Everything You Need to Know about Printing Catalogs
Catalogues rarely go wrong at the design stage. They go wrong at the file — images that looked fine on screen and print soft, artwork that stops 2 mm short of the edge and leaves a white line, colours that shifted somewhere between your monitor and the press.
This covers what a printer actually needs from you, and the decisions — paper, binding, print method — that determine what it costs.
Size and format
Stick to a standard size unless you have a reason not to. A4 (210 × 297 mm) or US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) are cheapest because presses are set up for them. A5 and half-letter suit compact line sheets a buyer can slip into a bag. Square formats look considerable and cost more, because they waste sheet.
Page count must be a multiple of four. Every sheet folded in half gives four pages, so a catalogue is 8, 12, 16, 20 pages and so on. Design to that from the start rather than padding at the end with a blank.
Trim, bleed and margin
Three terms that cause most reprints.
- Trim — the finished page size, where the guillotine cuts.
- Bleed — artwork extended past the trim, usually by 3 mm (0.125 in) on every edge. Cutting is never perfectly accurate, so anything meant to run to the edge must run past it. Without bleed you get a white sliver down one side.
- Safe margin — keep text and anything important at least 5 mm inside the trim. Closer than that and it looks cramped even when the cut is perfect.
On a bound catalogue add extra inside margin for the gutter, where pages disappear into the spine. A perfect-bound catalogue can swallow 5 mm or more; put a product code there and nobody will read it.
Images: 300 DPI and CMYK
300 DPI at final printed size. That is the part people miss — a 300 DPI image is only 300 DPI at the dimensions it was measured. Scale it up on the page and the effective resolution drops with it. A web image at 72 DPI has roughly a sixth of the detail a press needs.
Convert to CMYK before you send. Screens are RGB and can show colours that ink cannot reproduce — bright oranges, vivid greens and anything neon shift noticeably when converted. Convert yourself and correct what changes, rather than letting the printer’s software decide.
If exact brand colour matters — a logo, a signature shade — ask about a Pantone spot colour. It costs more but reproduces consistently across print runs, which CMYK does not.
Paper: weight and finish
Paper is specified in gsm (grams per square metre). Rough guide:
| Use | Weight | Feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Inside pages, economy | 90–115 gsm | Magazine |
| Inside pages, quality | 130–170 gsm | Substantial, no show-through |
| Cover | 250–350 gsm | Card |
Under about 100 gsm you get show-through — the image on the back of the page ghosting into the one you are looking at. For a catalogue selling on visuals, that is a false economy.
Coated stock has a clay finish that holds ink on the surface, so photographs stay sharp and colours stay saturated. Gloss is punchy and reflective; silk or matt is easier to read and looks more considered. Most product catalogues want silk.
Uncoated stock absorbs ink, softening images slightly and muting colour. It feels natural and takes pen, so it works for line sheets a buyer will write on. It is the wrong choice for a photography-led lookbook.
Binding
- Saddle stitch — folded and stapled through the spine. Cheapest, lies reasonably flat, suits roughly 8 to 64 pages. The right default for most line sheets and seasonal catalogues.
- Perfect binding — pages glued into a square spine, like a paperback. Looks substantial and gives you a printable spine, but needs around 40 pages minimum to glue properly, and does not lie flat.
- Wire-o or spiral — lies completely flat and pages turn fully back. Excellent on a trade show stand where a buyer is flipping and writing. Costs more and looks less formal.
If your catalogue sits between the thresholds — say 36 pages — ask the printer which they would run. The answer usually depends on their kit.
Digital, offset, or print-on-demand
This is where the cost per copy is decided.
Digital — no plates, so no setup cost. Economical for short runs, typically under a few hundred copies, and viable down to a single copy. Per-unit cost barely falls with volume.
Offset (litho) — plates are made per colour, which is a real setup cost, but the per-copy price then drops sharply. Better colour fidelity and more paper choice. Crossover is usually somewhere in the several-hundred-copy range; ask for quotes at two quantities and see where the lines meet.
Print-on-demand — printed and posted as each order comes in, with no stock and no minimum. Highest per-copy cost, zero risk, no boxes in your hallway. Sensible when you cannot predict demand, or for sending a single catalogue to one buyer who asked.
The trap with offset is over-ordering. A thousand catalogues at a good unit price is a poor deal if your prices change next season and you bin six hundred.
Exporting the file
Almost every printer wants a print-ready PDF. Ask which preset they prefer — PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4 are the common ones — and then:
- Export at 300 DPI with no downsampling
- Include 3 mm bleed and crop marks
- Embed all fonts, or outline them
- Convert to CMYK, plus any spot colours you have agreed
- Export as single pages, not reader spreads — the printer imposes them
- Flatten transparency if they ask for it
Then order a proof. A physical proof on the actual stock catches colour shifts, show-through and trim problems while they are still free to fix. Skipping it to save a few days is how brands end up with a thousand copies of a catalogue whose greens went grey.
Before you send it
- Page count is a multiple of four
- Bleed on every edge that needs it, safe margin respected, gutter allowed for
- Every image 300 DPI at placed size
- CMYK throughout, spot colours agreed
- Fonts embedded, single pages, crop marks on
- Prices and item numbers checked against your current list — this is the expensive one
- Proof ordered and approved
Getting to a print-ready file
Building all of that by hand in InDesign is real work, and it has to be redone whenever prices or products change. Foldsquare generates print-ready 300 DPI PDFs from your Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix or Ecwid product data — bleed and trim handled, and a price change means regenerating rather than relaying out.
If you are still deciding what to produce, our guide to the four catalogue types covers the difference between a retail catalogue, a wholesale line sheet and a lookbook. And before it goes to print, the two things worth getting right are the information buyers need on every page and the descriptions that sit beside your photography.