These catalog design tips might help you make next year's book better than ever.

It's a great feeling to collaborate with a client who not only wants us to top last year's book, but wants their catalog to beat every book they've ever seen.

We've designed catalogs for a variety of industries including cosmetics, jewelry, boats, fashion/apparel and more. Here are a few of the things we've learned along the way that could help you and your design team with your next catalog.

1. Gather references from other product categories
Designers typically have a truckload of stuff they've accumulated over the years. Most marketing directors do too. Don't be shy about getting catalogs from other industries though. You may see a fresh approach that no one else has done.

2. Shoot all new photography or take the necessary steps to make a long-term photo plan
Don't combine your old lifestyle photos with new ones unless they're shot in the same style and possibly even by the same photographer. You risk creating a disjointed looking catalog with inconsistent images.

If you do think you'll need to combine your photos from previous model years with new ones, think long-term and make a plan for multiple shoots on the front end, with an eye toward consistency in look and feel. Also negotiate for unlimited usage from photographers and models. You may have to pay more on the front end, but you won't have to deal with the hassle of managing usage agreements from multiple shoots with multiple vendors over multiple years.

3. Go big. Go small. Go sideways.
Sometimes a bigger catalog can help you stand out. Think about how it will be used. If it's primarily handed out at trade shows, and customers are looking at multiple books at once, a big book might help you stick out from the pile. If it's typically displayed in a rack at a dealership though, that big book may end up in a box on the floor. A small book might be more appropriate as a mailer. Or consider a horizontal catalog. If your products are mostly horizontal, you may be better served by giving them each their own page, than by jumping the gutter and splitting the images in half.

4. Get feedback outside the home office
If you can't afford to set up focus groups and do market research and testing, do your own informal testing. We've gotten great insights by talking to dealers and customers at photoshoots, at dealerships, at trade shows and of course on the phone. Spend a day calling dealers and talking to customers about your current catalog and you'll get an earful of useful info.

In our experience, dealers are always happy to tell you in great detail what works and what falls flat, and it helps to get objective feedback outside the home office. Even better is talking to real customers.

Start with a short list of survey questions. Be organized and be brief with your interviews, and take notes. When you're done interviewing, write a simple summary you can share with your team.

5. Don't scrimp on the paper, the printing or the color corrections
It may be better to create a catalog with less pages than to use super cheap paper. If your pages are so thin that your images are showing through from the other side, that's a big yuk. It may make sense, if you're creating a bulk mail catalog of tschothkes, but for a premium consumer catalog, it just looks cheap.

Same with printing. If your images are washed-out or smudged, your book looks worse than cheap, it looks sloppy. You're wasting the money you spent on quality design and photography. And speaking of photography, please, oh please, invest in photo color correction.

For more on that, please see our post "Why photo color correction is so important and (sometimes) so expensive"