The Year Ahead layout is a calendar rather than a design, and its interest lies in the thirteenth card and in what a twelve-card forecast can and cannot be.
Provenance
Annual layouts of twelve cards in a ring appear across twentieth-century tarot handbooks with no traceable first author. The atlas records the layout in use and states the authorship as unknown rather than assigning it.
The centre card
The thirteenth card sits in the middle and is read as the theme of the whole year rather than as a month. That convention is what distinguishes the layout from simply drawing twelve cards, because it gives the reading something to check the individual months against. Without it, twelve unrelated single-card readings are what remains.
What a twelve-month reading is doing
A reader who lays this spread in January and reads the ninth card as September is making a claim about a specific future month, which is the most falsifiable thing tarot practice does and the least often checked. Practitioners who keep records of their own readings generally report that the value of the spread is retrospective, as a record of what was expected, rather than predictive.
The atlas records the practice as practitioners describe it. It does not make or endorse the predictive claim, and the positions of the layout are recorded separately from this history.