Why the Boston Metro Map Designer Built Me a Calendar

In 2012, I printed my first multi-year calendar. Two years on one sheet — because the publishing industry only makes calendars for the next 12 months, and I needed to plan further. I gave copies to friends and colleagues. One of them — Evgeniya Shamis , a generations researcher — filmed herself using it . She pinned it to her wall and started marking deadlines across both years. That was the first signal: people actually want to see more than 12 months at a glance. The calendar was published through Scriber in the Russian «Жить интересно!» magazine. But every new year meant manual layout work. I needed a generator. The Boston Metro Connection In 2020, Michael Kvrivishvili — the designer of the official Boston Metro map — built a calendar generator specifically for me. His tool used pdfmake to create PDFs directly in the browser: you set the number of months and Gantt rows, and it rendered a printable document. It worked. But it was a black box — pdfmake handles all the layout internall