What if your best photographs could double as the most thoughtful gift you’ve ever given?

What if you could reach a broader audience with your original artwork?

Whether you’re putting them together for personal reasons, or to generate more income from your art through print on demand, calendars are a great way to pull your memories, and creativity, together in a functional way.

If you’ve always wanted to create your own wall calendar featuring your own artwork, but weren’t sure where to start, welcome to class.

Hi everyone!

I’m Tracey Capone, a photographer and illustrator in the Chicago area,

For the last several years, wall calendars with my artwork have been one of my top sellers, but I found the process of creating them cumbersome and inefficient. So I set out to find a way to create templates in Affinity that allow me to generate a variety of calendars quickly and easily, every year, using data merge.

In this class, not only am I sharing that process, I’m sharing the data I use to create the calendars as well.

We’ll begin class talking about considerations when researching calendar options, and download templates to help us create our initial guides.
Next, we’ll talk about how master pages can help us create set layouts, including guides and margins, once, to apply to multiple content pages.
We’ll follow that up with a look at the tools that will help us create our calendars more efficiently: text and picture frames, text styles and the data merge layout tool.
From there, we’ll take a deeper dive in to the data merge panel so we can get our data hooked up to our template, making the process work in minutes.
Once everything is together, we’ll talk about the benefits of saving a neutral template that you can use year after year, to generate multiple calendars with different themes in minutes.
When we’re ready, we’ll pull in a template, and I’ll walk you through how I make pre-merge adjustments to quickly take it from a neutral to a themed calendar, complete with it’s own unique typography.
And, finally, we’ll generate our data merges, make some post merge adjustments and talk about how to export the calendars to get them ready for print.

As a thank you for taking the class, I'm providing a spreadsheet complete with all of the data you need to create your own wall calendars with data merge, year after year, through the year 2040.

PLEASE NOTE: You do not need to have Excel to use the spreadsheet provided. Excel is the most compatible with Affinity and allows you to access multiple tabs within the same data merge, however it can be opened in any spreadsheet app (Google Sheets, LibreOffice, Numbers) so that you can change the year. You just need to export the updated spreadsheet in Excel format which is available in all of the apps mentioned. (I go over this in the video dedicated to the spreadsheet :))

Whether it's for personal use, or to sell online, you'll walk away from class with your own wall calendar template for Affinity as well as knowledge of the tools used to create it. The tools, and data merge process, taught in class can be used in a variety of other projects beyond calendars.

For this class, I’ll be using Affinity 3 by Canva, the free, unified desktop app. If you’re following along on Publisher V2, you should have no trouble completing this class as long as you know where the tools are located.

For those of you on the iPad, unfortunately, data merge does not exist on the iPad app so, while you’ll be able to create the template, you will need the desktop app to complete the data merge itself.

Please note: this intermediate class is not intended for students who are brand new to the unified Affinity app.

This class is intended for Affinity users with some experience with either the unified app, or Publisher V2. We won’t be covering the basics of the user interface and tools so, to have a successful experience with the class, I do recommend a basic understanding of how things are laid out. I’ve shared some resources to get you up to speed in the PDF I provided with the class.

Hi there! I'm Tracey. I'm an illustrator, designer, and photographer located in the Chicagoland area. You can find more information about me, and my work in my full profile. (find the link above) I've been a full time artist for over a decade, after leaving the corporate world behind in 2011. In addition to teaching, I am a full time creator who sells my work on my own site, as well as print on demand sites like Spoonflower, Etsy and more.

I've been using Affinity products for the last several years and love to learn as much as I can about the tools so I can not only use them the way they were intended to work but make them work for me; and I love sharing that knowledge with my students! I've had the privilege of being spotlighted by Serif, the company who created the app, twice as a go to teacher for their apps. You can find links to the spotlight articles, as well as a Creative Session I've created for their YouTube channel, on my profile page.

If you have any questions about the class, or would like feedback on your project, please feel free to let me know in the Discussion section of class, or by emailing me at hello@traceycapone.com.

I look forward to seeing you in class!

Music Credit: "String & Twine" by Jamie Stevens on audiio (license on file)

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