Catalogue Editing: Three Tips for Success

Holiday catalogues are hitting your mailbox and online gift guides are popping up across your social media feeds. Who’s behind those publications, making sure prices are up to date, product names are accurate and merchandise pictures match the copy? It’s an editor, of course.

Here are some tips for ensuring your catalogue is error-free: 

Create two style guides

Catalogues are a visual feast of merchandise, but it’s important that the design of the catalogue remains consistent across all pages. 

First, create a style guide for the catalogue’s design. This can include colours and typefaces for headers, sub-heads, product names, descriptions, prices and page numbers; line spacing expectations; alignment and indentation goals (left, right, top and bottom); white space preferences; and which images need credit.

Then, create a style guide for the copy. Do you want to list a nine-dollar item as $9.00 or $9? Do you want to use commas in four-digit numbers or not? Will item specs be separated by semicolons, periods or commas? Will certain elements be italicized or bolded? Are you using sentence case or title case for bursts? Document it all.

Get all the content at once

If you receive a draft catalogue piecemeal — be that a single page at a time or just a few pages — the odds of an error slipping through are much greater. Being able to compare page numbers, alignment, font, formatting and more from page to page will be much more successful if you start with all the pages in hand. 

Check, check and check again

Be sure to have a solid resource to check all data against (ideally a company-owned database with product information that has been entered accurately). It’s easy to mix up a detail or delete a price when rearranging items across a catalogue page, so before the information goes to the masses, check it against your primary resource. 

This includes product names, prices, descriptive details, trademarked names, product numbers, age ranges, quantities and more. Last-minute additions to the catalogue also warrant extra checks.

Final thoughts

Your first time editing a catalogue will always be the hardest, but once you have style sheets for the design and the copy, you can update them for each catalogue issue. This will give you a strong foundation for editing any other catalogues you work on in the future.

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