As online catalog publishing becomes more relevant, we have compiled a list of 3 design trends that will make your efforts more successful and engaging.
Lifestyle & Feature Images
Catalog designers want to incorporate feature or lifestyle images whenever possible, and for good reason. Customers are drawn to good looking imagery and love to see products featured in an environment where they will be used. Unfortunately, the cost of printing and distribution puts a natural limit on the amount of space devoted to images.
With digital catalogs page space is no longer a hurdle!
The low incremental cost of additional pages in a digital catalog removes this design barrier and opens up tons of new possibilities for the use of lifestyle images. In fact, Black Dot can show you how to design your catalog so these big, beautiful feature images can become the main focus and interactive driver for your customer’s experience.
Progressive Product Detail
The idea of presenting users with on-request access to progressively greater amounts of product detail goes hand-in-hand with the idea of focusing on Lifestyle or Feature imagery. By moving your products’ textual details and sku photography behind clickable hotspots you can open up your catalog design layouts and lead with your best imagery assets. Black Dot creates pop-up product detail presentations that are triggered by a click on an icon or other visual cue to maximize the space for imagery on your main page. Multiple photos, descriptive copy, feature/benefits bullet points, pricing, and Call To Action buttons can be shown only when the customer is interested enough to explore further. The Call To Action buttons can redirect users to an extensive sku-level presentation on your own site or when users are ready to place an order.
Breakout Catalogs
Every supplier or distributor creates a “full-line” catalog – a catalog featuring all the products they carry, that can be extremely helpful when someone wants to understand the full range of products from a particular company. It’s a great way for people to browse your full line of products in a single place with very little effort.
In addition to full-line catalogs, Black Dot can show you how to easily create “break-out” digital catalogs. These are catalogs that focus on a specific product category, season, vertical market or even price point. They have proven to be an effective way to promote and market products in a more targeted way with a very low cost of production. Our “Related Catalogs” feature makes it easy for users to explore any of the break-out catalogs from a single location.
