Calendar Project 2020 by Five Metal Shop / 五金行
Yes we have a real calendar in our Elephant Calendar. It’s the Calendar Project 2020 by Five Metal Shop, a creative studio located in Taipei and Hong Kong. The Calendar Project by Five Metal Shop is an experiment to see how an almost obsolete object with quite a cultural significance might be revived in a modern context by using modern printing, papers, illustrations and design.
The project started from 2016. It might not have seamed ambitious but they decided to reinvent the traditional wall calendar, where each day occupies a whole page. By tearing a page each day the time passing by becomes simply tangible. We can collect and share our memories by collecting and sharing the pages of those special days. Isn’t that cool?
BRAND NEW COLOUR AND PALETTE & ILLUSTRATIONS : There are two Pantone colours for each month and also 85 brilliant illustrations for special days and festivals (Here’re well the cultural inputs of this project, wanna know what we celebrate in China?). For 2020, FMS came up with new colours inspired by daily objects and their surroundings in Taiwan.
CRAFTSMANSHIP
The execution of the project is a tight cooperation between the designers and the senior technicians who has been handling the machines for more than 30 years. The binding, due to the thickness of the paper (0.05mm), is 100% manual. We are talking about 385 pages for every and each of the calendars.
BAG AND KEYCHAIN
This year the calendar no longer comes in a box, but a waterproof plastic Tyvek bag. What a gift for us who live in Bergen, the most rainy town in the world. After taking your calendar in it with you home you can use it for your lunchbox (or your swimming suits). Do you want to be as cool as ice-cream or a superstar? Pick your new keychain. It’s one more present in the package. Christmas is around the corner isn’t it.
ABOUT FIVE METAL SHOP
Five Metal Shop is an independent creative studio that helps their clients identify, understand and solve strategic problems through design. Each project has a unique context and set of individual constraints, and these frame the creative solutions from the studio. In doing so, they do not limit the scope of the project or their involvement to just one area. They provide holistic creative solutions which typically leverage multiple forms of design including strategic, brand and communication, interior, website and product depending on the project. Their core team are from business, marketing and communication design backgrounds with top level international experience in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, UK and Germany. They also regularly collaborate with like-minded international talents who are often leaders in their respective creative fields. As design takes many visible and invisible forms, the aim of Five Metal Shop is to continue their wide exploration of the creative landscape together with their clients and grow organically into any direction which feels true to their mutual context and interests.