If you’ve been following my blog for a long time now, you know that back in the day, I used to do tons of graphic design work for John and Hank Green. Now that they have lots of employees to do that kind of work for them full-time, I don’t do as much for them anymore, but they still ask me to design their calendar every year and I am always happy to. This year, they decided to make an entire calendar of Pizza John artwork sent in by nerdfighters. The calendar is available for a limited time on DFTBA for $20, so head over there if you want to get one, and keep reading to see more photos of the inside.
The inside of the calendar is similar to last year except that I changed the font and the stylization of the boxes. I also got rid of the icons that represented each holiday – they seemed a bit busy when I looked at it again this year.
I pulled each month’s colors from the artwork for that month. The artwork in this photo is by Melanie LaMay.
September’s artwork might be my favorite in the whole calendar. It’s by artist Anja Misiol.
I didn’t have any input in the actual printing of the calendar, but I will say that I am very impressed with the production this year. Each page is printed on high-quality matte paper that would be easy to hang up and write on. The pages are held together with staples.
I checked and double checked every single month to make sure all of the days were numbered correctly and all of the holidays were spelled right. If you find any typos, please don’t tell me!
The back of the calendar might be my favorite part of all! John and Hank opened up artwork submissions to all nerdfighters and chose their 13 favorites for the month pages (it also includes January 2020). But, to make sure everyone felt appreciated, we included all of the submissions on the back of the calendar, which I arranged into rainbow order because I’m me and everything needs to be sorted by color.
The header on this page as well as the “Calendar” text on the front cover were also made by me. I used Illustrator to slightly skew the lines from the font Gotham and then rounded all of the corners by hand in order to make them match the original Pizza John design as closely as possible.
All of the proceeds from this calendar go to the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck and the Project for Awesome, so head over to DFTBA to pick one up for yourself while they’re still available!
