Great Catalog Design for the Design Impaired

If given a catalog-page layout and asked to improve it, most people will line up everything on the page — square and the same size. That’s what happened in the event noted above. But it’s wrong, and you won’t like it when it gets into print.

One of the greatest secrets of appealing design is “balanced asymmetry,” which simply means that things are almost balanced, but not quite. This underlies the great “rule of thirds” of photography: Mentally divide the frame into thirds both horizontally and vertically, and position things along those lines, not dead center in the frame. The result will feel balanced, but not quite.