Procedures For Designing A Catalog

Okay, you have your products and you’ve decided you are going to design a catalog for distribution. But, where do I start? What should I do first when designing a catalog? What are the necessary steps to designing an effective catalog? In this article I will answer those questions for you and will give you a step by step procedure for designing your new catalog.

Ist Procedure: Decide who your target audience will be. This sounds easy but it needs to be done fist. You need to have who you will be designing a catalog for while you design your catalog. By doing this you will be able to picture how they will react to each step you take.

2nd Procedure: Decide what you will sell. See procedure number one for details. What I mean by that is that you do not want to add every product you have in your inventory if it is not something your target customers will buy. You can save money designing your catalog by leaving out items that are very unlikely to be bought by your target audience.

3rd Procedure: Separate your products so you can focus on them one at a time. Take each product you will be selling and write your sales text and price out so you draw out an idea of how each product will be displayed.

Also as you work on each item and write the descriptions, separately write out any details you will need to give your customer about size, color, and specifications. With some products you will be able to just use a little space in addition to the picture and explain everything there.

But with other products where more information is necessary, you will be putting together a page or more of just information as a reference or guide to buying the products in your catalog. So as you do each one, that is the time to make notes about additional information you will need to offer the customer on another page.

4th Procedure: Photographing your products.. When designing your catalog, individual pictures are best. Group photos will save you money, but they will also make you less sales. Using a professional photographer is also a good idea if you can afford one. Your images are what sells your product so if you do a bad job at photographing your product, you will lose sales.

Summary: At this point you have most of the “pieces” you will use while designing your catalog. Just a couple more pieces and we’ll be ready to move on to actually designing your catalog.

5th Procedure: Informational Pages. Industrial product catalogs might need to give specifications, clothing catalogs need to offer more colors and sizes to choose from but not have it take up too much room on the product pages, and more.

You want to design the information pages of your catalog so that it is simple for the shopper to use. Do not use complex formulas and make them do calculations. Don’t make your customer think too much or too long or you will lose sales. You should have most of the information on the product pages where possible.

Other pages that might help your catalog’s design are special sales product pages, an index, etc. You need to decide how many pages of information you will be including because when designing a catalog you have to remember that the number of pages is always a multiple of four.

6th Procedure: Pre-Layout. This is where you decide where everything will go. Will your information pages be on the inside of the covers or in the center, etc. You know you will have a front and back outside and inside cover. You will have informational pages, and then you have your product pages. Decide how it will read.

7th Procedure: Layout of product pages. Again, just like in the photography is you are not experienced in layout you may want to hire a professional to do the layout design of your catalog, especially for the pages that will display your products and descriptions.

If you intend to do it yourself, then there are some things you will need to know. Always place quality images at the top right hand corner of every right hand page. When your customers starts to turn the page, this is the first thing they will see. It needs to catch their eye and stop them from just flipping through the catalog.

Some people flip through magazines and catalogs from the back to the front, so the upper left hand corner of every left hand page is almost as important. You want them to stop and open your product pages so think of images that will catch their eye and make them want to see more.

Some catalogs use the easiest method of displaying products and information on each page. That is dividing the page in quarters, sixths, or eighths and giving each product it’s on little section. In other catalogs they display the photos and product numbers on one side and the corresponding information for each on the other side of the page. There are other ways as well, this is meant to suggest a couple of ways you can do it.

8th Procedure: Front and Back Cover Layout. This is one of the most important steps you will take while designing your catalog. If you have done everything else yourself, you still may want to consider having a professional design your covers.

The reason this step is so important to catalog design is twofold. One your cover is what will get your customer to want to browse through your catalog in the first place. A bad cover is like having a store that sells fashionable clothing in the ghetto. If your target customers will not come to the store and go inside you have no chance to sell them anything.

The second reason is that for each catalog you send out, you want several potential customers to read it. When the person you sent it to lays it down somewhere, you want others who see it want to pick it up and browse as well. For this reason both the front and back cover is important. You do not know how they will lay it down.

9th Procedure: Finding a printer for your catalog. Before you start designing your catalog, you may want to find the printer that will be doing the printing for you. The reason is that they can help you know what requirements they have for your artwork, images, and layout, and will help you choose the printing methods that will work best for your type of catalog.

I saved this for last, but it is really the first step to catalog design. The last thing you want to do is design your catalog, then find out your chosen printer cannot print your catalog the way you have designed it.