Case Study: OyezStraker Office Supplies Catalogue​

Design firm Nude Design chose CatBase to produce stationery catalogues for their client, OyezStraker, because of the savings in time and effort it offers.

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The Challenge

Once a year, London-based OyezStraker publishes a series of catalogues offering office supplies. The main catalogue – the Multipack – contains all products the company offers, and runs to almost 600 pages; other catalogues offer a subset of products and are approximately 150 pages.

As always, deadlines are tight, budgets need to be stuck to, and last-minute changes are inevitable. The project needed to:

• Import data that originated in QuarkXPress documents and had been put into an Excel file

• Publish all the data to InDesign for the Multipack Catalogue

• Update the data both manually and via import from Excel files and OyezStraker's MS Sql Server database

• Update changes in the InDesign documents, such as last-minute price updates

• Publish a selection of the data in a different style for the Essential Brands Catalogue

• Update OyezStraker's Sql Server database with the final data

• Accomplish everything within a very tight schedule

 

The CatBase solution

The solution consists of:

• CatBase Data Chameleon Edition, multi-user

• Xtags plugin for InDesign: this plugin enables advanced tagging features for files imported into an InDesign layout, such as automatic image placement and special InCatalog tags for automatic updating

• InCatalog plugin for InDesign: this plugin enables automatic updating of data in the InDesign document, such as pricing updates

 

The Workflow

• The Excel files were imported into CatBase via Import Styles

• Publishing Style Sheets were set up to tell CatBase what data to publish and how to sort and format everything

• The data was published in sections and placed into the InDesign documents. At this point no prices were included; placeholders were set for prices and these were tagged for automatic updating via the InCatalog plugin.

• The pages were checked, adjustments made where necessary (spacing, picture placement, etc.), then sent to the client for approval.

• Some changes were made manually in the database - for example, spelling mistakes fixed, products moved into different or additional categories

• Towards the end of the project, item prices were updated in CatBase via an Excel file update

• The price details were published to files in a special format (one for each catalogue section)

• The price update files were applied to the catalogue sections and the prices were all updated

• The live data was then uploaded from CatBase to the client's Sql Server database via an ODBC data link

 

They then needed to produce the smaller Essential Brands catalogue. A new Publishing Style Sheet was set up, which set the data in a different style. The data was then published, using a subset of the database.

 

The Result

MULTIPACK CATALOGUE: 572 PAGES