Email received last week via my contact form:

Corrie,

Love all the forms you’ve designed. Any practical advice or resources for a beginning form maker?

You rock,

Bob

First, thanks for the kind words, Bob!

In no particular order, here are all my thoughts about making forms.

• Forms for me: I make forms that address a need for me. That means that it’s something I will actually use, test, and revise. This also generally means that the form might be useful for someone else. I haven’t made forms on request for someone else yet, so I’m not sure what that process would look like. Making a form that someone might find theoretically useful seems hard to me — it seems easier to make a truly useful form when you have actual users who can provide feedback. In my personal situation, I’m the main feedback-provider.
• Sketch the form first: I usually make a hand-sketched prototype before firing up the computer. This involves cutting a piece of paper to the desired size, then using pen or pencil to sketch out whatever fields I want. I might make a few different versions as I experiment with form element placement. This gives me a good idea of how many form elements can fit on the piece of paper and is a relatively quick way to design the form without spending too much computer-detail time.
• Illustrator rocks: All my forms are made in Illustrator (with the exception of my Excel grocery shopping list). If, like me, you already have Illustrator, then it’s easy to get started. If you don’t, it could be a rather pricey investment just to make cool forms, so maybe you’ll want to try something you already have available — Word or Publisher, for example. Generally I find that Illustrator has the best fine-tune control, you can make custom vector graphics and make easy rounded-corner rectangles, plus it has awesome features like the Transform and Distort command that make duplicating elements super-easy. A few more Illustrator tips follow…
• Easy copy in Illustrator: You can easily copy and place an object in Illustrator by selecting it with the black arrow tool (aka selection tool, keyboard shortcut “v”), holding the Ctrl or Command key, and dragging it to your new location. Hold Shift down as well to constrain the movement to a straight horizontal, vertical, or 45-degree angle. Actually, by holding the Ctrl key, you can copy an object while doing almost any kind of transformation — rotating, reflecting, etc.
• Duplicate your last transformation: Let’s say you used my previous tip to move and copy a rounded rectangle to the right, so you now have two rectangles next to each other. You’d like to copy the rectangle again by the same distance. Instead of trying to drag another copy over just the right amount, type Ctrl/Command-D and your last copy/transform move will duplicate itself! Hit the keyboard combo as many times as you want to keep on duplicating.
• Transform and Distort: If you have a group of objects that you want to duplicate (example – each row on my weight training workout sheet), use the Transform and Distort command. This allows you to edit the “base” group if you want to make changes instead of having to go through each and every row to make changes later! You can apply the Transform and Distort effect several times, too, so you can have groups within groups. Awesome!
• Pretty forms: For nice-looking forms, make sure your elements align neatly. Use guides if you have to, or zoom in to check that the edges of boxes line up with each other. I think rounded rectangles make the form look friendlier, as do bright colors. But that’s just me.
• Print, test, print: Once I have the form designed in Illustrator, I do a test print onto scratch paper, cut, punch, etc., and try out the form. I may make some tweaks immediately and do another test print, or it may take a few days of actually using my new form to figure out what I can improve.

Hope this is helpful, Bob! You might want to solicit advice from other form gurus. Dave Seah and Lori Linstruth come to mind, but I’m sure there are many more out there!

I am very very very excited to announce that my new “side business” is finally opening its virtual doors. VERY.

Introducing Custom Shadow Box at www.customshadowbox.com!

Business plan? What business plan?

The [rather uncreatively named] business is meant to be a side project for me. I enjoy working with my hands, and this is an opportunity to try to get some additional income while doing something else I love. I’m not expecting a high volume of orders because of the price point, so I expect to show a loss at the end of this year (for the shadow box side business part, anyway). The startup costs weren’t high, but I did invest a nice chunk of change into professional photography in addition to fictitious name filing fees.

Nevertheless, this has been a great (albeit sometimes frustrating) way to learn about selling tangible product in California, which involves getting a reseller license, dealing with sales tax, and all that fun stuff. Making the web site was also a great learning opportunity. More about that in a bit.

Beginnings

It started with a wedding present given to my sister back when she got married. A friend had arranged the invitation artistically in a small shadow box with silk floral accents that matched the colors of the invitation. I always thought it was a cool idea, but it wasn’t until my coworker got married that I finally tried it out. Their invitations were wrapped in orange vellum with a gorgeous patterned ribbon. My coworker had gerbera daisies in her wedding, so I picked some silk flowers that matched the invitation and put it together.

