Images and videos tend to attract people these days even more than an extraordinary piece of written content. Graphic designers use bold images and visuals to enhance the look and feel of your brand and designs. We use an artistic approach making the most of attractive and mind captivating visuals to enable users to better understand and receive your product and message.
Graphic designers create a visual feast for our audiences that resonates with the demographic the material is intended for. This creates interest in your product and your marketing remains in your potential customers mind long after they have enjoyed your businesses designed and printed offerings.
These materials are vital to helping your customers really ‘live’ the experience of owning or using your product as it creates a positive link to a desired lifestyle or outcome in their lives if they use or own what you are promoting. Printed designed and branded catalogues, annual reports, promotional pieces, flyers, etc are still an essential part of any business offerings.
Good Design is about creating a perception that you have a solution to any problems that your customers may have in the business space that you are operating in. Good design touches and resonates with human emotions and the flow of our minds and feelings of comfort, desire and pleasure. Graphics play an important role on various levels of your sales funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire and Acquire) and are extremely powerful in leading a user to conversion.
Branding:
Branding is vital for your business success – no matter how big or small your business may be. The perception of professional business is contingent on good graphics drawing customers to your business. A new business should sit down with a designer as soon as the business is decided upon to research a strategy, create a name, agree on the business colours, fonts, etc and the business message to be used on the brand. Then you need to decide which graphic items are the most important to launch the business successfully. This will always include a good logo and brand profile. Then the brand look and feel needs to be rolled out across the whole business. The brand is vital to your business and needs to be consistent and maintained throughout all marketing promotions and anything associated with your business.
Logos, brand colours, signs, product catalogues, email marketing templates, Social media ads, Menus, Powerpoint presentations, album covers, books, magazines, business cards, DVD covers, vehicle wraps and so forth all need to be designed professionally with the brand to the fore at all times.
I would like to discuss various designed and printed materials here in this forum and how they can enhance your business. Today I would like to discuss the importance of a product catalogue for your business and how a product catalogue can help clients toward purchase and education as to the range of items that you have on offer.
The need for a product catalogue for your business:
Every business sells a product, be it a pen or a building. To sell a product, you first need to create a demand for it. Next, you need to use professional tried and tested marketing techniques to enable your product to be seen ‘everywhere’ and become top of mind for your potential customers encouraging them to choose your brand over any others.
This is where a product catalogue will come handy. For example, you are into the construction sector and you want to market residential living and your range of custom house builds. This will need to include good quality visuals of the end product, the amenities provided, a tour of the inside of the houses, the images of what the user might expect if they choose your brand and the lifestyle they can imagine that they will be enjoying if they purchase your product.
We all believe what we see and a product catalogue is a brilliant platform to show people that they too can ‘live a great life’, ‘be that cool person’ or as ‘stylish as their heroes’ if they purchase a particular product. A good catalogue will not just have great lifestyle photos and product shots but should also include comprehensive product descriptions, features, dimensions of the product, call to actions, price and terms & conditions to enable the buyer to make an informed decision. You also, most importantly, need your contact details in there so that they contact your business when they are ready to purchase!
The Design Process:
The need for a catalogue can be different, it may be used for branding, online catalogues, sales promotions, or any events or shows. Once the content of the catalogue is finalised with you, the design team will work out a page count, printing suggestions, colours, paper stock and finishes and then provide you with one or two concepts of what the final catalogue will look like. You as the client will then review the mockup designs, and decide if it is a good fit for your brand in conjunction with the designers. Then the final finished digital artwork will be done by your designers ready for you to sign off on and then for the final item to be printed.
Signs of a Good design:
By George Digital ensures that all the designs that we create follow a clear guideline based on your brand and follow the rules of good design:
- Index and table of contents – An Index is a must for product catalogues, it helps the content to be organised so that users can quickly understand what is included in the catalogue, what your business is about and the kind of services or product that you provide.
- Not just good – It is not enough for the design to look good, it also has to be unique, uniform, functional, follow the brief and adhere to the brand guidelines.
- Software used – Adobe Creative Cloud suite of programs, particularly Adobe Indesign, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop is by far the most popular software used and industry standard. Using other cheaper programs to try to cut corners or letting an unskilled designer lose on your project can cause unexpected results that might not be the result that you were after.
- CMYK presets – CMYK or full colour represents the four ink plates used in color printing. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. All photographs and process printed articles are produced using these 4 colours. Spot colour can be an add on if desired.
- Image resolution -Image resolution is very important as you need to preserve the clarity of the photos used in the design. A minimum of 300 DPI is recommended for print.
- Fonts and colours used – The fonts and colors used for all graphic designs in a business should be in sync with its branding style guide.
- Print, quality, and quantity – there is a multitude of different choices of (stock) paper, card, etc that can be used for printing your catalogue. These stocks vary widely in price. Catalogues are printed in multiples of four, each page is folded into two which makes a total of four including the front and back. The outer and inner cover stock are matched for uniform colour and quality. Catalogues can be saddle-stitched like a magazine, coil bound, Wire-O bound or perfect bound. They can also be matt or gloss varnished or laminated. Embossed or use dye-cut elements. There are so many possibilities, these are only limited by your designer’s imagination.
