Designing Catalogs for Print

September 23, 2022 GuruTeam Printing Services

Catalogs are a great way to get news of your products out to your customers. Organizing and displaying your services or products can help you get more sales and boost your business. Catalog printing in Los Angeles is easier than ever these days. But a printed catalog is only as good as its design, and a poorly designed catalog can harm your business rather than improve it. Here are some tips on how to design catalogs for print so you can get the most out of your project.

Layout

The layout of a catalog is highly important, especially when it comes to print catalogs. With digital catalogs, users can be more forgiving, as there are alternate ways for them to get around and see the information displayed. When someone is browsing online, they’re more used to clutter and wacky designs. However, there’s a clean, streamlined layout most print catalogs follow that readers are going to expect. If you don’t at least try to follow it, you’ll likely lose interest.

A print catalog should be spacious without wasting space. It’s a common mistake to try and cram as many images and as much text as possible onto one page to help maximize the number of products you can put on there. However, this can easily clutter the page. And with each product vying for attention, it’s hard for readers to find the products they want to buy and that you want to sell. Here are two common catalog layout designs that work well.

One possible catalog page layout includes a featured item and a few related items. The featured item should be larger than the others and situated in the center of the page. This is the product that you are most eager to sell, or that you think is most likely to attract attention when flipping through pages. Now, just using one page to sell one product isn’t very productive. You can fill in the space around the featured product with smaller listings for other objects. Just remember to make sure those objects in some way relate to the featured product to help entice more purchases.

Organized Lists

If you don’t have any products you want to feature over others, you can make each listing the same dimension and fit a number of each on one page. Products should be arranged in an organized and simple manner, not just thrown about on the page at random. When organizing your catalog in this way, try to put products on the same page that relate to one another. For example, if you’re printing a catalog for clothing, it’s a good idea to have all of your shoes in one section. Alternatively, you can intermix pages with products that put together a whole outfit.

File Settings

Designing a catalog for print is different than designing one for the web. Not only is the layout and design different, but there are specific file guidelines you need to adhere to. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a discolored or blurry print that won’t serve your company well at all.

catalog printing Los Angeles — Photo by Kitti Incédi on Unsplash

Color Spectrum

The most common mistake people make when sending a file to the printer is not switching the color spectrum first. Computer screens use the RGB spectrum (red, green, blue) to create the colors you see. Because most images these days end up online, the majority of image editing software defaults to RGB when you create a new file. However, if you try to print an RGB image, it’s going to come out discolored. Printers use four ink colors, utilizing the CMYK spectrum (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) instead. Before you even begin designing your catalog, make sure you swap the color spectrum settings to CMYK to ensure everything looks the way you want it to for printing.

DPI

When an image is displayed or printed, the quality of it is measured by the dots per image (DPI). The higher the DPI, the better the quality will be. Because online images are typically smaller and can display easier at lower DPI, most of them hardly go above 75 DPI. While this is perfect for your website logo or a silly image on a social media account, it’s not great for printing. Trying to print an image at 75 DPI, even a small one, will often result in a warbled or blurry design. For the best catalog printing in Los Angeles, make sure your images’ DPI is set to at least 300.

Page Order

When printing anything with more than one page, it’s important to make sure you check with your printer on how the pages should be ordered. Many modern printing services these days can print with a file sent pages 1-100 in numerical order. However, some printing machines will require the pages to be out of order when printed, so that they bind together in order. Whenever you’re ready to send your file to the printer, always double-check how your pages should be ordered, or else you may end up with a disorganized catalog.

Catalog Printing in Los Angeles

At Guru Printers, we’re dedicated to providing quick, high-quality prints to our customers. Whether you’re putting together this fall’s fashion line up, the newest furniture in your collection, or the hottest toys for Christmas, our catalog printing services in Los Angeles are here to help. A well-designed catalog can help boost your business and earn you more clients and future shoppers. We also provide design aid to walk you through the process of creating a gorgeous catalog readers are sure to love. If you’re ready to take the next step for your business, call us today at (213) 320-4865. Or shoot us an email at [email protected] to get started.

Thank you for choosing Guru Printers for your designing needs! Once the checkout process has been completed and payment has been reconciled successfully, one of our gurus will contact you to discuss your new design.

Design fees are based on projected time set aside for each design. Fees are billed at $75 per hour. Phone calls and design consultations will be counted towards design time. Customers are allowed a total of 15 minutes of meeting time before the time is counted as a revision round. Meeting times are via email and phone only. After the three (3) rounds of revisions are met, a fee of $30 will be charged. This additional fee will provide you with two (2) additional revisions.

By purchasing this design fee, our gurus will present you with the initial design and you will then have three (3) rounds of revisions. Please put all revisions into one email. Each email containing revisions will count as one round.

Please note, it is your responsibility to provide correct information and then review proofs accordingly to confirm everything has been transcribed correctly. Guru Printers is not responsible for missed typos. It is the sole responsibility of the customer to make sure all information is correct. By approving your proof, you acknowledge that you have read through each file carefully.

Printing will only begin once we receive final proof approval. Once approval is given, no adjustments, corrections, changes, or cancellations can be made.

Please see our FAQ page for more details.

BATCH ORDERS

When multiple sets of an item are needed, you will only pay for the initial design fee to create the master template. An additional $7.00 fee will apply for each file change/revision thereafter. For example, if multiple sets of business cards are needed where only information specific elements needs to be change (i.e name, contact info, etc), you will be charged $7.00 per file. An electronic invoice for the applicable/pending charges will be sent via email. Once the invoice is reconciled, we will be able to process your order accordingly.

Digital proofs may take up to 24 hours to produce. By requesting a digital proof, an additional business day may be added to the production turnaround of your order.

Designing Catalogs for Print

Designing Catalogs for Print