Fast forward to sometime last year. I was brainstorming ways that I could develop alternative streams of income. By this time, I’d created some shadow boxes to display my own wedding photos and invitations and created a couple more for other friends, as several of my friends were conveniently getting married. I played with the idea of making custom shadow boxes for money and sketched out some pricing ideas. Come 2007, I decided that one of my main goals for the year would be to get this new business idea up and running.

Process

First, the logo. Below, you can see the logo evolution. I started with a simple 3D box shape created in Illustrator and eventually made the frame “thicker” to give it some depth. While I liked the inner shadow effect (large upper right), I eventually moved the shadow in front of the box so that I could do cool things with Jason Gaylor-inspired flowers. I liked my original wild tangle of flowers (third row left), but when reduced to logo size it was too hard to tell what they were (my sister Angela’s feedback), so I simplified the shapes for the actual logo itself. I didn’t want the time I spent on the crazy flowers to go to waste, however, so you’ll see that they show up in other parts of the site.

My original logo and web site design color was teal, but my graphic designer sister said that I should pick more neutral colors so that the site wouldn’t clash with my product pictures. Above you can see my attempts at choosing other colors. Eventually I figured out that it would work best to have the shadow box mark in one color and the text and the rest of the site to be in another color. I also made the page titles green to add some additional oomph (that’s a technical term, by the way).

The web site design went very smoothly. I used my wild flower mass as a page background and already had in mind the kind of feel and style I wanted for the web site, which I’d describe as clean and web 2.0-ish.

The web site development, on the other hand, was a fun learning experience and challenge:

• I tried to use as-clean-as-possible HTML for the markup. I generally suffer from divitis so this was my attempt to use as few divs as possible. (Note – I don’t think the site validates 100% quite yet. Still working out some of the kinks.)
• I bought DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith and then completely redid the gallery page to use better markup, with a fancy Javascript file controlling the application of classes.
• I also used DOM scripting to get the order page more interactive, with prices highlighting as you select options and the bottom invoice amount automatically updating as you “build” your shadow box.
• I got to experiment with a totally new illustration style. More below.

There are still some challenges with the order page that I haven’t figured out how to deal with. There’s something about my script that won’t allow me to automatically put the focus on a text field after selecting a radio button (such as Calligraphy Options). Also, if you leave the page and then go back to the order form, the radio buttons are selected but the Javascript stuff has all been reset so the prices aren’t highlighted and the order total is “$0.” Not sure what to do about that either. If you’re a Javascript expert and would like to provide some tips or want to monkey around with my code, please do!

The next step was to get some product photography. I had put in some temporary pictures into my gallery of older shadow boxes I had created and photographed. Some of the photographs were okay (such as the one used on the home page which had removable glass) but the photos of black frames were generally not usable because of reflections on the glass. I chose Bonnie Anglin from Anglin Art and Design because of her experience with product photography, although I think I offered her a new challenge with photographing glass-faced picture frames! You can see her great results on the gallery page; she took all the photos except the first one and the third one.

At about this point, I also decided that I wanted to put some illustrations on the how it works page, which was text-heavy and boring. I didn’t think my typical comic style would work, so I contacted Paige Pooler to see if she was available. Unfortunately, she wasn’t, but I was inspired to try out a different style of illustration and see how far I could take it. You may remember my first attempts; that specific portrait ended up on my about page. The other illustrations took a while to complete because of a bout of procrastination, but I’m very very pleased with how they turned out. Notice that I managed to incorporate the wild-flowers in the illustrations as well. See the other illustrations on the how it works page.

Using code culled from other projects, I finished up the web site by getting the order form to work, then actually shipped shadow boxes (long-belated wedding presents) to test the shipping price. US Priority Mail ended up being the most cost-efficient way to ship. I ordered boxes from Uline although I still need to find a source for bubble wrap (Office Max will do for now).

And this morning, I went live!

Next steps, and how you can help!

Things I still need to do:

• research bubble wrap costs and find a source
• create business card and brochure
• create invoice template
• finish baby shadow boxes for friends (need to add baby photo) and take photographs for gallery

How you can help:

• Kindly spread the word! Word of mouth, blogs, anything will help.
• Provide feedback about the general business idea, site, and price point.
• See a typo? Let me know!

