Custom Wall Calendar for Your Business: What to Put on It (and What Not To)

The gift that stays on the wall

Every December a company sends something. Pens are lost by January, mugs go to the back of the cupboard, and the calendar with twelve photos of the product ends up in the recycling because nobody can plan on it. The branded object that survives is the one that does a job every day - and in an office, a shop or a workshop, that is the wall planner everyone looks at.

plainplan is a blank year with large day cells and nothing printed on it. That is what makes it the right base for a custom version: your colour, your logo and your company name go on it, and the rest of the sheet is left for the customer to actually use. A calendar full of your imagery is an advert. A calendar with your name in the corner and their year in the middle is a tool with your name on it.

What goes on a custom calendar

Three things, in this order. Your accent colour, applied to the month headers and the grid lines, so the sheet reads as yours from across the room. Your logo, once, in the corner where the plainplan wordmark normally sits. Your company name or a short line - a web address, a phone number - in the footer, small, where it is found when needed and ignored the rest of the year.

If your customers are in one country, the calendar can also carry that country's public holidays and the week start your customers use. plainplan ships in five languages with the Monday or Sunday start fixed by language, so a German company gets a Monday-start German sheet and a US company a Sunday-start English one.

What stays off it

Product photos. Slogans across the top. A different image for every month. All of it competes with the only thing the recipient wants from a wall calendar - space to write. The restraint is what keeps the sheet on the wall for twelve months, and twelve months on a wall is the whole point of the gift.

The same restraint applies to colour: one accent, not a palette. A calendar in three brand colours looks like a brochure. A calendar in one looks like it was designed.

One grid, your brand

The custom version uses the same two layouts as the standard planner: Vertical, with the months side by side and every day of the year visible at once, and Square, the classic monthly block. Most companies choose Vertical - it is the one that makes a year of deadlines, deliveries and leave readable from a desk. You receive both, in your colours, as vector PDFs.

Vector matters for a corporate calendar more than for a personal one: the same file goes to a copy shop for fifty A2 sheets and to a poster printer for the A0 in reception, with the logo sharp at both. The vector PDF guide explains why.

Quantities, printing and timing

You get print-ready files and a print guide, and print wherever you like - your usual printer, a local copy shop, an online poster service. Small runs of twenty or fifty are cheapest at a copy shop; from about five hundred sheets, offset printing in the EU is worth arranging and I can help set it up.

Timing: the design takes days, the printing takes a week or two, and December print queues are long. Orders placed by early November are on walls in January. Orders placed in mid December are a gamble.

How to order

One flat price covers the design in your colours with your logo, both layouts, five languages and the print guide, with the files delivered digitally. Everything is on the business page: what every order includes, the licence, invoicing with VAT, and the questions companies ask before ordering. If your case is unusual - a fiscal year, a second logo, a language not in the five - write to me first and we will find the version that fits.