Five Metal Shop’s 2024 Calendar Project is a modern take on the traditional daily almanac that this Taiwanese design studio has been printing since 2017.

They've kept information like the solar terms, lunar calendar, and Chinese and Taiwanese holidays like Chinese New Year and the Dragon Boat Festival. Plus, they've created 88 illustrations highlighting special days (International Puppy Day and May Day, to name a couple). And most importantly, they’ve preserved that paper-thin format while printing with metallic and pastel Pantone inks.

It’s a calendar, an advice column, a 365 page artist book, a technical masterpiece, and a year’s worth of wrapping paper.

Order Terms:

• Due to limited stock, please limit orders to one calendar per customer

From Five Metal Shop:

A calendar where you tear off a page after each day ends is a typology unique to Asia. Traditionally in East Asia, a calendar contains the date, month and year but also the date in the lunar calendar along with various information pertaining to the ‘wisdom’ of that particular day, such as indications of good days for moving, farming and ploughing, getting married and so on. As well as a calendar, it served as a daily guide with tips for what was then a mainly agricultural society.

We have always admired this typology and the important social and functional story behind it, so we decided to revisit the design and update it for today. The Calendar Project by Five Metal Shop is an experiment to see how an almost obsolete object with a quiet cultural significance might be brought back and made relevant again in a modern context by using modern printing, papers, illustrations and design. We tried to keep the design honest and refrain from over-designing it. We made minor tweaks to the typeface and the layout but the DNA of the calendar remains the same.

The typefaces were carefully chosen to remind people of the traditional calendar and modified to fit today’s requirements. The dates of the lunar calendar and 24 solar terms have been kept because they were the most important factors that our grandfathers traditionally referred to everyday.

Specifications and Dimensions

385 pages, manually bound
Printed on superfine 30 gsm paper (0.5 mm thickness)

Made in Taiwan

Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.8” / 18.4 X 12.3 cm

Comes with a hole in the backing to hang the calendar

About Five Metal Shop

Five Metal Shop is an independent creative studio located in Taiwan and Hong Kong that helps clients to identify, understand and solve strategic problems through design. Each project has a unique context and an individual set of constraints, and these frame the creative solutions which we propose. In doing so, we do not limit the scope of the project or our involvement to just one area. We provide holistic creative solutions which typically leverage multiple forms of design including strategy, brand and communication, interior, website and product depending on the project.

Our core team is from business, marketing and communication design backgrounds with top level international experience in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, UK and Germany. We also regularly collaborate with like-minded international talents who are often leaders in their respective creative fields.

As design takes many visible and invisible forms, the aim of Five Metal Shop is to continue our wide exploration of the creative landscape together with our clients and grow organically into any direction which feels true to our mutual context and interests.