Colorful Printable Calendars

Loud on purpose

Almost every design on this site is built to be quiet. This one is built to be seen. The accents are a saturated orange, the weekend columns a clear sky blue, the notes band a warm yellow and the holiday marks a bright magenta, over a deep navy type that holds all of it together. The header illustrations are the brightest on the site: hot air balloons, kites, bunting, ice creams.

That is a design decision with an audience. Nobody prints this for a home office. It gets printed for classrooms, nurseries, youth clubs, shared kitchens and anywhere a chart has to compete for attention with everything else on the wall. So the extra sheets on this page are the rest of a classroom set rather than a set of typographic refinements.

Confetti, and a page that fits above a whiteboard

The confetti sheet scatters three shapes in three colours down both margins: a dot, a tilted square and a short streamer. It is the only ornament here drawn in more than one colour, which suits the palette, and like every ornament sheet it prints outside the grid so no day box loses room.

The landscape sheet turns the month on its side. The free wall in a classroom is almost always the strip above a whiteboard, which is wide and short, and a portrait sheet wastes it. Landscape also widens every day box to about twice its height, which is what you need if a cell has to hold a whole activity name rather than an abbreviation.

A term at a time

The quarter sheet puts three months of real dates on one page. That is roughly a school term, and it is the unit most of this planning actually happens in: trips, assessment weeks, parents' evenings and the inset day nobody remembers are all set before a term starts, not during it. Every design has one on the quarterly calendar page.

The A4 sheet is drawn at true A4 rather than scaled from US Letter, which matters more here than almost anywhere else: schools outside the United States print class sets, and thirty sheets is thirty chances to forget to tick "fit to page".

Two charts, and why both

The chore chart is ten jobs with seven tick boxes each and a name line at the top, in the loudest palette on the site, for a shared kitchen where a discreet chart would simply be ignored. The reward version swaps two rows for a star tally column and a prize line at the foot, sized so that a whole class can read the tally from their desks rather than crowding round it.

Both are undated, which is the point: one print serves every week. If you want either in a different size, the chore chart page has five row and fourteen row versions for very young children and for whole households.

Questions about the colorful set

Will this drink a colour cartridge?

It will use more than the others, yes, though less than you would expect: the saturated colour is in the accents, the header art and the tinted bands, while the day boxes themselves stay near white so they can be written on. If you are printing a class set and the budget is the constraint, print one colourful sheet as the wall copy and run the class copies from the minimalist set.

Is this suitable for a very young child?

For looking at, yes. For filling in, the cute collection is usually the better answer, because it has a five row reward chart with oversized tick boxes and rounded day cells. This set is pitched at a room rather than at a person: bigger, brighter and meant to be read at distance.

Which sheet works on a whiteboard or as a laminate?

The landscape month, because it matches the shape of the space and because the saturated lines survive a lamination gloss that would wash out a pastel. Laminate it, write on it with a dry wipe marker, and wipe it at the end of the month. The chore charts laminate just as well and are undated, so they never need reprinting at all.