In my t-shirt design, I’m using Envelope Distort in Illustrator for tweaking the shape of the words. Envelope Distort is awesome for getting words to fit into weird shapes. There are a few ways you can use Envelope Distort in Illustrator CS2 — I’ll show you what I did for the t-shirt design. Then, I’l show you how to make the “totally awesome wavy text effect” graphic.

Start with some text. You want your font, colors, etc. to be completely set, as applying the Envelope Distort command will make the text uneditable. (If you need to, create a copy of the text field just in case you need it later!)

By the way, you can distort any vector object or group of vector objects, not just text!

Go to Object > Envelope Distort. There are three options:

• Make with Warp gives you a dialog box similar to the Text Warp feature that you might be more familiar with in Photoshop. You can choose from several pre-set warp shapes (which allow you to tweak “how warped” the text is), and also modify the warp shape manually using the Direct Selection Tool (aka white arrow tool).
• Make with Mesh is similar to Make with Warp, except that you get to define how many grid points you want to start with and then tweak it yourself. This is the one I’m choosing.
• Make with Top Object assumes that you have already created a funny-shaped vector object that you have laid over the text.

After choosing the “Make with Mesh” option, you can choose how many rows and columns to have for your mesh grid. I just want a very simple shape, so I’ve set the options to 1×1.

This results in a basic rectangular shape, with four anchor points forming the corners. Each anchor point has bezier control handles that you can manipulate with the Direct Select Tool. In the diagram below, I’ve simply dragged the point itself out and to the left.

My final shape involved some additional tweaking of the corner point positions as well as the direction of the control handles:

Here’s one more example of using the “top object” envelope distort option. I’ve started with four separate text boxes, underneath a rectangle that I sliced into curvy shapes using the Knife tool. The curvy shapes are outlined in red so that you can see them more easily. (Remember to set your font colors and fonts before performing the Envelope Distort!)

Selecting the top text box and top shape, go to Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Top Object.

Immediately, the text is warped to fit the shape, and the shape outline disappears.

Repeating this for each shape/text box, here’s my final result, which took about fifteen seconds to create (not including my grabbing screenshots time, of course):

Have fun!

Heavily inspired by Paige Pooler and this guy at istockphoto, I’m trying a new style of illustration. I call it the “retro round-head big-eyed woman-look.” (Take a look at the links and you’ll see what I mean.)

So, here is my first attempt at a retro round-head big-eyed self-portrait using Illustrator:

Question — should I go with bigger eyes or smaller eyes?

The one on the right (smaller eyes) was traced in Illustrator from my original scan, but thanks to the power of vector graphics I increased the size of the eyes and eyebrows for the left version while keeping everything else the same.

When I was making the eyes bigger, I had a sense of deja vu, but realized that I was just remembering a scene from the special features on the Return of the King Extended Edition DVD, where Weta Digital increased the size of the Mouth of Sauron’s mouth to make it look especially weird and creepy. Luckily enlarging the eyes didn’t make my self-portrait look too weird and creepy; I could really go either way but thought I would solicit opinions as well!

Armed once more with Illustrator and a color printer, plus scissors, a glue stick, and x-acto knife, I started in on making favors for this weekend’s baby shower. (You may already have read about the invitations and note cards, and caught my honey pot tutorial from yesterday, but in case you didn’t, there are the links for you.)

I started with boxes of Glorybee “Honeystix.” (Side note for a pleased customer testimonial: I ordered them last Wednesday because normal shipping with UPS would take “5-7 business days for arrival.” During checkout, I added a note that I hoped they would arrive by this Friday. I got a phone call the next day, first letting me know that they were out of lemon-flavored honey sticks, so I substituted blackberry flavored, then telling me that since it was a relatively small shipment, they would send it by Priority Mail so that I would get it sooner, and, incidentally, save three dollars off of shipping. The package came on Monday but I wasn’t home, so I picked it up at the post office on Tuesday.)

We had planned on four honey sticks per person (two clover, one peach, one blackberry), so I measured the honey sticks and figured out that I would need to make a 7.25″ x 1.5″ sleeve or envelope to hold the honey sticks. Then I fired up Illustrator and designed the envelope. Starting with a 7.25″ x 1.5″ rectangle, I added a baby bee stock vector graphic, the daisies that I had made from the invitation, and some custom-drawn honey pots. I added some envelope-shapes around the rectangle and put a larger version of my daisy on the “flap” of the envelope.

