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Creating a Calendar Icon

“What a great idea, use a date / calendar icon for our events on the website so as to make the date stand out.”
What seemed like a great idea at the time has turned out to be a big learning curve and a lesson I thought was worth sharing.

So firstly what is it I was trying to create?  Well here is day 1:

Simple right?  Wrong!  Once this one was created I had then to create 365 other images (yes 366 in total – leap years!) and do this one by one.  I would also have to repeat as we wanted three different colours – that’s a total 1098 images.
At this realisation I almost gave up, but thankfully I remembered something about running scripts in Adobe Photoshop.

After a lot of digging around I found a life saving guide from Alan Gilbertson that guided me through the process of using a data set a variables to output the 366 images I needed and then I just changed the colour and repeated.

This guide is available at: http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/4874

With this you can script for changing textual variables and also image variables (replace image at the same time as text).  What you could do is create a text file with month,day,image and change the image between spring, summer, autumn and winter.

If you would like a txt file using the format name,day,month (e.g. January-01,01,January) you can access mine at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7PYk41GiJMvd1dJSFMxUUU0VEU/edit?usp=sharing

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