New Year, New Calendar

It's Day 1 of a new year! With all the talk of resolutions and starting with a clean slate (or even a clean desk, or a clean outfit, or just a clean cereal bowl), Meylah will be bringing you lots of articles to help get your creative pursuits on track.

In the meantime, planning for a great new year requires a great new calendar. Rather than relying on a patchwork of Post-It notes this year, why not be inspired year-round by the work of other artists, photographers and graphic designers? Here are a few creative calendars we found:

The Perpetual Paris Calendar (above) by Little Brown Pen is more of a decorative piece than a functional one – but it couldn't be cooler. It's a photo collage of letter and number images shot in Paris. Watch this video to see how it was made.

A series of 12 beautiful elephants illustrates calendars sold by A Touch of India. Her black-and-white textile motif calendar is also striking.

If you like these cute little owls in the woods, Valentina Design will sell you the files so that you can print your own calendar pages. Great for a kid's room.

Photographer Megzy Tred has a good idea: She invites you to pick 12 photos from her selection of 600 on Flickr, then she'll make them into calendar for you.

A ball-shaped calendar? Yes, that's right; this 3-D design (shown below) by ScrampAddict sits on your desk, and you turn it to have the correct month face you.

If you like quotes from inspirational people, here's a printable calendar (you buy a .PDF file and print it yourself) by Groovy Grrl, featuring quotes from women writers.

Calendars are a beautiful way for artists and photographers to package a range of their work and sell it in a practical format. Canadian artist Jessica Doyle has done just that with a series of 12 whimsical paintings. She cleverly designed it so that you can frame the individual pictures when the calendar has been used.

Maleah Matthews, based in Oregon, features some of her most popular landscape and nature photos in her 2010 calendar (shown below).

Artists and crafters, what tools do you use for scheduling and yearly planning?