Everybody's workin for the weekend...

In 2008, the agency I worked for wanted to develop a different sort of holiday promotional piece. Ordinarily, this piece aims to spice up Christmas/New Year. I proposed a project that could do this for its recipients throughout the year...specifically those precious days between Friday and Monday. What evolved was a completely functional planner, chocked full of ways to make more of their 52 weekends as well as the days in between.

The pages between its die-cut, chip-board covers held information on 12 different subjects, including genealogy, geocaching, sailing, games, movie marathons and more. "How-To" sections offered instructions relevant to subjects like starting a family tree, using a compass, crafting a boomerang and making Harvey Keitel popcorn. A running "More Ways to Live Out Loud" list flowed through the pages, suggesting visits to a country store, trying the bagpipes, operating a CB radio and 100 others.

 

To insure the book remained usable as a planner, each month got its own calendar - spread across two pages - to provide ample room for entries and notes.

 

Each calendar spread offered over a dozen ways to "Wake Up Your Week" - including performing karakoke with friends present, sparing time to bowl, and hanging upside down. Quotes added to each month acted as reminders to "die of exhaustion rather than boredom," because "how we spend our days, is how we spend our lives."

 

For me, it was a massive undertaking: determining and researching the topics, crowd-sourcing the various lists, finding relevant quotes, creating the instructive diagrams and simple illustrations, locating and/or producing appropriate imagery, developing content - and more content, establishing the overall look and feel - from the fonts to the die-cut cover, placing each illustration, photo and art element - and of course, preparing for production.

I loved every minute. To this day, it remains one of my favorite projects.