Build it
Make it sell
Keep it running
Catalogues & brochures
Still readable on page eighty.
Long documents are decided by their setup, not by their cover. Grid, type and image treatment settled once and then applied — which is what keeps the price sane and makes the next edition cheap instead of nearly the same again.
Where the cost goes
Eighty pages, or one system applied eighty times.
A catalogue is usually quoted by the page, which makes it sound as though eighty pages cost eighty times what one page costs. They do not, and the entire difference is in how the document was set up on the first day.
If the grid, the type styles and the image treatment are decided once and then applied, page seventy goes quickly. If every spread is arranged by hand, page seventy is as slow as page three — and the document drifts. Margins wander, headings change weight, captions end up in three different sizes, and nobody can point at the moment it happened.
That drift is what a reader notices without being able to name it. A catalogue that feels expensive usually just feels consistent, and consistency is a setup decision rather than a talent. It also comes from the identity — a document is easier to keep consistent when the decisions already exist.
Set up once
Six decisions that pay at the second edition.
None of these are visible on the finished document. All of them decide what the next version costs.
- A master grid
- Page eighty takes as long to lay out as page eight rather than three times as long, and the margins are still where they were at the front.
- Paragraph and character styles
- A late change to the body typeface is one edit rather than eighty, and nothing is quietly left behind in the old one on page fifty-three.
- Master pages and running heads
- Page numbers, section titles and margins update themselves when a section moves — which it will, usually after everything else is finished.
- One image treatment, defined
- Every photograph gets the same crop logic and the same colour handling, so a catalogue of pictures from four sources looks like one catalogue.
- An export profile agreed with the printer
- A PDF that goes through without a call about fonts, colour space or bleed, at ten at night when the deadline is the next morning.
- Product data from a single source
- The catalogue and the shop stop disagreeing about a price. Maintained separately, they will diverge — and your customer will notice before you do.
The second edition is where all of this is repaid at once. A catalogue built as a system costs a fraction to update; one built as eighty separate pages costs almost the same again, and nobody remembers being told that at the start.
What you receive
A document, and the machine that made it.
- Print-ready PDF/XWith the profile your printer uses, fonts embedded, bleed and crop marks where they belong.
- A screen versionLighter, in RGB, sized to be sent by email without anyone complaining about the attachment.
- The master file, intactGrid, styles and master pages all still working — not flattened into a document that cannot be edited again.
- Images prepared and linkedAt the resolution the format needs, treated consistently, and organised so nothing goes missing when the file moves.
- The product data usedAs a list, so the next edition and the shop can start from the same place rather than from a PDF.
- Editable source filesYours to keep. Another studio can produce edition two without rebuilding edition one first.
The third and the sixth are the ones that matter in two years. A finished catalogue delivered only as a PDF is a document you can print and nothing else — and the quote for the next edition will reflect that, whoever writes it.
How often does it change?
If the answer is every year, the setup matters more than the cover. Tell us the page count and how often it reprints — those two numbers decide almost everything else, including the price.