The yearly calendar

Every year Spoonflower does a contest to put next year's calendar in a fat quarter-sized design, such that it can be used as a tea towel - you can see my previous entries here. This year, I was initially going to go with something generic that people like to have in their kitchens. Uhh, lavender flowers! And let's add fleur-de-lis and go for a French theme. But when I started trying to make the basic layout of all the numbers, it seemed kind of dumb and pointless. Back to the drawing board.

I had been laying it out in a diagonal checkerboard pattern, so I stuck with that. Then I had the thought to fill the background of each of the diamonds I was going to put a month in with just a large initial for the month. But, starting with "J", that seemed like it left too much empty space, so then I did the three-letter abbreviations instead, trying to stack them together like Mayan glyphs.

The Mayan connection reminded me of the ancient Egyptian colors I used before, so I used those. I made a polka dot background - instead of just circles, it's X's, stars, hexagons, and bursts, which you can see better here. I'm actually really happy with how that came out - it's one of the few designs I've made that came out exactly like I envisioned it.

In any case, the calendar came together like so:



It didn't go anywhere in the contest, but two people bought it. My favorite was this one.

Best results from recent contests

Today I'm finally caught up with summarizing my recent contest entries. Yesterday I rounded up a couple of designs that performed pretty well (at least by my standards), so we're wrapping up with the ones that have performed the very best.

The most recently finished contest was for something to do with beetles.  Of course I immediately thought of doing something punny with Volkswagons or The Beatles (or both at once), but decided instead on Egyptian scarabs. One of the other synergy designers is working on a set of colors matching those used by ancient Egyptians, of which I selected a subset. It was fun doodling a whole variety of variations on standard scarab carvings.



This got 133 votes and came in 55th out of 288. My favorite was this one (which won).

Further back in time, the theme was surfing, and we had to use these colors (plus white):


Color by COLOURlovers

I went with a pretty straightforward combination of surfboards and hibiscus.



This got 104 votes and came in 31st place out of 169. My favorite entry also featured hibiscus.

Finally, we got a theme of tennis. Not a topic I find particularly interesting. Thinking back on tennis historically, it reminded me of going to Hearst Castle, where one of the stories the tour guides like to tell you is how Hearst always wanted his guests to be active - illustrated with old film of his glamorous guests heading off to the tennis court. So, how about some twenties-style tennis clothes? I used the same colors as my art deco and library cards designs.



This got 136 votes and came in 23rd! That's my highest placement in quite a while. My favorite was this graphic repeat of tennis balls.