Round Calendar

For as long as I can remember, my internal picture of the year has been a circle, with summer opposite winter, spring opposite autumn. The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed that there were no calendars which depicted the year in its natural form, the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. (Technically it’s not a circle, but an ellipse with a very small eccentricity; which, however, makes the northern hemisphere’s summer four days longer than its winter).

Most calendars showed time as an infinite sequence of rectangular boxes, like the boxes—classrooms, houses, offices, cars—in which we spend so much of our lives. Eventually, since I couldn’t find any round calendar designs that I liked, I decided to go ahead and make my own.

As well as a practical wall calendar and year planner, it’s also meant as a mandala—an object for meditation, featuring both radial and fourfold symmetry. And what better than a round calendar to help you meditate on the transitory and cyclical nature of all things?

Unfortunately, making each new year’s version of the calendar (in OpenOffice Draw) is very labour-intensive, and I haven’t been making a new version since 2018. I would be keen to hear from anyone with the technical know-how to streamline the process.