Hi,
I attended the annual Analog Aficionados get-together a couple of weeks ago at DesignCon, an invitation-only meetup of the living legends of analog design.
Rather than have a web page of photos to share with our readers, I decided to do something different and to produce a poster of selected images of the Aficionados, with the idea that it would be a great calendar for readers to be able to hang in the office, lab, garage, makerspace, or...living room.
We'd never done such a thing in the past, so it was a first time for everyone, including our art department. After honing conceptuals, we settled on a design and a couple of iterations later, we released the PDFs onto electronicdesign.com along with a short article on the Analog Aficionados history, here.
The calendar has been available for free download via that page, for a few days now, with the files being in PDF form that readers could print out.
I tried doing so at a local Walgreens Pharmacy, who do photoprinting, this past Saturday. First of all, they don't take PDF files, so I had to scramble for an online PDF-JPG converter, hoping the resolution wouldn't get degraded.
I then came to the realization, in the store, that the 16x20 poster size was the size of the media and that Walgreens' printers needed 0.2" (5mm) margins between the printable area and the media edge. Ugh - our poster art got trimmed by their software, taking a chunk out of the right side of the even months of 2026.
With several revisions of the calendar already under my belt, I risked my life in asking our art dept. for another revision this past Monday, shrinking the art and creating a JPG file, and was pleasantly surprised with a quick "how's this?" after which I quickly tested it as an upload to Walgreens to see that it more or less fit, which it did.
As I write this, I just put an order in for a few calendars at Walgreens and the process went without a hitch. The jpg files are now on the ElectronicDesign website for everyone to download for free.
Please don't pass the files on to your friends/colleagues/fam - download them for each person's use so our advertisers don't see tumbleweeds on our site so we can keep the lights on. Getting to the files is mostly harmless.
The calendar is copyrighted, but you are permitted by Endeavorb2b to print them off as copies for yourselves, not for resale, say no more than 5 copies. Print this off and take it with you if they need proof.
One more thing, which is why I'm writing all this. Walgreens Photo have a sale on until this coming Saturday evening Central time with 50% off using discount code LUCKY50, which makes a 16x20 collectible poster/calendar for your shop or office less than ten bucks!
enjoy,
-andyT
p.s. now that we have the process down, next year's calendar should go much smoother. Apologies to those who grabbed the PDFs and may have dead-ended in a printing attempt.