I printed out one test to check the colors and actually cut it out and taped it together to make sure it would work. The size was fine, but I found it hard to fold the long sides without making the envelope crooked or wrinkled. I moved the side flap shapes away from the main rectangle about one or two pixels so that there would be a fine white line to act as a guide for me. I also thought it would be cute to have some sort of cut-out shape in the middle so that you could see the honey sticks inside, so I added a heart.

Attempt #2:

I duplicated the envelope to make two on a page, then printed out ten copies. I used a paper cutter to slice away the long edges, then hand-cut the rounded portions with scissors and cut out the heart with an x-acto knife. Using my fine white lines as guides, I folded the edges and glue-sticked them shut, then glued the bottom flap and creased the top flap. The photo below shows the boxes of honey sticks, my printed envelopes, one cut out, and one folded:

In this photo, I’ve started to fill some of the sleeves with honey sticks. I was happy that I had ended up with the blackberry flavored sticks instead of lemon, because it made for a colorful and pretty mixture.

Here is a close-up of the sleeve — I used the stock baby bee vector graphic I had used for the thank-you cards (after adding a “shadow” shape to help anchor it down) and scattered my Illustrator-drawn daisies about. The “Thanks” uses Scriptina font and the other text is in Myriad. You can see the heart cut-out with pretty honey sticks behind it pretty well.

This next photo shows the other half — you can see my custom-drawn honey pots explaining what kinds of honey are included, as well as the big daisy on the flap of the back side of the envelope.

Of course, I had to stage a picture of all the completed honey stick packets:

I’m glad this was for a relatively small baby shower (I made 20 packets). I like making things with my hands, but doing any more and my neck would have cramped up from leaning over so much!

This morning I started on the last component of the Baby Bee baby shower paraphernalia. The other bridal shower organizers decided on getting inexpensive “honey stix” for favors. My job was to figure out a cute way of packaging them. I’ll have to post the results later on, but as part of my project, I wanted to draw a honey pot in Illustrator and decided to turn it into a step-by-step tutorial while I was at it. You can see the completed honey pot, now for the step by step…

First: Using the pen tool, I drew an outline of a honey pot shape. This shape will form the outer “stroke” of my drawing. (Note — this is not a tutorial in how to use the pen tool. Luckily, I’ve already written a tutorial on SitePoint about creating vector shapes in Illustrator.)

I want to copy and shrink the shape slightly to form the “inside” filled portion of the honey pot. One way to do this is to choose the scale tool. Click and drag to shrink the honey pot — but hold down the Alt (PC) key while doing it. This will create a duplicate of the shape while you shrink it. Release the mouse to see your new shape on top of the original one.

I filed the inner shape with a different color to make it easier to see. (If you have the shape selected, make sure your “fill” color patch is selected from the toolbar, then click on a color swatch to fill the shape with the color.) Using the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow), click on each vector point to move it. You can also drag on the control handles to adjust the curves.

Here is my edited shape:

Now I want to add a little “line” to help define the shape of the pot. To do this, I want to tweak the yellow shape so that more of the brown background shape shows. I select the “add points” tool (hidden behind the pen tool) and click twice to add two more points. You can see where I clicked in the diagram below.

I click on the original point and drag it to the right. This tweaks the yellow shape so that the brown shape shows through. (I then tweak the direction handles slightly to get a smoother effect.)

With the yellow shape still selected, I choose the Knife tool. The Knife tool can be used to “cut” a shape into multiple shapes. Using the knife, I draw the line shown below:

When I release the knife tool, Illustrator automatically separates the original shape into two separate vector shapes.

I fill the two shape with different colors. Again, you want the fill color patch selected, and then you can use the Swatches or Color palettes to define your colors.

Next, I draw a blob for “honey” that is spilling over the edge. I use the dark brown so that this can be my “stroke” color.

Using the Scale tool again, I shrink and copy the honey shape by clicking and dragging whil holding the Alt key.

