📝 Behind the Design: Analog Weekly

Analog Weekly has quickly become one of our best selling products! From the outside it's a pretty simple product, but behind the scenes I worked through quite a few iterations before arriving at the finished product.

Here's a peek into my design process and 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.

As we starting prototyping, we noticed the "tippiness" of the card holder came into play. I wanted the holder to feel visually light and minimal, but when we slimmed down the card holder too much, the center of gravity shifted and made them too easy to knock over.

Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.

For the prototypes, we glued two pieces of wood together, but for the final design we created a custom tool to cut the card holder out of a single piece of wood. This creates a seamless one-piece design and continuous grain pattern.

The final shape with the perfect angle.

Stacks and stacks of Weekly Card Holders in production at our local woodworker's shop here in Pennsylvania. You can see how the grain pattern on each piece is slightly different on each piece. All cut from solid walnut or maple and sealed with a clear, matte finish. No coloring is added to the stain.

The final design in all it's glory.

Each week, simply place your completed card in the back of the stack. And when you cycle through all 52 weeks, it's time for a refill.

My full year of 52 completed cards. Feels good.

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.

Get Analog Weekly →

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

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