How To Design a Product Catalog That Sells (with Examples)

Catalog design is the process of organizing and visually presenting a collection of products in a way that is both informative and engaging.

A well-designed catalog doesn’t just list items. It tells a visual story about your brand, guiding customers naturally from product to product while emphasizing your key offerings. 

In our guide, we’ll walk you through all the features a successful catalog design combines and how to design a product catalog that drives sales.

Learn more about strategic layout, consistent typography, high-quality photography, and clear product information to create an experience that’s easy to browse and visually appealing.

Is it a catalog or brochure you need?

Check out the differences in our guide!

How To Make a Product Catalog with Pictures

Catalogs are meant to be highly visual with a lot of high-resolution imagery that makes your products pop out.

Organizing your images well and using the right sizes helps bring your customers attention directly to their most important aspect.

Tailor Your Photos to Your Products

Making sure your photos are tailored to your products is essential for showcasing them properly to potential buyers.

Make sure to cater your photos to how the product looks best, focusing on the angles, backgrounds and presentation to ensure they are best represented.

• Clothing and Fashion: Photograph clothing on a mannequin or, even better, a live model to show how the item fits, drapes, and moves. A neutral, non-distracting background like a white or light gray cyclorama wall keeps the focus on the product.
• Jewelry and Accessories: Use macro photography to capture intricate details, like gemstone facets or delicate metalwork. Soft, diffused lighting will prevent harsh glares, and using a simple, elegant prop like a velvet bust or a stone slab can add a touch of luxury.
• Furniture and Home Decor: Stage furniture in a fully decorated room setting. This helps customers visualize the piece’s scale and how it might fit in with their own home’s style. Use wide-angle shots to capture the whole room and closer shots to highlight textures and features.
• Technology and Electronics: Use clean, sharp lighting to highlight the product’s design and features, like ports and screen quality. A simple white or dark background creates a modern, sleek look. Including a hand or person interacting with the device can also provide a sense of scale and usability.

Find out more in our Photo Tips guide!

Keep a Consistent Style and Background

Make sure to photograph your products using a consistent style and not varying the backgrounds too much.

This is important as pictures that lack a cohesive feel can look unprofessional and at odds with the message you want to portray.

The goal is to have almost all your images following the same general pattern for each product.

Group Products Logically by Visual Theme

If you have product categories, this doesn’t just have to be clear in your descriptions and overall catalog organization, but also in your images. 

Maintaining a consistent visual theme for certain categories helps customers quickly identify what type of product they are looking at. This works even on a psychological level where a customer realizes they’re on the right page without even reading.

Use Lifestyle Photos

Showcasing your products in actual use is a must. Customers need to be able to visualize wearing or using your products in order to be convinced to buy.

Here are some ways you can portray certain products to help edge customers along the buying funnel:

• Clothing: For a sundress, capture the movement of the fabric as a model walks through a flower market. Focus on a candid, joyful expression. Compose the shot so the background is softly out of focus, which makes the dress pop as the clear subject. Use the warm, flattering light of late afternoon to bring out the color and texture.
• Jewelry: For a delicate necklace, arrange a close-up shot where the model is posed near a sunlit window. The key is to direct the natural light to catch the facets of the jewelry. Have the model gently turn their head or rest their hand on their collarbone to create an elegant, natural look that highlights the piece.
• Outdoor Gear: When shooting a tent on a mountain, use compositional rules like the “rule of thirds” to place the tent off-center, emphasizing the vastness of the landscape. Make the scene feel lived-in by leaving the tent flap open with a sleeping bag peeking out, telling a story of adventure.
• Appliances: For a blender, style the scene with fresh, colorful ingredients scattered around it. Capture the action of a smoothie being poured into a glass to show the product in use. For a pan, create an artful top-down “flat lay” of a finished meal, using complementary napkins and cutlery to create a visually appealing breakfast scene.
• Cosmetics: To showcase a face serum, create a clean, minimalist setting like a tidy bathroom vanity. Focus on capturing a sense of calm and luxury in the model’s expression. Use soft, diffused lighting to create a dewy, glowing effect on the skin, and consider a macro shot of a single drop of the serum on a fingertip to highlight its texture.
• Pet Supplies: For a dog toy, get down to the pet’s eye level to capture a more personal and engaging action shot. The goal is to photograph the genuine moment of play and excitement. Ensure the surrounding environment, like a sunny park or a cozy rug, is visible to connect the product with a happy pet’s life.

Catalog Design Examples

Catalog design examples help with getting an idea of how to best arrange your pages and your layout. Here are some catalog designs that incorporate the principles we’ve outlined and to inspire you to create yours.