Here are some diagram-less steps. The purpose is to get a “cut-out” of the stroke. Unlike the honey-pot where the brown “stroke” is really a solid shape behind the yellow shape, I want a see-through “stroke” for the honey, which means I’m going to make a copy of the inner shape and then use it for a “cut-out” of the larger shape.

• Adjust the points using the Direct Selection tool (white arrow), similar to how I did it for the honey pot.
• With the inner shape selected, go to Edit > Copy and then Edit > Paste on top. Now I have two of the inner shape, exactly the same size, one on top of the other.

Now, using the black arrow tool, click on the top inner shape and then Shift-click on the outer edge of the bottom shape to select both of them. Open the Pathfinder palette and click on the fourth shape mode (highlighted in blue in the diagram) to get the path intersection.

Initially it may seem like nothing happened, but if you click and drag on the inner shape and move it away (I colored it yellow for demo purposes — this is the “original” inner shape), you can see that the inner and outer shapes have been combined to form a cut-out of the stroke. (If you really did move the inner shape aside, undo to get it back to where it was.)

Use the knife tool again to make a “highlight” for the honey. I made a curvy sort of shape.

I colored the highlight part a light yellow. For the lower honey part, I kept it a golden yellow color and then lowered the Opacity in the Transparency palette.

Now, type some text (or add some other kind of symbol) over the honey pot.

Switch to the black arrow tool and select the text. Type Ctrl-[ a couple of times until the honey glob overlaps the honey text. Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] are keyboard shortcuts for moving objects backwards and forwards (think of them on different layer). Since the honey glob is transparent, you can see the text behind it.

Again, here’s the completed honey pot:

Hope you enjoyed that tasty tutorial!

I have insomnia (lack of sleep + caffeine = wired), which means that I am getting a lot done. Tonight (this morning?) I worked more on the baby bee baby shower project by creating a simple notepaper design for my friend to use for thank-you notes. Here’s how they turned out:

This time, I purchased a different baby bee stock vector illustration, but used the same daisy shapes I had created last time, scattering them around and behind the bee:

My Illustrator file had four to a sheet, using the Distort & Transform effect that I first tried out with my calendar layout and have pretty much come to depend on since! The envelopes are about 5.25″ wide by 4″ high, so I made each card about 5″ x 3.75″, which allowed me to have enough space for the color to bleed off the edges. Here’s a screenshot of my Illustrator file; I drew crop marks using the pen tool to make it easier to trim the paper:

In other insomniac endeavors, I also researched possible party favors for the attendees and came across this adorable wooden honey dipper (click thumbnail for larger view). I still have to discuss party favor possibilities with the other baby shower organizers, but I thought it was quite appropriate!

Doodah suggested that I incorporate the cheering groundhog into the monthly goal tracking forms, and thanks to Illustrator’s Live Trace function (using “Comic” setting), it didn’t take very long (I just had to adjust the paths for the letters and words). You can download the updated PDF or Word document versions on the Monthly Goal Tracker page. The original un-cutsey version is still up there as well.

Two of my good friends are pregnant for the first time, and I’m helping to throw separate baby showers for both of them along with some of the other women in my church small group. The original plan was to have the invitations for the first shower ready to go by this morning. On Thursday (T-minus 3 days) I realized with a start that I hadn’t done anything about the invitations! Not only that, because it’s been a scatterbrained few weeks, I had misplaced the address list and had no idea how many people were invited. I’m usually one of those people who knows exactly where everything is. Need an x-acto knife? In the office, in the top drawer of the plastic organizer to the left of my desk. But not this time! The address list was nowhere to be found.

Liz came over on Friday night (T-minus 2 days) to brainstorm decor ideas and color schemes so that I could coordinate the invitations. We first thought about an all-white base with accents of pink — white tablecloths and dishes, with pink flowers and napkins. We had some inside knowledge that the parents-to-be were calling their baby “Junebug” so I went on istockphoto.com to try to find some cute bug illustrations.

As I was paging through the 929 results for bug (Insect: Arthropod), we came across this adorable baby bee illustration. Liz and I both gave a simultaneous “awwwwww.” After staring at the image with goofy smiles on our faces, we decided to go with a yellow-and-white color scheme instead of pink-and-white!

I purchased the image and started pulling together some possible layouts in Illustrator after Liz went home. Saturday morning (T-minus 1 day), Steve slept in but I got up early-ish and worked more on the invitations, then printed them out on my laser printer. Since I couldn’t remember how many people were invited (I was thinking maybe around 30?), I printed out 28. Easy enough to make more later.

