Each year I produce—from templates and corporate guidelines—an annual catalog used by travel advisors, consumers and call center staff. It contains everything from company and fleet information to worldwide itinerary and excursion offerings.
Since the templates provided are finalized files for our UK office, they must be localized, converting information such as measurements, times and spelling from European to US formats. The bulk of my work, though, is creating the itinerary and excursion section—from the four or five sample templates given—by importing data from the various Excel spreadsheets.
In May of 2019, the creative director and I were sent to Italy to train on EasyCatalog, an InDesign data-merge plugin that quickly and efficiently imports itinerary, price and excursion data from all Excel spreadsheets into one printing file. This cut production time dramatically; what use to take months, now takes weeks.
Concurrent with the new workflow was the splitting of one mega-catalog into two separate catalogs—one for the Caribbean & Antilles and the other for the Mediterranean and Norther Europe. Shown below is a sampling of spreads contained in the those two catalogs.
View the complete digital catalogs: Caribbean & Antilles | Europe
DON SNODGRASS 