Normally, days on a calendar are organized in simple columned grids. Not so the 2015 Typographic Wall Calendar, a bizarre mosaic of orphaned keyboard keys—2,015 of them, to be exact—that asks you to learn to read a calendar in a totally new way.
Created by Frankfurt-based typographer Harald Geisler, the Typographic Calendar was started in 2009 as a one-off design, and went on sale to the general public as an early Kickstarter success story in 2010. It's made up entirely of individual keys ripped off of (mostly) mechanical keyboards, like the IBM Model M, Apple Extended Keyboard, and Cherry Model RS 6000.
To create his calendar, Geisler takes a couple thousand odd keyboard keys and painstakingly arranges them in a grid. Since one of the gimmicks of his calendar is that the design contains the same number of keys as the year, there's one more key in the design every year, requiring the whole thing to be redone from scratch. He then photographs the finished mosaic, and sells it to the general public on his website as a poster for around $36.
So if a year only has 365 days, how does Geisler use 2,015 keys in his calendar? And how do you read it? It's actually fairly simple. You read the calendar from left to right. Each month starts with the fully spelled out month name, then an abbreviation for the day of the week, and then the date. By tweaking the lengths of the abbreviations he uses, Geisler is able to pad out the calendar to exactly 2,015 keys.
This isn't exactly a calendar I'd want to use to try to keep track of my life, but as a visual love letter to keyboards, Geisler's 2015 Typographic Wall Calendar is the perfect Christmas gift for the writer or type lover in your life whom you don't want to spend more than $36 on. You can purchase it here.