Saturday night (T-minus 12 hours), the mother-to-be kindly emailed me the address list, and I addressed the invitations. I had one extra left over — yes! Liz happened to come over that evening and gently pointed out that I had forgotten to include a request for guests to bring baby photos of themselves on the invitation, so I made another sheet and inserted it — good thing I hadn’t sealed any envelopes yet!

Here are the results, with some additional description and explanation…

Here is what went into the vellum envelopes (still leftover from my wedding invitations and 2005 Christmas cards!), going clockwise from the top:

• “Cover sheet” that shows through vellum envelope. White box is for the address.
• Invitation with pertinent information.
• Map and directions.
• Whoops! Forgot to add this info onto the invitation so it got its own sheet.

The cover sheet is below. I made little white daisies with yellow centers in Illustrator and sprinkled them in the corner and around the baby bee. Since my HP Color LaserJet 2605dn doesn’t print to the edge of the page, I purposefully left a white margin around the sides of the light yellow background.

The addresses got written in the white box, then slipped into the vellum envelope. I wrote the name of the recipient on top for a cool layered effect.

Below is the invitation. I printed just the bee on white cardstock, then printed out the invitation part (with daisies scattered about again) on normal white paper with a slight bleed. I cut and trimmed the invitation layer to size, then rounded the corners of both the cardstock and the invitation layer with rounded corner punches. (My hand was hurting after 28 invites x 2 sheets x 4 corners!) Using an x-acto knife, I cut along the outline of the bee’s leg, stomach, and arm, then glued the yellow layer down, tucking the top edge underneath the leg/arm/belly cutout.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten to add information to ask attendees to bring a baby photo with them to the invitation. So I made another insert to go in between the invitation and the map. I made a gradient box background for the bee, a gradient box “bed,” and then clipped everything with another box in Illustrator. One more white box with a drop shadow effect in Illustrator, and I had a “photo”!

No close-up of the map, but that was drawn in Illustrator as well, with varying stroke widths for the streets. The ends of the street-paths were clipped with a mask in Illustrator for a nice smooth edge.

I’m pleased with how the invitations turned out. The parents-to-be and the other shower organizers were pleased, too. Whew!

This was a surprisingly economical project. I already had the printer, the paper cutter, the x-acto knife and cutting mat, the white printer paper, and the white cardstock, so my only purchase was the stock illustration (about $5)! Maybe the only downside I can think of is that it’s laser-printer toner on normal paper (not acid-free), so it’s not exactly a keepsake…

I discovered yesterday morning that the same artist has other baby bee vector drawings at iStockPhoto, so we may make use of those in the decorations for the party because they are so cute! I will probably use one of them for matching thank-you-cards that the mother-to-be can use.

I decided to take some time this morning to make a monthly calendar spread for my new organizer in Illustrator. Similar to my weekly pages, I wasn’t going to put actual dates on the pages, but wanted to have a base layout that I could then fill in. So, basically, I wanted to make a bunch of squares on a page. Sounds simple! Here are the original specs that I had in mind for my calendar layout:

• 8.5″ x 11″ sheet with two calendar layouts; I would cut the page in half, trim the edges (to match the other sheets in my organizer) and then hole-punch it
• Rounded corner squares, 7 across, 5 down, to represent the weekdays of the month; no numbers — I would write them in by hand after printing them
• A rounded corner bar at the top for the month

I recently had seen Veerle’s blog about using the Transform and Distort effect to make dynamic business cards in Illustrator, which was new to me. I was excited about trying out the technique for the calendar layout, because I could see how it would make it much easier to evenly space the squares for the calendar.

Here are the step-by-steps of what I did…

First, create a new 8.5″ x 11″ document in “portrait” orientation. Then, draw a guide to divide the page in half by clicking inside the top ruler, holding, and dragging downwards to the 5.5″ position (on the left ruler). This allows you to easily see the half of the page you want to work with.

Now, select the Rounded Rectangle tool. You could draw a rounded rectangle by hand, but if you want to be more precise, Alt-click (PC) on the page and a dialog box will come up that allows you to enter in your own dimensions. I used 1.05″ x .85″, with a .1″ corner radius. Click OK to create the rectangle.

