I'm working on a 160 page catalog for the company. It's all on Quark 6.5. The previous catalog was a Quark 4.0 doc, originally created as Quark 3.2 (at least). concerned about possible artifacts associated with taking these old docs & constantly updating them over the years, I started with fresh docs in 6.5, with all fresh type style sheets, color style sheets, and master pages.
This is the first COLOR catalog that the company is doing. I really pushed for this, and I was thrilled that they went for it even though it was quite an additional expense over previous 2 color jobs. So now there are 4 different color master pages: red, teal, purple, and blue. All a bit muted tones, rather than brights. There are 18 different chapters, as the sections are called, each will have it's own color, which will rotate through the 4 master page colors. The section color blends down from the top and up from the bottom, forms color bars for subheads, and the chapter number drops out of a square of section color that bleeds off the page edge to act as a thumb tab. The thumb tabs are also coordinated with the table of contents.
The guys here are great, really smart, nice, funny...but don't know a lick about design.
The old catalog was done in the fonts: Times and the dreaded Serpentine, which has that "it's so modern, it's dated" look about it. It's so amature, like wearing bellbottoms and sideburns, and saying, "I'm groovy, cat!" And everything is so boxy, boxy, boxy! Each picture & table are in a box, with are in a box under the subheads, which are all in an overall page box. The darn things can't breath.
My concept is to have each chapter look different enough that you really know which chapter you're in, based on color. And I'm going to use as few boxes or lines as possible. Also I'm going to calm down the fonts. I'm only using Frutiger, in its various weights, no italics. I think italics, like all caps, shouts, and are overused. I'm going to make full use of color, and get all the merchandise in color, even the so-called black & white stuff, items that are nickle and black still have a cast of color to enrich the picture.
After 2 inconcusive meetings weighing the relative merits of Frutiger, Officina, and Helvetica, we finally settled on Frutiger for the catalog. It was a good compromise between Helvetica, which for 20 years, since I went to School of Visual Arts, I've been hearing designers say is ugly, and Officina, which was just a little too fun with its curly lower case l's and t's.
Catalog work flow: take all the info on the old catalog, a page at a time, group it & drag it into position on the new catalog pages, aligning with the prepositioned guides. Edit>Colors>(select the PMS spot color)>Delete>Substitute with the section color.
