FIGURE B

The safety zone tells you where to keep your text. Click picture for a larger image.

I used the text tool to create four separate layers, each with a chunk of text. By moving the text around, I was able to create an attractive presentation.

Be aware that this stage is where your calendar either becomes quite professional in its presentation or spectacularly amateurish. Typography is an art I can't teach you in this article, but here are some hints:

• Leading is the distance between lines. Tighten your lines up as much as possible, so they look clean.

• Kerning is the distance between letters. You won't need to kern all your letters, but you'll notice the right side of the A fits well under the left side of the V in DAVID. I kerned these two letters so they looked nice.

• Choose a professional font that's not bitmap only. You want to use a font that stands out and can be represented at the dpi recommended by your photo service provider.

• Use color and effects judiciously. You'll notice I didn't use any shadow effects or any real color. I just used white text on a darker blue background, but I moved the text over an area of darker blue so it'd stand out.

• Don't forget things like calendar year and copyright.

• Make sure the font you choose avoids letters with thin lines. The thinner the line, the more it'll fade into the background. The type I used here had nice, thick lines.

Finally, you don't need to use a separate image for you your cover. I did, because I felt it gave the calendar more value.

Next week, we'll upload the images to CafePress and show you how the whole calendar came together.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.