Minimalist

Clean layouts and ample white space to create a sophisticated, product-focused presentation:

Informational

Prioritizing clarity and function, this style presents detailed product data in a highly organized and accessible format: 

Creative and Vibrant

Bold colors, dynamic layouts, and artistic elements to express a strong brand personality and capture attention:

High-End and Luxury

Exclusivity through superior photography, elegant typography, and a refined, aspirational layout:

Corporate

Focused on professionalism, this style reinforces brand identity with a consistent, structured, and trustworthy design:

How effective are catalogs today?

Designing an effective product catalogs for your business is no easy feat and involves careful product selection and presentation.

The goal of any product catalog design is to provide accessible but detailed information about your products, along with beautiful visuals that highlight your products to potential customers.

To help with creating a product catalog design that can really help sell your products, we’ve put together a complete guide with examples to help steer you through.

The Basics of Product Catalog Design

All great product catalog designs follow a few basic principles that enable them to attract attention as well as draw their customers to the important unique selling points of their products.

Here the core elements to consider for your catalog design:

• Layout and Structure: The way that you organize your product catalog needs to make sense in order for your customers to explore and understand what you are offering. Your layout will mostly depend on the type of products you’re showcasing and the industry you’re in.
• Visual Hierarchy: Arranging a clear order placement guide helps keep your content organized in a way that is visually appealing and that doesn’t overwhelm potential customers. This can provide the right balance of images and text.
• Image Quality: Using high-resolution images is essential for all catalog designs. Since the goal is to show off products, then it is vital to present them in the most attractive way possible.
• Typology: Font choices are important for making the information of the products, along with the titles and headings, as clear and legible as possible without deviating from the brand.
• Call-To-Actions (CTA): CTAs are often overlooked when putting together a catalog, but they are a necessary inclusion with the rest of the content in order to make sure your customers go to your website or order over the phone.
• Product Information: Detailed and relevant product information should involve descriptions, specifications, pricing, and policies that help build customer trust and drive decisions. 

A catalog is a powerful sales tool that tells your brand’s story, guides the customer experience, and drives purchasing decisions.

By focusing on these key areas, you can transform a simple booklet into a compelling showcase for your offerings.

6 Catalog Layout and Design Tips

The layout and the structure for your catalog are the most essential for a great design.

Layouts can be tricky since it involves balancing different factors to avoid both being too vague in your product information, and too overwhelming. 

Text needs to be well-positioned and images need to be effectively displayed, and you need to leave space to really showcase your products. 

Here are our main catalog layout tips:

Find Harmony Between Elements

Maintaining a strong balance between large, dominant visuals, smaller images, and bodies of text will ensure that the content of your catalog doesn’t overwhelm your customers.

The goal is to organize your pages in a way that reads with a natural flow.

Leading with a visual anchor or a dominant image instantly grabs attention which is complemented by smaller satellite images. This helps in establishing a clear visual hierarchy. This is vital for creating a sense of quality and desirability.

• Dominant Image: High resolution showing the product in use or in a relevant environment. This helps the user imagine it in their own life. For example, a watch looks better on a wrist than floating in a white void.
• Satellite images: Alternate angles of products or on key features, textures, materials, or branding (such as the stitching on a leather bag, the interface on a gadget).
• Text: Use different font sizes, weights, and styles to distinguish between a product title, its price, a short description, and detailed specifications. The title should be the most prominent text element. Incorporate bold for scannability.

Utilize Layout Software

Bridging the critical gap between a digital design and a physical printed copy in a customer’s hands is always a tricky business.

Overlooking this step can lead to costly printing errors and a final product that doesn’t match the designer’s vision.

Using a dedicated layout program like Adobe InDesign, Affinity Publisher or QuarkXPress, is non-negotiable for professional catalog production. These graphic design tools are specifically designed to integrate text, vector graphics, and raster images from various sources into a cohesive, multi-page document that is optimized for print.

Tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Microsoft Word are not recommended for this type of design.

Pay Attention to Trim Size and Technical Margins

Carrying on from layout software, considering trim size and technical margins is also vital.

This addresses the physical reality that a digital design must be accurately translated onto paper, which is then mechanically trimmed to a final size.

• Trim Size: The trim size is the finished dimension of your catalog page size after it has been cut from a larger sheet. With layout and design software, that means setting your dimensions exactly to ensure accuracy. For example, in designing a standard catalog (8.5” x 11”), you can set the measurements exactly.
• Bleed: A bleed is the portion of your design that extends beyond the trim edge of the page.This means you must extend any artwork that you want to touch the final edge of the page by at least .125 inches (about 1/8th of an inch) outside the defined page size. For an 8.5″ x 11″ size catalog, your total document size with bleed would actually be 8.75″ x 11.25″. 
• Safety Margin: The safety margin is the inner boundary inside the trim edge, where all important content should be placed including text, logos, page numbers, or key parts of an image. All these must be kept at least .125 inches inside the final trim line.