If you want, you can set the properties of the rectangle. Mine has a white fill with a grey border. Now, move it to the printable edge of your document. I left some room above for the month-bar.

Now we’re ready to apply some Distort and Transform magic! Go to Effect > (Illustrator Effects) Distort & Transform > Transform. Check the “Preview” box and type “6″ copies. Now, start dragging the Move/Horizontal slider to the right. You will see the duplicate copies of the box begin sliding over as well.

Move the slider over until the squares are spaced within your printable area to your satisfaction, then click OK. If you need to, you can manually type in a number if the slider doesn’t go far enough for you.

Now go again to Effect > Distort and Transform > Transform. A warning dialog box will come up — click the “Apply New Effect” button to continue.

The Transform Effect dialog box will come up again. This time, type “4″ copies and move the Vertical slider to the left. When you’re happy with the spacing, click OK.

The beauty of the transform effect is that the copied squares are truly copies of the original object. Any changes you make to the original object will automatically apply to the other copies.

I created a colored bar for the month and typed the days of the week. At this point, I decided that I wanted to have the month actually typed (instead of handwritten), so I added that as well. (See below.) You can create whatever objects and effects you want in Illustrator for the month and weekday headings.

Now you’re ready to create the bottom half of the page. Because of the tight margin at the bottom of the calendar and the printing margins of my printer, I couldn’t just simply duplicate the entire thing at the bottom — I was going to have to flip the copy that I made to be upside-down. First, I copied the squares by clicking on the original square, holding the Alt (PC) key, and Shift-dragging the square down to the bottom half of the page. Holding the Alt key allows you to make a copy by dragging/dropping, and holding the Shift key constrains the movement so that they line up perfectly with the previous object.

Now, let’s flip and copy the header. Select all the header objects (you can group them together if you want), then select the Rotate tool. To make positioning the header easier, click once in the center of the page to set the center of rotation. (You can watch the rulers on the top and left as you move your mouse to find the center of the page.)

Your next click/drag will actually rotate the object. Hold down the Alt/Option key as you drag so that a copy is created. Drag around until the copy of the header is positioned properly.

Here’s what the completed layout looks like:

Now at this point, you could manually select the month names, change them, print, and repeat. But, again, I’m lazy, and I like to find better ways of doing things. I’m not that familiar with Illustrator, but I was fairly certain that there was a feature somewhere that would allow me to have variable text. After some quick searching, I found this Adobe Design Center Tutorial that explained how to create data-driven graphics.

First step is to open the Variables palette. Select the top month field, then click the “Make Text Dynamic” icon at the bottom of the Variables palette. In the dialog box, type a name for the variable — I called mine “Month1.” Repeat for the bottom month field (I called mine “Month2″).

Now, click the “Capture Data Set” button, then go to Save Variable Library in the palette fly-out menu. This will prompt you to save an .xml file.

Note: Before saving the variable library, I found it helpful to select the text and change it (“january” and “february”) and click the Capture Data Set button again, so that I could easily see what I would need to change in the XML file.

Now open the .xml file for editing in your editor of choice. I used a simple text editor.

Here is the code that I modified:

...
<v:sampleDataSet dataSetName="Data Set 1">
<Month1>
<p>january</p>
</Month1>
<Month2>
<p>february</p>
</Month2>
</v:sampleDataSet>
<v:sampleDataSet dataSetName="Data Set 2">
<Month1>
<p>march</p>
</Month1>
<Month2>
<p>april</p>
</Month2>
</v:sampleDataSet>
...

Using the inital data as a guide, copy the XML code and update the “Data Set #,” “Month1,” and “Month2″ variables with the rest of the months.

Save the XML file.

Go back to Illustrator. In the Variables palette, select Load Variable Library. Browse to the XML file and select it, and click OK at the prompt that asks if you want to replace the existing data.

You’ll see that all the data sets show up in the Data Set dropdown. As you select the different data sets, the names of the month change!

At this point, you can choose to print out each page as you change the data set, or do something else fancy with it, perhaps by creating a batched action to save to a PDF or something like that.

If you have a lot of time and if you like things to look neat and pretty, you could create text variables and actually print out the day-numbers as well. I’m lazy, so the thought of having to update an XML file with all the days of the month is not appealing… for some reason I’d rather just hand-write the numbers in.