Program schedule
Definition
A Program Schedule is a document that provides a description of the topic, time, and place of the events associated with a convention. Program schedules may be very detailed and become much like a small handbook, or they may be very small and reduced to a single sheet of paper. A popular layout style, especially for the most abbreviated program's schedule, is called a program grid.
Program Grid Layout
Time Down
In this format, The time axis is drawn down the left column, with the rooms across the top.
| Room A | Room B | Room C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00 am | panel | panel | panel |
| 9:00 am | Large Panel | panel | |
| 10:00 am | panel | panel | panel |
This format is more conducive to reading in a certain respect, because time flows down the page and therefore your pagination flows naturally from one page to the next. Note that by convention, events which span rooms are usually drawn with merged cells as shown.
Time Across
In this format, The time axis is drawn left to right across the top, with the rooms down the left.
| 8:00 am | 9:00 am | 10:00 am | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Room A | panel | panel | panel |
| Room B | panel | panel | panel |
| Room c | panel | panel | panel |
This format is more compact and can be made more space efficient in your document.
Universal Caveats
Always show all the rooms on a single page, across or down, so that the viewer can see all the temporally coincident panels at one time. If he must flip back and forth between pages to understand everything that is happening at 2:00 pm, he will likely miss something.
Ideally a given day will take up the entirety of exactly 1 page view. This could be an 8.5 x 11 page, a tabloid foldout or even discrete loose pages of whatever size you wish. It may be possible to use 2 facing pages of your booklet to display an entire day at once, but the page layout gets prohibitively complicated.
