Once upon a time, in the land of Catalog Design, there lived a monster named “Templates.” This beast sucked the creativity out of the village of designers and wiped out an entire generation of innovative spreads. Its goal was to make all catalog pages look the same and remove any sign of brand uniqueness or rebellion. Templates attacked in the cover of night using “easy” and “fast” as its disguise.
Then, one glorious day, some brave designers from the village fought back against the mighty Templates beast and began creating custom design solutions of their own, using strategy and creativity as their weapons. Yet, other designers tethered to the past continued to feed the mighty Templates beast and suffered a slow and painful death of irrelevance.
Okay, enough of that. You get my point.
There was a time when you could design an entire catalog using a handful of existing templates (pre-determined page layouts), drop in your images into the pre-determined gray boxes on the page, flow in your copy into the pre-determined placeholder copy blocks, and you were done. Not much to think about. It was paint-by-numbers for the catalog industry. And it worked.
Not anymore.
There’s nothing “pre-determined” about good catalog design these days. At least not in our shop. Every brand is different. Every brand has a unique story to tell. Each has a flavor and personality all its own. Their catalogs should reflect that uniqueness. They deserve it.
Catalogs are an enormous puzzle to solve. Each spread is a unique challenge unto itself. It requires strategy and a team of highly skilled craftsmen to build a book that is compelling, fresh and effective that people want to spend time with, hold on to, and ultimately buy from.
There are no templates that can achieve that.
There is nothing fresh or compelling about pre-determined “standardized” solutions.
We get asked all the time if we can create templates for clients so they can hand them over to their internal creative team to finish out. They’re looking for a “plug-and-play” solution. “We’d like a blueprint for the design of our catalog,” they say. “Can you just create a grid that we can drop things into?”
No, I’m sorry. We can’t.
We can, however, create design “concepts” that will show you our interpretation of what your catalog could be. These concepts are used as inspiration and a starting point for either your team or ours. This is more of an exercise in how to THINK, not just how to design.
When we design a catalog, we agonize over every page. Every product. Every headline. Strategy drives every decision. There are dozens of individual problems we solve along the way. We think and debate and edit and polish and edit again. Every catalog is a unique creation. To be clear, even within these concepts, we may use some level of “common design” or similarly designed pages that recur through the book. Consistency is good. But only when they make sense for the products.
We don’t even use the term “templates” anymore. It’s deceiving. It suggests an easy solution. There is no such thing.
Your book should be handcrafted by a team of highly skilled experts that can tell your story in a way that moves people emotionally and then moves them to action. We have dozens of successful case studies that prove this method works.
There is no template for that.
If you would like to take advantage of the latest trends in catalog design and see what your catalog might look like with a fresh handcrafted approach, I’d love to talk with you. Send me an email at brentn@jschmid.com.
Tags: Brent Niemuth, brentVid, catalog design, catalog layout, concepts, Conceptual, templates