How to Create a Winning Self-Promotional Lookbook

If you’re looking for marketing material that’s fast, effective and focused on striking images and minimal content, check out how to create your own lookbook from scratch with this step-by-step guide from digital printing specialists Precision Printing.

Don’t waste money by missing crucial parts of your lookbook. The essential lookbook elements to consider are:

• Cover page
• Sensible navigation
• High-quality images
• Enticing product/service descriptions
• Key brand details (including contact information and social media addresses)

Cover page: making a first impression

First impressions matter, so make sure you pay a lot of attention to your lookbook’s front cover. The objective of the cover is to grab attention, which means you need to think: attractive image, excellent use of color, and an appealing title to compel the reader to want to know more. Cover pages typically detail the month and year and, if it’s not in the title, you need to have your brand name and logo somewhere here, too.

Navigation: does it read well?

How your lookbook reads is essential to its success — nobody will carry on reading it if the page order doesn’t make sense or certain products and services pages aren’t in a logical place.

Don’t make your reader flick back and forth through the lookbook — keep relatable items together. If you offer both goods and services, keep these separate, and try to section off connected articles into clear categories to deliver consistency and avoid making your lookbook appear disjointed.

Imagery: is the quality enough?

The point of a lookbook is that it’s visual, so your photos and graphics are critical to its success. Make sure the photos you put into your lookbook are professionally-taken and of the highest quality, which means considering props, lighting, color, setting, and image resolution for each shot. If this is one of your first print marketing campaigns, you don’t want any mistakes.

Have you considered using whitespace? Not every image needs to run border to border and whitespace is a modern photography technique used to create a focus point and highlight a particular part of the page — use it sparingly.

Although you may want to save cash, hiring a professional photographer could be a wise move to ensure your images are high-quality. However, you can do these yourself if you prefer, but just remember to check that you have exclusive rights for everything you include if they aren’t all original images.

Product descriptions: are these clear and correct?

Images are important, but get the text wrong, and you’ll significantly harm the ROI of your lookbook marketing campaign. Essentially, a lookbook will feature product/service descriptions and — if you’re a startup — perhaps a brief brand description so everyone knows what you’re about.

When creating quality and engaging lookbook copy, ensure that it’s:

• Succinct: no unnecessary words or details.
• Informative: don’t leave your reader asking questions.
• Interesting: grab your audience’s attention and keep it.
• Enticing: make them want to give you their custom.

Through content, you can better engage and communicate with your target audience, which will help you build a relationship. Use professional language to convey your reliability, but try and adopt a chatty tone to come across as approachable. Try to avoid using very long words and sentences — these sound stuffy and clumsy — and keep your product descriptions between 30 and 60 words in length to avoid taking focus from your lookbook’s images.

Details: have you included what you need?  

Don’t forget that your reader needs to find you, if they’re going to become your customer. Place contact information at the back of your new lookbook — if you’re a new company on the scene, you’re going to have to shout about where new customers can get in touch with you. Make sure you include:

• Shop address
• Phone number
• Email address
• Social media addresses

Lookbook printing options and final preparations

As soon as you’re happy with the layout, content and overall design; it’s time to look over your print options to bag a good deal. Have a chat to your printing specialist about the type of paper stock and finishes that might look good and ask to see a few samples to get a better idea. The worst scenario would be to put so much time, money and effort into designing the perfect lookbook, only to have it ruined by opting for a cheap paper or poor finish.

Now you’ve sorted out the details with your print company, it’s time to do one last proofread of your pre-print lookbook. Check copy, scan photos for anomalies and verify product names and prices. After it’s printed, get your lookbook out to as many potential customers as you can!