Adobe InDesign: Calendars With Circles Behind Numbers

I spend a lot of time each year making my planner for the following year. I do all of this in Adobe InDesign, which gives me the most amount of freedom to automate tasks like this.

I make these calendars using a combination of cell styles and paragraph styles. This means I only need to do it once, and then I can apply it to all of the calendars in my document.

First, I set my cell style. Because I have a lot of cell styles, I’ll usually base all of them on one cell style. You can do this using the “Based On” dropdown.

The settings you choose here don’t really matter, it’s just how you want it to look. I choose to set no strokes on my cells, so the circles act as my border.

In the paragraph style, I already have one set, but you can choose to go “New Paragraph Style” to set up a new one. The paragraph style determines the circles and their colour.

In the paragraph style settings, we’re going to turn on “Paragraph Shading”. This is like highlight in Word, but much more customisable.

I’ve changed all of the corners to rounded, and then I play with the offsets to create my circle shape. I always make sure the width is set to column, which means it will be determined by the width of the cell, not the text. If the width is determined by the text, then some numbers might have a circle around them, while others have an oval.

The offsets can be a bit of a trial and error sort of thing. With my current calendar, it’s not set up as perfectly circular, but optically it looks better.

These settings will change based on the font you are using, the text’s position in the cell, the baseline of the font, and the size of your table. My planner is based on an A5 format, and I’m using Operetta 8 as the font.

This chain link in the middle enables and disables linking all of the offsets together. Because I’m making something more customised, I have it turned off.

This method doesn’t work exactly with how I make big calendars, because I right-align my type, so not all of the numbers will be perfectly placed within the table, but this method is perfect for making mini calendars.

If you want to go a step further, and add a stroke around the paragraph shading, you’ll add the same settings for paragraph shading to paragraph stroke.

And then you’ll have shaded circles behind your numbers as well as a border around the circles.