Visual Schedule

Ryan and I teamed up and developed a task manager / visual schedule to help us manage life. This is what we came up with. Click on the “Download Files” button below.

Helpful Details

File Format

The cards are designed in Adobe Illustrator. The mockup boards are an Adobe InDesign file.

Card Size

I choose square business cards as my design. The bleed area is 2.71″ x 2.71″. The final card is trimmed to 2.56″ x 2.56″. The safe area for text and design is 2.4″ x 2.4″.

Font

The font that I used for all my designs and cards is “Atkinson Hyperlegible Font.” You can download the free font from here: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont.

Colors

Here’s a list of the colors in CSS Hex format: #DE77A3 (pink), #D42E35 (red), #ED7D46 (orange), #FCDC0C (yellow), #30519E (blue), #9ECFBA (mint), #117C2B (green), #000000 (black), #FFFFFF (white).

Other Supplies

For the project cards, I found Mini Index cards that are 3 inches by 2.5 inches.

My map push pins were also from Amazon, but you can get those anywhere.

Cards

Designs

The end goal was to print cards through Moo. The cards are based on their design guidelines (see above). The minimum order through Moo is 50 cards, and they allow you to make up to 50 different designs on the back of your card with the same front design. All my cards have a confetti front design. If you have less than 50 backside designs, then they’ll just repeat your designs until they reach 50. If you have more than 50 designs like I did, you’ll just have to create multiple jobs.

If you want to order repeats of your 50 cards, you can, by just ordering more cards. If you order 100 cards, then your 50 designs will be printed twice; if you order 150 cards, then your 50 designs will be printed three times; and so on.

My backside designs fall into three categories: general cards used for task management and schedules, holiday cards used to signify holidays and important calendar days, and affirmations.

Export from Adobe Illustrator

File > Export > Export for Screens…

Make sure to “Include Bleed”.

Export at 300 ppi in a usable format like PNG.

Boards

Design

I wanted to go as small as possible, so the corkboards are 18 inches by 24 inches. We ended up with 4 cork boards: this week’s schedule, next week’s schedule, daily/weekly tasks, and monthly/big projects. I created a mockup of the boards through Adobe InDesign and printed the boards on normal 8.5 by 11 paper for a few weeks to pilot the ideas.

Drag and Drop

If you have exported your cards from Adobe Illustrator, you can now drag and drop those cards into the Adobe InDesign frames.

For more information about how to do that: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/frames-objects.html

Export from Adobe InDesign

File > Export…

Export at 300 ppi in a usable format like PNG.

I find exporting the files as PNG or PDF makes it easier to print. I hate the Adobe print dialog. If you don’t have a problem figuring out the Adobe print dialog, you can skip the export option.

Construction

The large text headers (i.e., “This Week’s Focus,” “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc.) are printed at home on standard paper and glued onto the corkboard with rubber cement. To make it easier to place the cards on the corkboards, we punched holes in the center of the cards and placed “permanent” pins. This takes the guess-work out of trying to pin everything correctly and eventually wearing out the cards and corkboard with repeated pinning. Obviously, you could skip the whole corkboard idea and use something entirely different too.

Use and Additional Ideas

The whole idea behind this task manager is that when a task is done, you flip over the card and celebrate with some confetti!

If you have small children, you may want to add more general cards to create a visual flow chart for things like getting ready for school, bedtime routine, etc. You can also add more general cards like play, read, practice instruments, school, sports, homework, etc., and let them create their daily flow each morning.

For Ryan and myself, our task manager’s purpose was to prevent us from over-scheduling and over-whelming ourselves every day with what needs to be done around the house and in our lives.

Conclusion

If you have any questions about how to use Adobe products, need help ordering through Moo, or want to know what some of my cards mean, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I will help as much as I can. Here’s the download button again…