These are critical parts of catalog design that makes sure that you have all the technical details correct for when it comes time to print.

Read more in our Print Bleed guide!

Typographical Consistency

Maintaining a consistent style with your text and fonts is paramount for clear and professional catalogues. It complements the organization of your products into a cohesive and branded experience that fully introduces your customers to your company’s image.

A consistent typographic system also makes your catalog easier to read.

The 2-3 font rule is one of the easiest ways to make your typography more consistent. By carefully choosing only 2 or 3 font families, you can produce a lasting visual effect. Organizing your fonts according to:

• Primary Font: For headlines as your main attention-grabber. It’s used for product titles and section headers. Usually a bold or distinct sans-serif font works well here, as it’s clean and strong.
• Secondary Font: This font must be highly readable (usually a serif font is best), since it will be used for product descriptions and longer paragraphs.
• Accent Font: This could be a script font or a light, italicized version of one of your primary fonts, but is typically used more sparingly.

The other important aspect with fonts is creating a typographic hierarchy to help better organize your catalog’s content with better flow.

Creating clear heading, subheadings, body, and caption styles enables you to build your information in a way that has logical coherence.

Add Page Numbers

Page numbers might seem like a minor detail in a large-scale catalog design, but they are fundamental elements of usability. They serve as a critical navigational tool for the customer as well as a key organizational reference for the graphic designer and printer.

Designers lay out pages sequentially (1, 2-3, 4-5), however a printer arranges them on a large sheet in a completely different order.

For instance, this could mean page 16 is next to page 1, so that when the sheet is folded and cut, the pages fall into the correct sequence. Page numbers help with determining which page needs to be next to which.

Beyond production however, having page numbers allows customers to go directly and read about the product they are interested in. The inclusion of a table of contents allows customers to better navigate to where they want without wasting time.

Use White Space

White space (or negative space) often goes against our instincts to fill up pages with visual content, however it’s an important design component for catalogs.

Where the goal is to present products clearly and attractively, the strategic use of white space is what separates a cluttered, overwhelming page from an elegant, effective one.

Here’s why you should use it:

1. Provides Breathing Room: White space prevents a layout from feeling cramped and busy. It gives individual design elements, such as images and text, the necessary space to be seen clearly, making the entire page more open and approachable.
2. Reduces Visual Clutter: By acting as a buffer between elements, white space separates and organizes content. This clarity makes it easier for the eye to distinguish different sections and pieces of information, improving overall legibility and comprehension.
3. Creates Greater Balance: White space is crucial for distributing the “visual weight” of your page. It helps to balance heavy elements (like large photos) with lighter ones (like text), resulting in a composition that feels stable, harmonious, and professionally designed.
4. Emphasizes Products: Surrounding a specific product with ample white space instantly makes it a focal point. This technique draws the customer’s eye directly to what you want to highlight, signaling importance and increasing the product’s perceived value.
5. Doesn’t Overwhelm the Customer: A page packed with information can be visually exhausting and intimidating. White space creates a calmer, more relaxed browsing experience. It guides the reader gently through the content instead of bombarding them, making them more likely to engage with your products.

Choose ChilliPrinting for Your Printing Your Catalogs

After finalizing your design, the next step is choosing an online printing service to produce it.

ChilliPrinting specializes in high-volume catalog offset printing, focusing on delivering a quality product efficiently and at a competitive price for SMEs. We offer:

• Exceptional Value: We use offset printing technology, which makes printing in bulk incredibly affordable. The more you print, the lower the cost per piece, allowing you to reach more customers without breaking your budget.
• Variety of Products: To complement your catalogs, we offer a vast selection of different print products from brochures to flyers to bulk posters to help you with your print marketing strategies.
• Full Customization: Create the perfect catalog for your brand with our wide range of options. We offer page counts from 8 up to 320 pages, multiple paper stocks with glossy or matte finishes, and both saddle-stitched (stapled) and perfect binding for a professional finish.
• Guaranteed Quality: We are motivated by customer satisfaction and guarantee the highest quality for every project. Your catalogs will be printed with sharp details and vibrant colors that make your products shine.
• Reliable and On-Time Delivery: We combine efficient production with trusted shipping partners to ensure your order is delivered on your schedule, so you can launch your marketing campaign with confidence.

Find out how ChilliPrinting can get your new product catalog printed to perfection and delivered on schedule.