Have you ever made a cataloge

[smo]

How did you get on then Daz?

[Johnny]

What magazine is that and wheres my copy!

I havent got round to playing with it but i shall learn over the weekend.

its called Moseley B13. Been running since 1974.
if you want a template then I can throw you one together?
j.

[dazzul]

Ahh a little out my area for that then, im over dudley way

Yeah if you dont mind, ive spent about 3 hours watching videos, but they never help me get to where i want to be

[pisquee]

For the trade show, we kept our catalogue just as A4 pages, but decided to keep them separate, and had 10 copies of each page to give away to the buyers who seemed most in need of a hard copy, and emailed out PDFs to everyone else, either straight away or that night (using mail chimp)
We decided to divide the catalogue into sections, as some shops were only looking for mugs, and others were jewellery shops (so wouldn't want our iPhone covers section) etc. So, some sections were a few pages, and some just single sheets, and then the price list was another A4 sheet. This way we could hand them just the catalogue they would find most useful with a price list and business card, and they would get the whole catalogue emailed to them overnight just in case.

For most products, I went for a 4x4 or 4x5 grid for the photos, and as each product type had its own page/section, the header area was used for any description of the product necessary.

In the end, we ran out of time to name every design we had, so a lot of products just had their product code, which worked fine for writing out order forms, or for buyers emailing through their confirmed orders - much easier to type/write IM5 than "individual mug - aliums" for instance. This is fine for a B2B trade show, but we'l be finishing the naming before selling to the public.

The other thing I realised with the product codes, is that if there are designs that you use across numerous products, then the design numbers part of the product code should be consistent ... ie IP05 (I phone cover design 5) should be the same artwork/design as IM05 (mug 5) Unfortunately, I didn't realise this until the show was underway, so I'll be redoing this part of things before the next show!

[Johnny]

Ahh a little out my area for that then, im over dudley way

Yeah if you dont mind, ive spent about 3 hours watching videos, but they never help me get to where i want to be

Try this. CS5 and IDML. Very basic but it should give you some kind of starting point.
www.dosime.co.uk/BasicCatalogue-v1.zip (23mb)

There's also a plugin for InDesign (that I think you need to pay for) that lets you import a spreadsheet into a layout. Never really tried it properly though.

J.

[dazzul]

Thanks Johnny i shall have a look at this over the weeked

Daz