This year I was happy to be asked to design the Men and Women of YouTube Calendars again. We sold them during the 2013 Project for Awesome and raised a ton of money for charity. I had a lot of fun putting them together, so keep reading for more insights into how I designed them.
This was the first year we did a Women of YouTube Calendar, and I love how it came out. I didn’t want to make the cover too stereotypically pink and girly, so I chose purple as the main color, while the men’s calendar is orange.
All of the photos are so fantastic. I didn’t take any of the photos in the calendar, but I was eagerly anticipating getting each one in my inbox as I was designing it.
Fun Fact: the photos on the cover of the calendars are mostly just the first photos that were handed in. Anyone who’s not on the cover you can yell at for being late with their picture ;)
As sad as I am that Watsky wasn’t on the calendar this year (my 2013 calendar still says February just so I can keep his picture on my wall), all of the photos we did feature are so great.
This year for the interior of the calendar, I wanted to design it so you could write in the boxes any events or plans that you had personally, rather than just having the large calendar numbers like last year. I pulled each month’s color from a spot in the photo, and kept the holidays at full opacity while the other days were lowered to 50%.
I think Felicia Day’s photo may be my favorite across both calendars. I love that she just had that outfit ready to pull out for this photo.
We included all of the basic holidays, but then also some nerdy days of interest, like the The Fault in Our Stars movie release on June 6th.
Anywhere that there’s a multi-day event, I just extended a line out through the duration of the event. It gets a little confusing when lots of events happen on top of each other, but I think you’ll be able to figure it out.
I had to convert all of the symbols to one-color white images, which was a little tricky for the more complex logos, but I think I got all of them looking alright. Who’s planning on doing Nanowrimo at the end of this year?
Grace’s page is the only one without a URL, but that’s because I was designing it while she was going through the difficulty with her network. She’s no longer DailyGrace, so make sure you unsubscribe from that channel and subscribe to her new channel itsgrace.
Even though Men and Women of ___ Calendars usually imply scantily dressed people, ours is completely safe for work. Craig is the only person who even took off his shirt, but with that body, how could we keep it hidden away from the world?
I knew a lot of people were going to buy both calendars and hang them next to each other, so I made sure the colors between the months on each calendar didn’t clash or match too closely.
And that’s the 2014 Men and Women of YouTube Calendars! Thank you so much to Laura Chernikoff for producing it and keeping everyone organized. I can’t wait to see what we do next year so I can keep growing the collection. As of right now, I don’t think you can buy the 2014 calendars, but the 2013 calendar is on sale at DFTBA for $5, so even though you can’t use it as a calendar anymore, you can still pull out high-quality photos of some of your favorite YouTubers.
Thank you so much to all of the YouTubers who posed for the calendars. Be sure to check out all of their channels:
SourceFed, Kingsley, Shay Carl, Caspar Lee, Rhett & Link, Troye Sivan, Tyler Oakley, Dan & Phil, Hank & John Green, Our2ndLife, Craig Benzine, Charles Trippy
Alli Trippy, Grace Helbig, Tessa Violet, Ashley Clements, Emily Graslie, Meghan Tonjes, Mamrie Hart, Felicia Day, Hannah Hart, SourceFed, Emma Blackery, Justine Ezarik
If you liked this calendar and want more calendars in your life, you can also check out my Don’t Break the Chain calendar for 2014. Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you all have a great year!
