Great Catalog Design, Tips & Tricks, Pt. 1
Whether you are looking to create your very first print catalog or you’re a veteran of the process, there are certain aspects that are more important than others. You don’t need to spend all of your time tearing out your hair worrying about the Index (though you will anyway). There are a number of “better bang for your buck” aspects that you should not neglect, however.
The purpose of this article is to create a checklist of some of the best and easy-to-implement best practices, based on our years of experience as well as the experience of some of our most prolific catalogers. So without any further ado, here they are in no particular order:
Design For Your Intended Audience
This sounds obvious, and of course it is. But the reason it seems obvious is because it’s one of the most critical things you need to keep in mind when coming up with your catalog design. It’s easy to get lost in the layout and aesthetics, or become so enamored with a great “design idea” that you completely drop the ball on what’s important for your company: selling to your customers.
If your catalog will be selling sporting equipment and other products for extremely active lifestyles, you are primarily catering to younger people. With that in mind, designing a catalog with a rustic or antique Victorian theme could be strange—even if the design itself looks very good. Your intended audience will take one look at this catalog and think it’s a nod to the Sears catalogs of the early 1900’s. That won’t hold appeal to them because they are youthful, computer savvy, and accustomed to modern design tastes.
On the other hand, if your catalog sold products that catered to a more senior audience, this same style would invoke nostalgia for them and make it more appealing. So the question isn’t whether one design is BETTER or WORSE, it’s about which design choice fits most with your audience.
Your Products are the Superstars
While a great design can enhance your catalog, it can’t be the primary reason you’re taking the time and effort to create a print catalog. It’s valuable to take a step back and remember that your products are the stars of the show. Everything you do—from the styling choices, layout work, size and placement of products on the page—is done with the idea of presenting your products in the best possible light, so you can sell more of them.
Generally speaking, “an image is worth a thousand words”, and with catalogs it is even more evident. Images really sell the product—so with that in mind, what can we do to maximize the size of the images on the page? We realize we need a certain amount of descriptive copy. If we’re selling products with technical specs, we have to include those, too. If we show pricing in our catalog, then that has to be there. Once you have everything that needs to be included taken care of, look at your product layout and determine if there’s a way to get that product photo a little larger.
You don’t want to go so extreme that you are now cluttering the page, or making it difficult to tell which product is which. You do want to maximize the available space you have to make sure you are devoting enough real estate to the product photo as you possibly can, without taking anything away from the page as a whole.
Use Awesome, Quality Photos
We just covered using “big” or “as big as possible” photos. But will any photo do? Absolutely not! The image is the visual representation of the product and it’s going to form a lasting imprint on the brain of whoever’s opening that page—so make it count.
One mistake we see a LOT of first-time print catalogers make is using “Web quality” images for Print—or attempting to. They probably already have a successful website, so it’s natural to assume that those photos which look just fine on the Web can be repurposed for Print. Unfortunately, that is almost never the case. That 16,000 byte 400×350 pixel JPG may look fine on a computer monitor, but in a Print catalog that same image will look blocky and pixellated.
This is because with Print, you want images with a minimum of 150 dpi (dots per inch), and we recommend 300 if at all possible. The resolution of the image will depend on the physical size of the frame you want to display it within the catalog. As a generic example, if you just need to fill a 2” x 2” block on the page, a photo with 1500 x 1500 pixel resolution will be fine. But, if this is image is intended to be a “full-page image” or “full spread image”, definitely not.
Print is not forgiving. Considering the cost, time, and effort involved in getting a print catalog printed, you don’t want to skimp with low quality low-resolution images that will look washed out and “choppy” on the page once you’re all done. You want those images to POP and have vibrancy—these photos are literally going to drive your sales. For better or worse!
Don’t Go Crazy With Fonts
We all know what it’s like to find a new font family. We want to use it for everything in every situation: let’s put some BOLD here and some ITALIC there. This is as exciting as it gets for us some days. Still, we have to remember the main focus of the catalog: selling products to our target audience. Too many fonts can clutter up the page and can even make our styling look inconsistent.
Most importantly, the font needs to maximize readability. You may be excited to use that shiny new font, but is it less readable than another font? If it doesn’t hurt readability, then move forward full steam ahead.
Another rule of thumb is to keep the number of different fonts to a handful, or less. That includes options like bold and italic. Be consistent with the font styling and weight you use from one product to another. If you use Myriad Pro 12 point BOLD font for the Product Name, use that same font / weight combination for the other Product Names.
Consistent use of these style cues will enhance readability in your print catalog, and make it that much easier to scan the page. Your eye will naturally train itself to recognize the different product blocks if the styling is consistently applied. If the style and size fluctuates from one to another, it will seem off and be harder to scan.
Stay tuned for Part 2, where we delve even deeper with some more best practice tips for creating a Great Catalog!