Berry Assoc. Product Catalog

This project was a process challenge as much as a graphic solution. The primary difficulty was volume—to lay out the 600-product catalog in a reasonable amount of time, I sought to automate the process as much as possible. Complicating the situation, much of the product information came from a website database, and HTML tags were mixed into the descriptive text.

I created a highly-structured InDesign template and, with the help of programmer Ryan Sexton, converted the web data to a matching XML structure that could be organized and imported into the catalog document. This import process saved huge amounts of time, and, critically, ensured that the correct chemical structure images were always paired with the proper text.

Additional semi-automated GREP search and replace operations removed idiosyncratic HTML tags from the copy while using them to simultaneously apply character styles to chemical formulae and other text in the book.

The page layouts were spiced up with a combination of stock images and photos that I shot on-site at the Berry laboratory.