Happy deskware: Scout Creative's free pop up calendars

Scout Creative makes my desk a happier place to work

I have completely fallen in love with these papercraft monthly desktop calendars designed by Scout Creative. They are super fun, very cute and, best of all, utterly free :) You can collect your free calendar on their site on the first of every month, or you can subscribe to their email service and they will deliver it right to your inbox. Either way, you are supporting a nifty company and making your desk a more liveable place to work :) This month's calendar is a chicken coop :)

Scout Creative is a content marketing firm that specifically designs papercraft promotional items. They make all sorts of cut out and papercraft toy designs that are designed to promote, say, movies, printers, company entities..etc. They have even made little stand alone paper toy patterns for Disney. Very, very cool.

For the last year-ish, the company has designed a free paper craft monthly desktop calendar. My favorite in their archives is the July campfire scene, but the April record collection is pretty cool too. Browse their archive. The designs are clever, little color bursts that are a little tongue and cheek. They've already made my month...and I finished a PhD in the last 30 days.

Silly thing - it never occurred to me before finding these calendars that there are companies out there that produce papercraft promotional items. When I was a kid I loved, loved, loved cutting these sorts of patterns out of cereal boxes, folding and pasting. When I was doing my Masters, I even went so far as to buy a really complicated cuckoo clock pattern from a store, and assemble it. It took months, but it supposedly worked when assembled. I wouldn't know. I got the whole thing assembled, but couldn't afford the $20 of pennies that I would have had to put into the weights to get the clock started. The paper clock hung on the wall, and the weights sort of hung around my apartment. Still, that experience did not take away from my love of these little patterns. Can you imagine how much fun designing these crafts? If this science thing does not work out, maybe I'll do this for living :)