Learning Catalog Design by John McWade

Catalogs still move product. Retailers spend about $9 billion a year on catalog marketing, and over 100 million people bought from one last year. This quick course shows you why direct mail still works and how to put together pages people actually shop from.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Why print catalogs still drive sales for apparel, electronics, and office supplies
• How to structure a catalog for browsing, comparing, and buying
• Layout principles for covers, product spreads, and order pages
• What makes real-world catalog examples work or fail
• How to plan product flow, pacing, and visual hierarchy across pages

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic understanding of graphic design and page layout
• Tools: Computer with a layout app like Adobe InDesign for practice

📝 Description

Everyone said print was dead. It wasn’t. Almost 40% of apparel shoppers still find products through direct mail, and the same goes for a third of electronics buyers. Paper sticks around on a coffee table. It gets flipped through. It gets shared.

John McWade keeps it practical. No theory overload. He walks through paper promotion advantages, then shows how to build pages that sell — clear product hierarchy, readable prices, photos that do the heavy lifting, and pacing that keeps people turning pages. You will look at real catalogs, not mockups, and see why certain spreads work.

If you do any kind of page layout or print design, this is useful stuff. Short, direct, and easy to apply to your next client job or in-house piece.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Graphic designers who want to add print catalogs to their client work
• Marketers and small business owners planning a direct mail piece that needs to convert

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

John McWade is a graphic designer, writer, and longtime LinkedIn Learning instructor. He founded Before & After magazine, where he spent decades teaching practical layout, typography, and print techniques to working designers. He is known for breaking down complex design ideas into simple, usable rules.

🏁 Final Result

• A clear plan and layout concept for a print-ready product catalog based on real-world principles covered in the course.