Photos of Southern Canada wall calendar
Photos of Southern Canada is a 2026 wall calendar featuring photography that my brother, Evan Lachmanec, shot on a cross-Canada road trip some years ago.
Designed to showcase the photos at a large size, the calendar is printed on 12×18 inch (305×457 mm) cover stock. To preserve the original compositions, the dates of the month are aligned in a single narrow row at the bottom of each page.
I wrote the calendar’s final layout in HTML and CSS. The web’s markup languages may seem ill-suited for designing a printed calendar. However, thanks to the criminally-underrated PagedJS (a JavaScript library that paginates and previews print content in the browser), writing web markup is now my preferred way to design any multi-page print project.
I could be accused of being a rigid Müller-Brockmannite, and, indeed, the front and back covers are built upon a modular grid. For the inside pages, however, I found this approach somewhat excessive and opted instead for a simpler, more flexible system. Vertically, the design adheres to a consistent typographic baseline but horizontally column widths change depending on their content. Not only did this make for a more visually-interesting design with slight variations from page to page, it was the most elegant solution from a technical perspective. For example, the layout for each month’s dates was achieved with these satisfyingly-simple lines of CSS:
display: flex;
justify-content: space-between;
Since no one else will ever see the markup I write for a print project, perhaps it’s odd that I allow the the markup’s brevity to influence my design decisions. Odd or not, it feels right to me as it contributes to a project’s integrity. (Elegance in design is more than outward appearances–it should be an ethos that guides and coheres a project from start to finish.)
I wanted the typography to be visually-striking yet not distract from the photos, and I didn’t fight against the obvious choice: Helvetica. The entire calendar is typeset with Haas Recast Bold in three point sizes: 9, 22, and, on the cover, 44. The tight tracking of this nicely-drawn revival from Dalton Maag evokes the style of Italian modernism from the 1960s and 70s, a major inspiration for me on this project (Haas Recast is also available as a variable font and with more open tracking). In the larger point sizes, I tightened the tracking further still beyond the typeface’s already tight default, a move I hope doesn’t offend its type designer, Eduardo Rennó.
