What You Need Before Starting a Product Catalogue

Most catalogue projects don't stall on design; they stall on missing data. Hearing "this product has that attribute too" after the page system is underway means redrawing what was already built.

The items below should be ready before starting. If not all of them, at least it should be known which are missing.

1. A product table

The most critical item. Products should be in a table — a spreadsheet or similar, one row per product, one column per attribute.

What matters isn't a complete list but consistency: every product carrying the same fields. Fields that exist on some products and not others determine how many page templates are needed. If one exception in ten is known upfront, the system accounts for it; found later, it breaks the layout.

2. Knowing which information decides

Printing every attribute makes a catalogue unreadable. Which three pieces of information does a customer look at to decide? Those three come forward; the rest goes into the table.

Asking the sales team is the fastest route: "what do customers ask about most?"

3. Product images at real resolution

Images need to be at print resolution. Pictures downloaded from a website can't be used — they were compressed for screen and fall apart in print.

List the missing images now. If a shoot is needed that's a separate job on a separate schedule; it doesn't hold up the start of design, but it does hold up the finish.

4. How many languages, and which

In a multilingual catalogue the layout must survive text expansion: the same sentence runs noticeably longer in German than in Turkish. Deciding this later means redrawing a system already built.

Who supplies the translated copy should also be settled up front.

5. Print, screen, or both

Forcing one document to serve both weakens both. Print needs page size, bleed and colour profile; screen needs a readable page shape, clickable links and a file size you can actually send.

If the answer is both, plan two outputs — not one file.

6. Print specifications

If the printer is chosen, paper, format, binding and colour count should be known from the start. These affect the page system directly: spine thickness, inner margins and how the page count divides all follow from them.

If no printer is chosen yet, a standard format can carry the work — but risk grows the longer the decision waits.

7. Brand guidelines or a reference

Colour codes, typefaces and logo usage. Without a guideline, existing printed work serves as reference; but then someone has to answer "which blue is the right one".

8. Who approves

A catalogue is a many-page job and every page holds a decision. If approval authority is unclear, revision rounds multiply. A single decision-maker matters more as page count grows.

9. Where it will be used

A catalogue handed out at a trade fair and one sitting on a dealer's shelf are not the same document. One gets scanned quickly, the other gets compared. Where it's used determines page density and information order.

10. Who updates it next year

Whether source files are delivered to you, and who maintains the layout, should be discussed up front. When someone says "let's drop that product" a year later, the system staying intact depends on the page templates having been built properly.

In summary

The hard part of a catalogue isn't drawing pages; it's deciding how the data will be laid out. If most of these ten are ready the work moves predictably; if not, design keeps looping back — and each loop bends the page system a little further.

I've written how this runs at Creative House on the catalogue design page. If you'd like to talk about your product count and language needs, you can book a conversation.