The making of Katalogus 2014

Planning the structure, handing out tasks to designers, illustrators and photographers, starting to assemble Katalogus 2014 column by column.

Inventing the cover.

Art director: The wrapping paper version is all right, but kinda boring. I like the one with monochrome goods, but I’m not overly excited. The one with the trench coat—yikes.

Deciding to draw the one with the vending machine. Simultaneously considering other drafts.

Designer: How about we try out the phone booth style, or add a unicorn?

Art director: Better yet, a rhinoceros, otherwise it looks too girly. I would also prefer it more rounded.

Artistic director: The rhinoceros sucks, just as the writing on the back. It still looks like a London phone booth.

Making a move towards the dear old style of Soviet refrigerators.

Assembling the openings. Receiving a list of goods and their prices.

The first idea for the opening dedicated to choosing a purchase is to simply arrange everything on shelves.

Art director: Too boring. It should blow your pants off.

Designer: Let’s cover it with living bushes, hands and eyes? Or throw everything in a river under a bridge?

Art director: Nope, that’s not us. How about we let every character tell what they want as a present?

Creating the characters.

Art director: Or we can come up with some sort of statistics on what grannies like most, for example.

All right. We hold a small research among grannies, accountants, coders, moms and dads, and place the results on catalog openings.

Simultaneously coming up with the design of advertisement pages and pages with store details.

Thinking over pages that separate different kinds of goods from each other.

Rendering along a grid.

Creating a bunch of icons, illustrations and images to make every page interesting and exciting.