Updated: date
Published: SEPTEMBER 2024
It’s been ‘a labour of love’
Two Montreal artists create new 2025 Dingbat calendar
By WARREN PERLEY
Writing from Montreal
Graphic designers Rodney Hall and Karen Boor are in Dingbat heaven! They’ve embraced the artistic challenge of a lifetime to produce an all-new version of the beloved, whimsical Dingbat calendar first created by artist Dudley Ward more than a century ago at the behest of visionary pharmaceutical executive Charles E. Frosst.
Rodney and Karen – who are partners with me in BestStory.ca Inc., Canada’s only ad-free, long-form journalism company ¬ – first became fascinated with the Dingbats when I wrote a brief description of the mystical little creatures in a business profile on Merck Frosst published across Canada on February 26, 2003. There were also a couple of Dingbat drawings reproduced in that article carried by Southam newspapers, owned at the time by Canwest Media.
Between 1915 and 1993, there were five Dingbat illustrators, starting with progenitor Dudley Ward and followed by Ross Wiggs, L. R. Batchelor, Alex McLaren, and Gunter Scherrer. While all five men were outstanding artists in their own right, the mandate of the latter four was to copy the Dingbat drawing style of Dudley Ward, who first created the mischievous little characters in the early 20th century.
The first thing you should be aware of about many artists is that they are creative, humorous, and inquisitive. One might even describe them as child-like – which helps explain the attraction of my colleagues Karen and Rodney to the cartoonish Dingbat characters.
After reading my 2003 story in The Gazette, Rodney says he immediately checked out the various Dingbat calendars displayed on the internet. “I loved the goofy nature of the Dingbats and the different, tongue-in-cheek scientific scenes created every year by the illustrators who came up with the visuals,” Rodney says. “All the illustrators throughout the years were amazing talents. It’s such an honour for Karen and me to be involved in creating a new Dingbat calendar for 2025.”
For her part, Karen says that my 2003 Gazette article made her wonder about the Dingbats origins. “I was very curious about those funny little Dingbat characters,” Karen says. “So I started researching online and found that people were selling old Dingbat calendars on eBay, Etsy, and elsewhere. I was amazed by their passion.”
It’s been a long journey to Dingbat heaven for Rodney who studied both illustration and design at Dawson College before snagging a Mac-based graphic design post at the upstart Weekly Herald in the fall of 1988. At that time, journalist Wesley Goldstein and I were co-publishers of the Weekly Herald, located in the mainly anglophone municipalities of west-end Montreal. I clearly recall that Rodney’s first illustration won our company a major contract with Birks, a prominent jewelry store of the era. Rodney’s hand-drawn illustration showed a bundle of diamonds simulating grapes hanging from a vine.
Rodney and I have been a team ever since – even after the Weekly Herald was forced to close its doors in February 1991 when we ran out of funds. Five months later, I incorporated Ponctuation Grafix Inc., a marketing and graphic design firm. In fact, Rodney is fond of saying that he’s known me longer than his wife!
In his capacity as art director at Ponctuation Grafix, Rodney was instrumental in hiring Karen to join the “family” in 1996 after she had spent three years as a designer at a Montreal ad agency. Karen, whose mother tongue is French, also had an extensive art education having studied technical drafting in high school, as well as fine arts at CEGEP de Valleyfield before earning a graphic design diploma at Collège Salette.
In 2014, a third talented artist named Nathalie Lagden joined the Ponctuation Grafix team. Like Karen, Nathalie is fluently bilingual and like her colleagues, she has double diplomas – in her case in fine arts and graphic design. Nathalie, who specializes in design and layout of scientific documents, paints abstract landscapes in acrylic as a hobby.
In July 2009 – five years before Nathalie joined Ponctuation Grafix – Rodney, Karen, and I incorporated BestStory.ca Inc. as an ad-free, long-form journalism company to provide a venue for freelance journalists to present articles to the public – supported by interesting graphics and high-quality editing. The freelance journalists maintain copyright over their original content.
For his part, Rodney says that the greatest artistic challenge he faced in creating the Dingbat illustration for the 2025 calendar was to bestow a more modern look on the Dingbats while maintaining their aura of magic, mystery, and fun. Of course, Rodney draws directly in the digital medium, as opposed to the brush, pen and paper used by the great Dingbat artists of yesteryear. Like most artists of any era, Rodney says he loves his independence and detests boundaries.
Karen was asked by me to design a logo to be integrated into the Dingbat trademark used by BestStory.ca Inc. on all our Dingbat artwork. She aced her assignment, coming up with a design that depicts a playful, bird-like character with colourful wings running with the Dingbat trademark in front of it.
In designing the grid for our 2025 Dingbat calendar, Karen confides that her major challenge was to keep it clean and simple using sans serif fonts and minimal colours so as not to detract from Rodney’s Dingbat illustration. She designed one sheet for each of the 13 calendar months with a one-month look-ahead and a one-month look-behind.
Deciding what to include on the grid required thoughtful consideration on Karen’s part. Fortunately, we have enough room to include a lot of useful information – given that the calendar is 13.5” w x 28” h (34.29 cm w x 71.12 cm h), which is slightly taller than the old Dingbat calendars produced under the Frosst branding between 1915 and 1993.
Being based in Montreal, Karen decided that all Canadian national and provincial holidays were a must. But she also researched and included the important dates for Canada’s North American neighbours – the U.S. and Mexico. Karen included at least one national holiday for the U.K. and each E.U. member state, as well as for many other countries worldwide.
Regarding religious holidays, the 2025 Dingbat calendar includes the main celebrations for the major religions of the world. And, of course, being based in the province of Quebec, there is a French-language version of the calendar to go along with the English-language one.
If you were to conclude that Karen and Rodney had a blast creating our brand new, made-in-Canada 2025 Dingbat calendar, you wouldn’t be wrong. Karen says she finds the Dingbats “curious” and “amusing”. Rodney calls them “a labour of love” and “like my cooking, definitely a work in progress”.
We hope that aficionados across Canada and beyond enjoy making the acquaintance of BestStory.ca Inc.’s new Dingbat family and will help spread the word to stoke passion among a new generation that might like to join ‘Dingbat Nation’!
• Story of Dingbat creator Dudley Ward and his four talented successors
• Radio personality Al Randall interviews Dingbat author Warren Perley
• Never try Dingbat humour on an enraged airline passenger
• Dingbat Wall of Fame at Castor Pharmacy Museum
• The chicken or the egg? How the Dingbat story and 2025 calendar came together
• Purchase the 2025 Dingbat wall calendar