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Gallery Of Date Stamps And Calendars

By Smashing Editorial, February 22nd, 2008 in Design Showcase | 83 Comments | Forum

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:

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

Published in Design Showcase, February 22nd, 2008
Tags: calendars, date, galleries, inspiration

1.

pryngiel (February 22nd, 2008, 7:27 am)

Nice collection!
2.

niksy (February 22nd, 2008, 7:39 am)

Nice nice…
3.

superxtian (February 22nd, 2008, 7:51 am)

i like calendar that is designed on GIMP, gotta download that one! thumbs up^^
4.

5011 (February 22nd, 2008, 8:02 am)

It’s really useful, thanks smashingmagazine
5.

liam (February 22nd, 2008, 8:05 am)

Not a fan of all of them, but usefull nevertheless
6.

efecaN (February 22nd, 2008, 8:35 am)

they gonna be useful:) thanks.
7.

yellowcake (February 22nd, 2008, 8:47 am)

oh no, i’ve been looking for these
8.

Creativepayne (February 22nd, 2008, 9:15 am)

Nice to see a bunch of calendar graphics on one page. Never even thought about doing this on my site.

Thanks
9.

kuldeep (February 22nd, 2008, 9:41 am)

Smashing seems to be getting more active nowadays. Keep it up!
10.

Laura - webdesigner (February 22nd, 2008, 10:03 am)

lovely icons! :-)
11.

Jason (February 22nd, 2008, 10:05 am)

Check out the date collection over at Link [timothysykes.com] - i love the colors he’s used and how the dates change colors!
12.

JM (February 22nd, 2008, 10:26 am)

Awesome :]
13.

Julio (February 22nd, 2008, 10:33 am)

Awesome!! :D
14.

Daniel (February 22nd, 2008, 11:24 am)

NICE ONES!
15.

jive (February 22nd, 2008, 12:44 pm)

Great post!
16.

ANDREW MEYER (February 22nd, 2008, 12:54 pm)

Thanks 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.
17.

David (February 22nd, 2008, 1:19 pm)

Thanks 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.
18.

SE7EN (February 22nd, 2008, 4:33 pm)

del.icio.us post again!
19.

Ecualucha (February 22nd, 2008, 5:08 pm)

Excelente ayuda, gracias por los tutoriales.
20.

Lalo (February 22nd, 2008, 9:20 pm)

I love the different calander looks. Helps on the design side.
Link [www.tech-exposed.com]
21.

Sesebian (February 23rd, 2008, 12:32 am)

magnificent
22.

Jeffrey Jose (February 23rd, 2008, 12:49 am)

Amazing article !
Thanks for this..
23.

chazzuka (February 23rd, 2008, 7:49 am)

Inspired list as usual thank you for sharing this gr8 stuffs
24.

maryj (February 23rd, 2008, 10:30 am)

nice article
25.

MiSc (February 23rd, 2008, 11:03 am)

I 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?
26.

Alex (February 23rd, 2008, 4:04 pm)

I 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.
27.

Tom Ross (February 24th, 2008, 5:12 pm)

Oh 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 :)
28.

ching blang (February 24th, 2008, 7:01 pm)

Nice article, thanks for the calendar stamps.
29.

pilot (February 25th, 2008, 12:06 am)

Hi!,
What about of best calendar picker javascripts that supports crossbrowsers?
30.

Maxi (February 25th, 2008, 3:59 am)

Wonderfull!
What I was searching for!
Thanks
31.

David (February 26th, 2008, 8:59 am)

many of this date stemps are really cool! good overview!
32.

Nefi (February 26th, 2008, 12:28 pm)

Thank you for considering my humble work. Really thanks.
33.

Shane (February 27th, 2008, 3:39 am)

Whilst 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.
34.

Yozz (February 28th, 2008, 3:09 am)

great :)… maybe you can write also a post with “quote” stamps ? :))
35.

Salman (February 28th, 2008, 9:11 am)

These look great, thanks for sharing :)
36.

Tom Martin (February 28th, 2008, 1:06 pm)

Just 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.
37.

Erdem (February 28th, 2008, 9:28 pm)

Good
38.

Ralph (February 29th, 2008, 10:23 am)

So many nice “Date Stamps” and my question is: left or right or top or bottom ;)

From germany

Ralph
39.

Edwin (March 2nd, 2008, 5:15 pm)

Nice collection :)
40.

JC (March 4th, 2008, 6:59 am)

Post 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 !
41.

Ian (March 4th, 2008, 10:43 pm)

Outstanding resource, thanks for your hard work.
42.

imaginepaolo (March 7th, 2008, 1:27 am)

Wath about my date stamp? Link [www.imaginepaolo.com]
43.

Gary (April 2nd, 2008, 8:19 am)

My 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.
44.

Phil (May 7th, 2008, 2:30 pm)

just what i was looking for, thanks again smashingmagazine
45.

butter (June 10th, 2008, 10:44 am)

great gallery with a grat collections. looks like a great effort has been put in to put this showcase up and running.. cheers
46.

vivek (September 18th, 2008, 5:36 pm)

nice one!……………
47.

Alanya (October 11th, 2008, 12:40 pm)

thanks for the news
Link [www.alanya.biz]
48.

ayhankeskin (October 14th, 2008, 1:31 pm)

That’s a great collection for blogs, when i’ll redesign my blog; i’ll use it; Link [www.zimpara.org]
49.

Thomas Montana (December 23rd, 2008, 3:16 am)

The Link [fubiz.net] design blog has got wonderful datestamps
50.

vishal (March 24th, 2009, 12:02 am)

Nice collection of calender icons. Thanks for them.
Link [www.freshinjobs.com]
51.

Jishnu (April 16th, 2009, 8:47 pm)

Very Good Blog Posting Link [samsubhash.wordpress.com]
52.

Robert Sandles (July 1st, 2009, 2:42 am)

Does anyone now a programme that makes date stamps like ones created by the Uk Post Office when they Frank your Mail ?