to highlight one photo above all of the others, but we also didn’t want to include every single photo, which would ruin the surprise throughout the year. I ended up turning to the website of the men’s magazine GQ for some inspiration and designing this stripey design with some nice typography, which I think was a good solution to the problem.
Open up the calendar and you’ll see a photo of a supersexy YouTuber for each month. Most of the photos were taken and edited by Nikita Bogolyubov, though I ended up editing this amazing photo of John and Hank Green in togas.
(Also, that’s just a giant binder clip. Each page of the calendar is normal letter-sized.)
We also included every nerdy holiday and event we could think of, including VidCon, LeakyCon, Esther Day, and even Talk Like a Pirate Day! I didn’t want the calendar to get too busy with icons and numbers everywhere, so I had the idea to replace each number of a holiday with an icon that represents it, and changing the colors as well.
The back cover went through several revisions as well, but then I had the idea to include a yearlong cutout calendar as a little bonus, so now you can have YouTube men everywhere in your life.
This calendar was so fun to design, and I’m so glad it’s a thing that exists in the world. Remember, there are a limited number still available at DFTBA if you want to get one yourself! Thanks so much for reading, and stay tuned until next year to find out who gets featured in 2014! (If it happens. Don’t quote me on that. I don’t actually know yet if it will.)
