A group show catalogue carries a problem that a solo book never meets. Each contributor arrives with a different practice, a different file and a different idea of how their spread should look, yet the finished booklet still has to hold together as one object. For Camberwell College of Arts’ MA Illustration students the test was sharper than usual. Their catalogue for ‘Residency’, the V&A inspired show that closed the course’s PDF (Public Dissemination Festival) at Peckham Levels on 7 November 2024, had to carry cast iron, glacier ice, theatre renders and pencil sketches between the same two covers.
The students solved most of it with design. We handled the rest with paper, paperwork and a close look at each file. If you are planning a catalogue for a class, a collective or a residency, these fixes travel well, and our page on catalogue printing for artists and exhibitions shows the formats we make most often.
Many makers, one booklet
Look at the range inside. Ornate cast iron garden benches, photographed in monochrome. 3D renders that build small theatres around insomnia. Loose pen sketches of tourists drifting through the museum’s China room. Glacier ice studied at microscopic scale, and space age toys meeting otaku culture. Each student made new work in response to an object or collection at the V&A and tied it back to their Final Major Project, so no two spreads share a medium.
Left alone, that variety would fight. Put a muted photograph beside a saturated render and one of them loses. The cohort needed a system strict enough to be fair and loose enough to stay lively.
A graph paper grid and a single orange
Their answer starts on the cover. A loose pencil drawing of a headless classical torso stands on its plinth, sketched straight over graph paper. ‘Illustrator’ lands in heavy orange, ‘working’ follows in hollow outlined letters and ‘with / in’ hides in tiny orange type, while the date and venue are hand lettered on strips of orange like masking tape on a studio wall. Turn it over and the scheme flips: solid orange, with ‘Residency’ reversed out in white.
Inside, that faint lattice runs under almost the whole book, like a drafting sheet on an architect’s board. It gives wildly different projects a shared floor to stand on. Over it, one orange carries all the emphasis, including each illustrator’s name, set huge along the foot of the left page. Images sit on the left and the thinking behind them on the right, under bold project titles such as ‘Coexist’ and ‘The Tourists’. Now and then a spread inverts to solid orange with the name in white, which breaks the rhythm without handing anyone a louder voice.
You can borrow this wholesale. Choose one ground (a grid, a tint, a texture), one accent colour and one spread template, then break the template on purpose once in a while. Oversized names double as navigation too, so visitors find a friend’s work in seconds.
Silk for pencil, photographs and renders
Mixed media is a paper problem as much as a design one. The first spec mentioned gloss for the text, but the job settled on 130gsm silk, a calmer surface for pages that also carry statements to read. Fine pencil lines keep their edges, the monochrome photography holds its deep shadows, and the flat orange panels print smooth and even across 36 pages.
The 170gsm silk cover carries matt lamination on its outer face, so all that white and orange sits without glare and shrugs off scuffs as copies pass round a private view. Perfect binding turns a slim A5 into a proper book with a flat, squared spine, which matters when the catalogue doubles as each student’s first printed portfolio piece. To compare how the main finishes behave before you choose, read our comparison of silk against gloss, uncoated or recycled paper.
Paperwork before the pages existed
The next obstacle had nothing to do with ink. A departmental budget deadline arrived before the students had finished their pages, and Gareth, from the MA Illustration team, needed to commit the money while the cohort was still designing.
We raised the paperwork against a working specification: A5, silk inside and out, matt film on the cover and a glued, squared spine. The course secured its funds on time and the students kept working. If you print through a college, a council or an arts fund, ask for this early. A spec can be confirmed later, but a missed budget window rarely comes back.
Files from a whole year group
Group catalogues live or die on their files, and these came from many hands. We checked each page for missing bleed, low resolution images and text creeping too close to the trim, flagged what needed fixing and talked the team through each change instead of printing round the problems.
Gareth saw value in that beyond the booklet itself. For his students it became a live lesson in the standards they will meet in professional practice, which suits a festival built around putting work in public. If your contributors are new to print, send them our walkthrough on adding 3mm of bleed to artwork before anyone exports a PDF, and set the file deadline well ahead of the print date so the checks have time to happen.
Got a show of your own on the calendar? Put your size and page count into our instant price calculator and you will have a figure before you brief the class.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100