Building a catalogue in InDesign

Catalogue work is not about making one page beautiful but about carrying a hundred pages at the same quality and the same speed. File setup comes before design here; a structure built afterwards turns into manual repetition at every correction.

Parent pages hold the folio, the column structure and the running heads in one place. Separate parents for product pages, section openers and technical tables turn 'move the page number two millimetres down on these pages' from a hundred edits into one.

Paragraph and character styles are the text-side version of the same logic. When product name, description, technical value and footnote are separate styles, a typeface change applies across the whole catalogue in seconds. Without styles the same job means walking the file page by page.

For repetitive content, data merge moves the work somewhere else entirely: product name, code, size and image come from a table and the pages are generated. When the price list changes you update the table rather than resetting the catalogue.

The last step is print preparation, and most errors come back from here: bleed, colour profile, the build of black, embedded fonts. Setting those at the start of the file pre-empts the 'could you resend the file?' email from the printer.