Our reporter Chen Xuening
The new year is approaching, and all kinds of cultural and creative calendars are on the market again.
Unlike the museum calendars represented by the Forbidden City in the past, this year's calendar market is even more prosperous, and cultural brands in different fields are exploring their own highlights.
Some are sentimental, one sentence of Beijing dialect every week, to start a small day in Beijing dialect; some spell the value of beauty, use paper sculptures to record the time and perceive the solar terms.
Intriguingly, since the explosive growth of cultural and creative calendars around 2015, many people's consumption of calendars has also begun to fall into the fatigue period of the "seven-year itch".
The cultural and creative calendar is no longer a simple binding of culture and date, but has evolved into a life taste and artistic aesthetic.
In an increasingly homogenized market, how to stand out in many calendars will undoubtedly put forward higher requirements for brand innovation.
The museum calendar keeps changing
The "Forbidden City Calendar", which began with the zodiac as the theme in 2011, has now gone through a 12-year cycle.
The "Forbidden City Calendar" of 2022 arrives as scheduled, but it is refreshing.
The cover is no longer the four gold characters "Forbidden City Calendar" inlaid on the red cloth of the palace wall, but a beaming tiger pattern, taken from the Forbidden City collection "The Qing Dynasty Red Silk Embroidered Flying Tiger Flag with Cloud Pattern".
"The previous years are all'red bricks', this year's is more special in terms of specifications." Xiao Wu is a museum cultural and creative enthusiast, and the "Forbidden City Calendar" is almost constant year after year.
More than a dozen books are placed together. In addition to the different cover styles of the 2022 edition, the format has also become larger.
Turning over the inner page, the new version has changed the way of displaying the past. The pictures of cultural relics are enlarged and high-definition, and even the relics can be displayed 360-degree rotation through AR technology. The date page also leaves ample space for remembering.
After three years of spring and autumn, the National Expo calendar in 2022 has also changed a lot.
In conjunction with the 12 months, the National Expo Calendar has delicately included 12 different categories of cultural relics in the design. Experts and curators have written descriptions of cultural relics, allowing consumers to watch the exhibition "in the air" and be on the scene.
The first calendar officially authorized by the Sanxingdui Site Museum, "Sanxingdui Calendar 2022" is also very popular.
It is not a simple "article of cultural relics", but a combination of cultural relics, patterns, archaeological diaries and calendars.
"Small but beautiful" products are cracked to survive
"2021? Where is the cool place to be cut! 2022, everyone is coming!" At the Code Character Bookstore in Wangfujing and Heping Fruit Bureau, "Chang Xiaoliang Beijing Dialogue Desk Calendar" was prominently displayed.
Every day a small illustration for DIY and one sentence of Beijing dialect science popularization every week are full of humor, which makes it seem a bit "skeletal and unique" in many literary calendars.
As a highly popular self-media blogger and painter, Chang Xiaoliang has tried to introduce Beijing’s most flavorful language to more netizens in short videos since 2015.
Chang Xiaoliang has been insisting on making Beijing dialect and Hutong culture into cultural and creative products such as desk calendars for 5 years.
In the beginning, the desk calendar designed by Chang Xiaoliang was a relatively traditional monthly calendar, with a monthly scene drawing outlining the childhood memories in the hutongs. In the past two years, he has begun to try to make a more novel weekly calendar.
A hand-operated mechanical calendar made from master-class paintings into leaves, a hand-torn calendar that uses paper-carved architecture to record time, a four-season food calendar that corresponds to seasonal delicacies, and a "cat calendar" with the theme of stray cats... …Various "small and beautiful" cultural and creative calendars emerge in endlessly, making people dizzy.
In the gap between the museum calendar and the calendars of classic cultural brands such as "Zhihu Calendar", "Reading Calendar", "Movie Calendar", and "One-way Calendar", small brands with a small print volume have squeezed out a channel of their own.
Ebb consumption calls for the ultimate experience
In September 2020, an article titled "We turned off the lights, the last year of the "Species Calendar" is on sale today" was reprinted by many people, and the "Species Calendar" launched by GuoKou.com reached the end in 2021.
At that time, some people in the industry believed that the farewell of "Species Calendar" meant that the cultural and creative calendar industry had entered a period of exhaustion and urgently needed to be changed.
Guo Husk has publicly stated: "In the first year that Guo Husk launched the "Species Calendar", the cultural and creative calendar was still a blue ocean. As various companies entered one after another, the cultural and creative calendar market began to scramble."
Lu Lu, 32, is an advertising practitioner.
The "Species Calendar", which combines popular science knowledge with calendars for the first time, is her first memory of the cultural and creative calendar. A year of explosive growth.
However, after years of precipitation, the cultural and creative calendar market has gradually matured.
Whether it is an old museum calendar or a trendy art calendar, it is no longer possible to sit back and enjoy what remains unchanged.
When brands, big and small, stand at the same starting point and compete openly, whose product can bring consumers a more unique experience will become the key to victory.