📝 Behind the Design: Analog Weekly

One year ago I launched Analog Weekly, and it's quickly become one of our best selling products! Now that I've completed 52 cards, I've realized how much less time I spend getting distracted by my digital calendar. It's nice to have my whole week at a glance, always in front of me.

Analog Weekly is a simple product and seemingly obvious follow up to our Analog Daily Cards, but behind the scenes it went through a lot of iterations and prototypes before I arrived at the finished product.

I wanted to give you a peek behind the scenes at my design process and some of the decisions that went into the final product. Let's dig into it...

The first part of the design process was figuring out size and format of how to lay out the week. There are only so many different ways to lay out seven days, but small changes in size and layout actually change the overall feel quite a bit.

Weekends on the side or the bottom? How big should the card be? Needs to have enough space to write on, but I didn't want it to feel too big and overpowering on a desk or counter.

As I was working through different layouts, I printed them out to compare how they felt in hand and in front of me. Sometimes things look ok on screen, but it's always best to dial in scale and proportion with physical prototypes.

Lots more decisions to make. Spell out the days of the week or abbreviate them? List out all seven days in a row? Do the extra lines help with the visual structure or clutter up the design?

Here's the final card design I landed on. It's 3" tall (same as the width of daily Analog Cards) x 8.5" long (standard letter size paper width).

Placing the weekends on the bottom gave more breathing room for the weekdays up top, and I liked how it grouped them together. 

The next part of the process was designing the card holder. I knew I wanted to match the design language of our main Analog Card Holder, but the way you interact with the Weekly Cards is a bit different. Rather than propping up one card in the front and storing the rest in the back, it made more sense to design a stand that holds all 52 cards in a neat stack.

I like to think of the Weekly Analog as one level zoomed out of my Daily Analog tasks. Every Monday morning I copy down any key events and meetings from my digital calendar onto a new Weekly Cards so I can visualize the week ahead. It's a small habit, but now one I can't live without.

It's been fun to hear how you all have been using the Weekly Cards for additional things like meal planning, goal setting, and project planning. 

I'd love to hear what you think of this look behind-the-scenes.

Send me a quick reply if you'd like me to do more of these. 

Jeff Sheldon
Founder/Designer
Ugmonk.com

. . . . .

Want less email from us?
Click here to change your email frequency preferences
No longer want to receive these emails? You can unsubscribe here.

 View this email in your browser