Looking beyond ordinary calendar designs (4/2/05)

Speaking of new calendar designs, I came up with the following sketches in Jan '04 after a dismal time looking for calendars myself. Click on the images for a larger image.
	Hours: The first one. These are monthly calendars, by the way. Anyway, The inner circle shows the month and year. Second circle is shaded for the weekends, to make it easier to identify which days we have off (usually). The third was just to show the moon phase, which for some reason is just a fun thing to mark on calendars. Plus people go nuts on full moons, so its handy. Next was just a blank box, where people could shade in days off, important days, etc.. Finally we've got the number date of the day, a good thing to have on a calendar. I suppose notes for the days could be scribbled on the outside, if needed.
	Are we there yet?: Topographic maps (ex.) were the inspiration here. Progress along the road to each "City", which is actually each day. Land features could be used to indicate moon phases, holidays, etc.. I think here I was going for hills/mountains to be weekends and the water as marking a holiday.
	Galileo's Legacy: For some reason, I always think of Galileo when I see the planets mapped out like this, and it seemed like a fun calendar idea so I made a rough sketch. Here we can choose the color of the orbit (see inner orbits for examples) and the size of the planetary body to show appropriate info, with a number on the body to designate the day. The calendar emphasizes the cyclical aspects of nature and life in a very reassuring way. For me, at least.
	Gantt Calendar: I dislike Gantt charts (ex.) immensely, so much so that I didn't even bother to finish this sketch. I think each box was going to have whatever info was needed for each day, and the and the moon phases were marked off by the horizontal lines, demarking where in the moon cycle each day fit.
	Lunar Wave: I liked this one the most, though its hard to do. The circles are my self-critiques... ignore them. Again, you can see the emphasis on moon phase here. Line length enables us to both show information (type of day, for instance) and we can actually write info on the line itself to show more information. I wanted to go crazy with the color palette as well, also to show information. Most of these designs would need a "Key" to show what colors and line styles meant what.
	Mind the gap: A bit like "Are we there yet?" except using a T/Metro/Underground map instead. Here's the official London Underground map, which is what I had in mind. Each line could represent a day-type with Zone's or even Station types indicating any of the other things we'd want to represent.
	Release: And after all that... a little fun :-) It looks like I was going to have line color indicate something, perhaps length could as well. Each "day symbol" could also vary, as they did in the "Mind the gap", to indicate another data point.

Ideas based off of Minard's "Naploeon's March to Moscow" and Grechko's cyclogram, both on Tufte's site, would probably also be worth considering.

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