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Gallery Of Date Stamps And Calendars
Designer’s attention to small details often has a significant impact on how visitors perceive the overall design of a web-site. Although users’ main focus usually lies on finding information, it’s nice to find the content being supported by finest visual details. This holds for favicons, shopping carts, pagination and tag clouds we’ve covered in our earlier posts. But it also holds for… well, date stamps and calendars. Apparently, the latter are used not only in weblogs, but also on large web-sites where events, news and any kind of time-planning is involved.
In such designs a tear-off calendar is often used to symbolize the date in a most intuitive way. However, it’s not always the case. In fact, designers seem to experiment with a number of different approach one wouldn’t really expect from such a tiny design element. Out collection of appealing and interesting calendar icons and date stamps is supposed to prove it. It might provide you with some fresh ideas once you need to design some original date stamp, but don’t know where to start from. All images are clickable.
Some of presented examples may not look nice at the first glance, but they all have some idea behind them — an idea you may use and develop further.
You might want to check out the following articles as well:
- Favicons: The Delicate Beauties
- Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
- Pagination Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
- Shopping Cart: Examples and Good Practices
[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the brand new Smashing Book?]
Date Stamps
Tutorials and References
To design something unique you might find useful some related tutorials.
- Calendar icons not only for your blog
Wit CSS-code and a source image for GIMP. - Web 2.0 Date Icons For Your Blog
png-format with a .psd-source. - Calendar Icon Tutorial
- Calendar Icon
- Calendar icon – Photoshop tutorial
Creating a Blog Entry Date Calendar Icon Look with CSS, Mostly
The Co-Founder of Smashing Magazine. Former writer, web designer, freelancer and webworker. Author of several books. Runs the business.
- 50 Comments
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February 22nd, 2008 7:39 amNice nice…
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February 22nd, 2008 7:51 ami like calendar that is designed on GIMP, gotta download that one! thumbs up^^
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February 22nd, 2008 8:02 amIt’s really useful, thanks smashingmagazine
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February 22nd, 2008 8:05 amNot a fan of all of them, but usefull nevertheless
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February 22nd, 2008 8:35 amthey gonna be useful:) thanks.
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February 22nd, 2008 8:47 amoh no, i’ve been looking for these
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February 22nd, 2008 9:15 amNice to see a bunch of calendar graphics on one page. Never even thought about doing this on my site.
Thanks
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February 22nd, 2008 9:41 amSmashing seems to be getting more active nowadays. Keep it up!
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February 22nd, 2008 10:03 amlovely icons! :-)
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February 22nd, 2008 10:05 amCheck out the date collection over at http://www.timothysykes.com – i love the colors he’s used and how the dates change colors!
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February 22nd, 2008 10:26 amAwesome :]
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February 22nd, 2008 10:33 amAwesome!! :D
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February 22nd, 2008 11:24 amNICE ONES!
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February 22nd, 2008 12:44 pmGreat post!
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February 22nd, 2008 12:54 pmThanks for this post. I’ve been looking for a good source of ideas on this very topic. Additionally, I found Smashing Magazine a couple of months ago and it has steadily progressed to my most read blog/online magazine. Really great publication and very helpful to me as a web designer.
Sweet
p.s. One complaint: what’s up with those nasty, huge post titles on the front page? I don’t get it.
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February 22nd, 2008 1:19 pmThanks for the collection. Always nice for inspiration.
One thing designers (not to mention writers) should avoid is using an ordinal number in the date. We pronounce dates with ordinal numbers (first, tenth, etc.) but this is not correct when dates are displayed visually. You would say “June tenth” and write “June 10.” I think Microsoft Word is a big culprit leading this decline because it “auto corrects” a date into an ordinal. A lot of people who should know better apparently don’t. Why does this matter? For the same reason we value good design. It makes us more professional.
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February 22nd, 2008 4:33 pmdel.icio.us post again!
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February 22nd, 2008 5:08 pmExcelente ayuda, gracias por los tutoriales.
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February 22nd, 2008 9:20 pmI love the different calander looks. Helps on the design side.
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February 23rd, 2008 12:32 ammagnificent
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February 23rd, 2008 12:49 amAmazing article !
Thanks for this.. - 23
February 23rd, 2008 7:49 amInspired list as usual thank you for sharing this gr8 stuffs
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February 23rd, 2008 10:30 amnice article
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February 23rd, 2008 11:03 amI am looking for design best practices for choosing a time period using a timeline (not tons of dropdowns), e.g. sth like timelines used at miomi.com – anyone?
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February 23rd, 2008 4:04 pmI sell my website THEN it gets linked on smashingmagazine! :(
Awesome article btw.. i was actually making some for a someones blog- thanks for the inspiration as always.
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February 24th, 2008 5:12 pmOh wow. Thanks for featuring my website again, I really appreciate it! Nice collection by the way, I’ve never seen a post that showcased this specific part of a website before. Great idea :)
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February 24th, 2008 7:01 pmNice article, thanks for the calendar stamps.
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February 25th, 2008 12:06 amHi!,
What about of best calendar picker javascripts that supports crossbrowsers? - 30
February 25th, 2008 3:59 amWonderfull!
What I was searching for!
Thanks - 31
February 26th, 2008 8:59 ammany of this date stemps are really cool! good overview!
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February 26th, 2008 12:28 pmThank you for considering my humble work. Really thanks.
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February 27th, 2008 3:39 amWhilst many are very nice graphically, I feel the examples with explicity month names (or abbreviations) are better, since they circumvent issues with mm/dd and dd/mm differences.
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February 28th, 2008 3:09 amgreat :)… maybe you can write also a post with “quote” stamps ? :))
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February 28th, 2008 9:11 amThese look great, thanks for sharing :)
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February 28th, 2008 1:06 pmJust wanted to say thanks for this article – I’ve been searching for the past few months for a good source for inspiration / examples of Calendar buttons (I found it pretty hard to locate sites for this!). Smashing Magazine rocks.
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February 28th, 2008 9:28 pmGood
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February 29th, 2008 10:23 amSo many nice “Date Stamps” and my question is: left or right or top or bottom ;)
From germany
Ralph
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March 2nd, 2008 5:15 pmNice collection :)
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March 4th, 2008 6:59 amPost a comment, just to say “nice” or “good” is completly STUPID … this makes longer an longer pages and makes it very difficult to browse the REAL content (too much scrolling) …
PLEASE, add a “rating script”, so that stupid peoples could show their satisfaction in a much clever way !!!!
THANKS !
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March 4th, 2008 10:43 pmOutstanding resource, thanks for your hard work.
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April 2nd, 2008 8:19 amMy god, I’ve been looking for this for about 2 hours now… I’ve been going through so many random blogs just to find an example of a decent calendar icon for inspiration when creating my own…
It’s typical, you see them every single day of your life, but when you’re actually looking for them they all dissapear…Thank you.
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May 7th, 2008 2:30 pmjust what i was looking for, thanks again smashingmagazine
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June 10th, 2008 10:44 amgreat gallery with a grat collections. looks like a great effort has been put in to put this showcase up and running.. cheers
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September 18th, 2008 5:36 pmnice one!……………
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July 1st, 2009 2:42 amDoes anyone now a programme that makes date stamps like ones created by the Uk Post Office when they Frank your Mail ?
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July 4th, 2009 12:52 amNice collection of calender icons. They will be very helpful
Thanks .. - 49
July 18th, 2009 3:40 pmI like the way you write! Nice blog.
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July 20th, 2009 4:37 amHey this is a very interesting article! Thanks!
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Nice collection!