Use issuu’s InDesign Template to Create Your Holiday Catalog or Lookbook

It’s that time of the year again, when holiday shopping kicks into high gear. Get a jump start on your small business marketing plan by creating a beautiful catalog or lookbook that makes online shopping a one-click experience for your customers.

To make your life easier, we made an Adobe InDesign template for you to use as a jumping off point to create the perfect catalog or lookbook for your brand.  After downloading the template, simply add your own images and copy, and just like that you’ll have a professional, high-quality publication to help kickstart your holiday sales.

Gather Your Assets

To make the process as painless as possible, be sure to gather all your assets before getting started. This includes everything below.

• Your logo.

  Don’t have one? No worries. Try a free online tool like

  this

  to create one.

• Product descriptions.

  Short paragraphs that explain the important points of each product, including what it’s made of, what can it be used for, etc. Check out

  this article

  for tips on making your product descriptions sing.

• Product images

  . Using high resolutions images is the key to accurately representing your products and making potential buyers open their wallets.

• Business bio.

  Tell consumers a little bit about your business, like how it started, who is behind it and what your plans are for the future.

• Links.

  Be sure to have the shopping URLs for each item, as well as links to your website, social or anywhere else you want to direct potential customers.

• Color Palette

  . Truly make it your own by matching the colors to your business color palette. Pick out a couple of colors that represent your business, and use their CMYK values to replace the colors in the template.

Get going

Follow these easy steps to start creating, sharing and displaying your own catalog or lookbook like the one above. 

1. Be sure you have Adobe InDesign. If you don’t already try

   Adobe’s one month free trial.

2. Download

   this

   InDesign file and open locally.

3. Choose which template pages you want to use. Decide what theme you like, how many pictures you want to use and in what order you’ll put them.

4. Replace any copy or images with your own.

5. Export the document to PDF, then upload it to issuu. For more help with uploading, check out

   this article

   .

Put it to Work 

• Add shopping links.

  Be sure buyers can easily click to purchase by adding issuu shopping links. Read how to do this

  here

  .

• Share on social.

  Make the most of your catalog and get social sharing to do some advertising for you. Learn how to

  share your publication on social media

  .

• Share with issuu.

  Share your catalog or lookbook with

  @issuu

  or with the hashtag #shopissuu for a chance to be promoted on all of issuu’s social platforms.

• Embed on your site.

  Embed the publication on your website or blog to make it easier than ever for your customers to learn more about and buy your products. Learn how to use the #newissuu embeds

  here

  .

Check back next week for some more tips and tricks to make your holiday catalog or lookbook a successful sales tool. We’ll also share examples of well-crafted small business publications for a little last minute inspiration.

Keep Us Posted

Creating templates is a new adventure issuu is taking to try to make our publishers’ experience with digital publishing as easy as possible. Let us know how it goes by tweeting us @issuu or writing in with your feedback to support@issuu.com. And be sure to share your finished product with us so we can hopefully feature it in an upcoming blog post.