Who wants a 2015 XJRider.com calendar?

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SpeedRacerOnline
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Buyin' the Goods, Online!
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Joined: Wed Mar 06, 2013 10:06 pm
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My sister sent me a code to get a free wall calendar through Shutterfly. I figured I'd throw the color background pics I made in there and have a cool calendar to hang up at home. It's just that easy, right?

Of course not.

Shutterfly has a pretty good calendar creator system with lots of options and customization, including lots of different layouts for 1 to 5 images per page. The problem is, there's no way to know what size image fits in their frames. I went through 6 customer service agents (their service is a bit less than stellar, too), and finally ended up with the solid answer that nobody seems to know what size any of the frames are. You just upload your image, and deal with the cropped edges. Obviously, for my edge-to-edge images with logos at the borders, cropping ruined them. I finally settled on making the images full bleed at around 8x10.3" to fit. That wasn't altogether simple, either because the originals are 1920x1080 pixels; not even close to the same aspect ratio. Basically, I had to completely remake all of them to work. Then, I did my best to color-match them to monthly backgrounds provided in the calendar making software (no black, though), and loaded them up. I think it turned out pretty sweet!

Then, when I was making the cover image, our existing logo wasn't nearly high enough resolution for print. I originally tried to recreate it, but it was turning out kind of messy. Instead, I decided to resto-mod it by recreating the same style with some minor design changes. One specific change was using the same font for the "XJ" as the bike decals I made awhile back.

So, here's a preview of what it would look like as it is. I haven't made any yet (just finished it this afternoon), so I can still make some changes if anyone sees anything glaringly wrong. Let me know what you think, and if you would want one. I don't know if they do any group buy discounts, but the regular price for an 8x11 calendar is $24.99. They're on sale right now for $18.74, and there seem to be a lot of freebie codes floating around on the web.

Oh, and pay special attention to June. ;)

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"I want to drive. I want to feel all of it: freedom, wind, curves, feedback, acceleration, unsteadiness, fear, joy... I don't want to ride. I want to drive."
- Speed's XJ Journal

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