📙 #077 - Plottable SVG Calendars

We look forwards, we don't look back.

Dec 25, 2025

December month planners, plotted in various sizes.

🎅 I come bearing a gift; an any-time-up-to-December-2038 svg calendar generator.

Pick a year, month, page size and export an SVG; throw it at your favourite drawing machine, perhaps pick some fancy ink and paper and you’re good to go.

I figured someone may find this useful, I do for a couple of reasons I’ll note below, it looks a lot like this…

Thanks for reading Drawing Machines & Notes from Art Studio Robots! This post is public so feel free to share it.

# VISUAL & TACTILE

Whenever I’m feeling lost or overwhelmed I write things down on index cards, stick them on the table and rearrange them until everything start to make sense. It could be tasks in a project, or todo items to get done throughout the week. Working on screen just doesn’t help, I need to see the bigger picture.

One sticking point has been planning out when to schedule things throughout the month.

This one was me figuring out when to post updates to the Patreon. I know the 1st is for saying what the plan is for the month, the 3rd Wednesday is for sending post out, which means the next day is Q&A post, with answers at the end of the month.

I wanted four updates on the project and saw how the 3rd one was going to fall the day before the newsletter, so better make it a “mini” one to not give myself too much to do.

When figuring out how to fit everything in I’ll often have several index card calendars on the desk, each for different things; I find looking at them so much easier than on-screen digital views.

I also find there’s something limiting about having just one shop bought calendar, with the need to get everything final-and-right on your single chance to get everything final-and-right month view page.

Having disposable (recyclable) index cards reduces friction.

Something I’ve found handy when working with a team is sending a large A1 month plot to the drawing machine, then mapping out project tasks using post-it notes or coloured index cards (or coloured beads and counters). Which I just can’t do (easily) with a normal printer.

Other times, a couple of index cards propped up on the desk and one tucked into my notebook have been a life-saver.

# KITTY & CODE

The link (https://revdancatt.com/calendar/) is a bit of a hack tbh. Normally I just tell Kitty (my AI PA) to plot out a calendar using the NextDraw she’s wired up to, and the Kitty backend is written in NodeJS.

The handwriting is really a webservice that runs on my laptop, where I (or Kitty) can POST some text to it (often addresses for envelopes, or daily todo lists) and get some SVG back.

But while I’m happy to have that running on my laptop, I’m not totally sure I want to put Kitty’s handwriting API out there on the web.

So what I’ve done is convert a whole bunch of the NodeJS backend SVG generating code into frontend javascript, pre-generated a few hundred variations of each month, day, year and numbers 1 to 31, and replaced what would have been a call to the API with loading up a random variation.

It’s a weird work-around, but gets the job done.

I also put up the code for this calendar thing so people can run it locally over on patreon, but I think you have to sign up to grab it. But so far I’ve found it to be one of the better ways of sharing code that isn’t GitHub.

# ZINE

That’s enough words for the year, so instead some pictures. As part of the patreon thing, which was all about dots this month, I posted out some little riso printed zines.

“Twelve Dots” - it was fun.

The four “masters”, one for each colour; yellow, pink, blue & black.

The Riso machine is a bit like a photo copier, but a B&W master in the top, select the colour, and it’ll print it.

Yeah, okay, so my registration was a bit off!

# THE PAPERNET

From 17 years ago…

# THE END

This year has been a bit intense, I hope you’re doing okay!

For my own sanity I more than halved the amount of time I spent on social media, and more than doubled the time I spent writing and sending postcards, letters, art and mail through the post. Totally worth it.

Next year even more of the same. I’ve even ordered some custom rubber stamps so we can have official Catt Studio inter-studio correspondence (no matter how big or small your studio is)!

Take care, I love you all!
Dan
🧡

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?