making my own calendar

[JennyK]

Hi all, hope someone can help me with this rather technical issue. I am involved in a project for a charity with a few friends and we are doing a wall calendar which will be sold to raise money for the charity. We will be taking macro photos of various plants and then design the calendars and eventually get them printed and hopefully sold Just one problem: I am not the most tech savvy person on the planet How would I go about designing the calendars? Is there a template or such I can use? To be honest I dont even know what kind of software I would use to do this! So please help I found one free one, called GIMP, and another that was quite cheap, called Pixelmator, does anyone have experience in using these? Are they quite easy to use? It would be something very very simple, something like this. A template or such would be absolutely fabulous! And also, what would be the easiest way to get it printed? We would need a few dozen copies. Can I print them using my home printer? I have this Epson one... Or should I use a print shop for the job? I googled and found a few, for example this print24 who print photo calendars and such. But as you can see I am a beginner so please any help would be very much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[Dan Earp]

Take the pictures and ideas on a flash drive, down to the printers and they can do the hard work lol

[bobh]

Have done one every year for the last 5 years, just for friends and family and never more than 2 dozen a year.

We looked around a bit and ended up using photobox to print them.

Not the cheapest but excellent quality (some friends got a few done really cheaply and the end result was so bad they decided not to give them to anybody)

Photobox has an easy to use online design template with pretty much every option you could want on it.

If you register an account with them they will email you their weekly special offers, wait for the 2 for one offer on the calendars which they run for a few days each autumn and buy them then.

The other thing we found out was unless you are having a LOT printed it is an expensive thing to do.

[Andy Collins]

I'm the trustee of a charity, and we looked into doing calendars to raise funds, it was a no go. The costs of production for less than 500 were prohibitive, and we had to sell over 1000 to break even. Short of doing a Page 3 calendar, it was just not feasible. We even had printers who were going to do it at cost to help.