Arming Your Catalogs Against a Rainy Day

Have you prepared your printed catalogs for a rainy day? Are they protected from rain, snow, dirt and even physical attacks? Well, if they are not, then it is time to know the proper way to defend your advertising material for a “rainy day”.

I have a few tips for you on how to properly do catalog printing with an eye towards protecting your catalogs from harm.

• Using thick covers – The general rule to make printed catalogs tougher is to use thick covers. People do not really think this is needed, but a thick cover for a catalog can really help protect the whole thing. Thicker covers are not merely tougher than normal paper, they usually also cover the whole catalog with a degree of security. So even if the catalog falls off, or comes into physical stress like bending and crumpling, all the inside pages will remain safe.

• Using protective shielding – You can also avail of great protective shielding or coatings for your catalog pages. Catalog printing services can actually offer adding certain moisture resistant coatings as well as UV shielding that make paper stocks glossy as well as immune to liquid. This of course protects the catalog from dirt and most kinds of moisture. You can apply this to the cover and even to all the pages of the color catalog if you want.

• Good binding techniques – Binding is also an important part in making color catalogs tough. The binding of pages is of course the catalog’s spine, and the stronger it is the better you catalog is against physical damage. The best binding technique of course is “perfect binding” since it uses adhesives, but you can also try string binding as well for a strong spine.

• Effective paper choices – You can also try managing the quality of your paper to make your color catalogs tough. With this, I mean using thick paper for all the pages of your catalog. Thicker paper is usually hard to tear, and most will stick to a good catalog bind with relative toughness. So try to specify that you want the thickest possible paper stock for your catalog to make all your pages very tough.

• Effective catalog shapes – Finally, you can also use the catalog’s shape as a way to make it tough. Yes! Printing catalogs that have uniform dimensions will result in tougher catalogs, than those that are long in some dimension or another.

This is because uniformly shaped catalogs have the ability to distribute stresses evenly throughout the document. Therefore, things are usually balanced. If long rectangle types of catalogs are subject to the same stresses, one side or corner will usually buckle first than another. So try to invest in small, almost square catalogs and not those long type catalogs. This should make them all the tougher.

Great! Now you know how to defend your color catalogs for a rainy day.