Here’s something we’ve learned from laying out a lot of product catalogues: the design is rarely what slows things down. The spreadsheet is.
A typical catalogue project starts with a client sending over a product list. It’s usually an Excel file that’s been passed between three departments, with a few columns nobody remembers adding, prices in two different formats, and a tab called “FINAL v2 use this one”. Then there’s a folder of photos where half the filenames don’t match any product code.
None of this is unusual, and it’s not a criticism. Product data lives in a lot of places in most businesses. But every gap in that file turns into an email, a phone call and a day of waiting, and on a 40 page catalogue those days add up fast.
What a clean product list looks like
You don’t need special software. A single spreadsheet is fine, as long as it follows a few rules:
- One row per product. If a product comes in three sizes, decide whether that’s one row with sizes listed, or three rows. Then do the same for every product.
- One column per piece of information. Name, code, short description, size, colour, price, category. Don’t combine “red / 500ml / KES 450” in a single cell.
- Consistent units and formats. Always “500 ml”, never sometimes “500ml” and sometimes “0.5L”.
- A product code on every row that matches the photo filename exactly.
- A column for the section or page it belongs in, so we know the order you want.
That last point saves a surprising amount of back and forth. If we know which products go together and in what order, we can start laying out pages on day one instead of guessing.
Write the descriptions before design, not during
This is the one we push hardest on. If the descriptions aren’t written yet, the catalogue isn’t ready to design. Writing copy into a half laid out page sounds efficient, but in practice every edit shifts the layout, and you end up redoing pages three or four times.
Keep descriptions to a similar length across a section. If one product gets two lines and the next gets a paragraph, the page will look uneven no matter how good the layout is.
Photos, briefly
Match them to product codes. Shoot them the same way, ideally in one session (we wrote a separate post about pack shots if you want the detail). And send the original files, not screenshots from WhatsApp, because those come out soft and grainy in print.
Prices are the last thing to lock
Prices change. Suppliers update, exchange rates move, a promotion gets added. If you can, keep prices in their own column and agree with us that they’ll be the very last thing confirmed before the files go to the printer. Some clients choose to leave prices out of the printed catalogue entirely and put them on a separate price list. That way the catalogue lasts a lot longer.
Why this matters for cost
When the data is clean, a catalogue moves quickly. Layout is mostly about building a solid set of page templates and flowing products into them, and that part is fairly predictable. When the data is messy, the same job can easily take twice as long, and most of that time is spent on things that have nothing to do with design.
So if you’re planning a catalogue, the best thing you can do this week is open the spreadsheet and start tidying. We’re happy to look at it with you first, and our catalogue design page has more on how we run these projects.
Header photo on Unsplash.
