Year two of the Wishon Golf catalog is in the books. As with most things that you get the opportunity to do twice, the second time seems to go a bit smoother and that was certainly the case this year. While the whole process is certainly still a ton of work, I was able to start integrating certain visual elements this year that I didn’t want to jump right into last year for my first time on the job.

About the Design:
This year I was pretty sold on a dark background right off of the bat. There had been a history of light backgrounds for the pages in the years past with the TWGT Catalog and I wanted to break out of that. When I presented the idea to Tom, he said he was hoping I would consider a dark background for this year alread, so that was an easy sell. I was able to spend a morning at the Dalton Ranch Golf Club in Durango, Colorado and got some, what I thought were, great background shots. It was nice this year to go out and take shots based on already designed layouts for the different sections of the catalog instead of working backwards and trying to use shots that were already taken and trying to work them into the design. I then took my favorites, turned them to black & white, blurred the entire image (to create less distraction in the background) and darkened them considerably.

For the content I wanted to create an element that I could use throughout the catalog that would divide different content on the pages and still accomplish the goal of having as much “floating” content as possible. I really wanted to try and stay away from putting content in boxes as much as possible to give the impression that the content was just sitting on top of the background image. I decided to use a bracket from the Eurostile font and re-size it as needed for each block of content. I think I accomplished my goal of having an “airy” design while still creating clear content divisions and I was really happy with the resulting aesthetic.

One visual element that I carried through from my design last year was using different colors to identify the different sections of the catalog (red=drivers, grey=irons, ect.). The guys in the sales department had received some comments that it made it easier to find different content when having section colors on the edges of each page (which was, of course, the goal). I thought it was a little more successful this year and it is probably a design element I’ll continue to use.

I had the opportunity to get a bit more involved with the photography this year. Not only did I take all of the background shots, but I filled in for Matt Mohi (lead sales/photographer/videographer) and did some of the new product photography as he suffered through a month long vacation in Hawaii in the middle of the catalog production. It was a learning process for sure as it had been a while since I had done any product photography, but I was pleased with the resulting images.

All in all I thought this year’s catalog was a pretty successful product. I am already thinking of ways to improve next year’s. Here is a link to the digital version of the catalog. Feel free to comment with your thoughts. We graphic designers should always put ourselves in a position to invite constructive criticism of our work 🙂

Click Here for Digital Version of the 2012 TWGT Catalog.