Hey, like I promised I’m back for probably one more blog post before I’m off to Chicago. I’ve got three things to talk about today. To make it easier to sort through and read, I’m going to make three blog posts for each specific topic.

Blog posts today: Christmas is coming; Got a Gift?, My 1st Desktop Picture Pack and… Harry Potter!!!

Time has flown and we are once again back at the Thanksgiving holidays, and you know what that means? Christmas, the winter holidays, and the new year. I hope you have gift ideas for all your family members, but if you don’t I’ve got just the perfect gift. No, its not anything you can pick up in the store. Its something that you have to make, those are the best gifts anyways.

This tutorial is going to require you to have Adobe InDesign. If you don’t already have it, you can get a tryout here. No, don’t pirate it! Also, this will work on Win or Mac.

Ok, so first download this file here.

Open it in InDesign and you should see an outline of a calendar. The first page up at the top is the cover page. Either add a Text Box and place your title in place of the top rectangle box or make a Photshop image of your title and put the image in that box (simply drag and drop). Then drag two family photos into the rectangles under that.

Scroll down and you will see two pages next to each other for each month of the year. The pages on the right have already been structured for the year 2006. I have included the basic, non-religious holidays in red. You should go through the calendar and add the religious holidays you want. For example, click on the table cell for December 25 2006. Once the cell is selected, ctrl-click (right click) the cell. One of the popup menus will be cell options, go into it‚Äôs submenu and select “Strokes and Fills‚Ķ” The popup menu will look like below. In the Cell Fill Section change the Color to Red and the Tint to 20%. Then at the bottom of that cell, write “Christmas.” You can find a list of religious holiday dates here. I also suggest adding in the family birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

Once you have your calendar dates done, you can start to add image. Just select 12 images you want to use for your calendar. You may want to choose images particular to a season, like a picture of you making a snowman for December and a picture of your vacation during the summer. Drag each image into its particular rectangle box on the page beside the chosen month for it. You will also notice a text box below the image. You can fill in a short description if you would like.

Now that you have a finished calendar, click File | Export… and choose a name and location and push enter. Leave all the defaults as they are and press export. This will save a PDF file of you calendar. You can now bring the PDF file to Kinko’s or the like and have them print it out and bind it for you. Make sure you specify how they should print it. For example, the picture for November should be on the back of the October Month page.

I hope this all makes sense. If you have questions, either leave a comment on the blog, on digg or email me here.

-Dustin