Shopping Guides

Shopping Guides are a perfect example of my integrated photo + design services. It calls on my skills in art direction, photography, graphic design and prepress. It also combines a fashion magazine publishing component and an advertising design component. Having produced nearly thirty shopping guides over a period of 10 years, I have developed expertise in this area.

Delivrables:

• High-resolution, print-ready PDFs for each page (32 to 48 pages).
• Low-resolution PDF, of the complete guide, for the online digital version.

Client 
Carrefour du Nord is a shopping center belonging to the Westcliff Group, which manages more than 30 shopping centers located in all regions of Quebec. The Carrefour du Nord is the largest shopping center in the Laurentians region. It has 120 fashion boutiques and service stores. It serves a population of over 375,000 people and welcomes 5 million visitors each year.

Project
The Shopping Guide is a 32 to 48 page brochure, published three times a year, in printed and digital versions. The three annual editions are Spring, Fall and Christmas. Each edition is printed in more than 80,000 copies and distributed at Carrefour du Nord and by mail in the greater Saint-Jérôme region.

The Shopping Guide is structured in two parts. A fashion trend section of 10 to 16 pages which presents the trends selected by the stylists throughout the shopping center and an advertising section which occupies 20 to 30 pages and which presents the collections in stores.

Objective
The objective of producing the Shopping Guide is to position the Carrefour du Nord as the trend-fashion destination of the Laurentians and to promote the offer of the 120 stores.

Process
Two teams of designers are working to produce each Carrefour du Nord Shopping Guide. The first team design the cover pages. The second team design the inside pages. I take part in the design of the inside pages.

The front and back covers of the Shopping Guide were designed and produced by Publicis Creative Agency, in collaboration with the marketing team from the Westcliff Group’s head office. All Westcliff Group shopping centers produce their Shopping Guide at the same time and use the same covers. Publicis provides graphic elements so that each center can adapt, in their own way, the inside pages of their Shopping Guide to the graphic line proposed on the cover.

The photo shoots for the inside pages for the Spring and Christmas editions were done in the studio at the Carrefour du Nord premises with my equipment. The fall editions were produced in August, so many times we took advantage of the nice weather to do outdoor shoots.

Team and Role
My mandate is to design and produce the inside pages in collaboration with the marketing department of Carrefour du Nord. Responsible for the artistic direction, I make sure to harmonize the inside pages with the cover. The challenge is to obtain a Shopping Guide that is visually consistent and that aligns with the trend-fashion positioning of the Carrefour du Nord and its exclusive offer. Concretely, I manage the visual creation, photo shoots, I do all the graphic editing and photo editing, direct the writing, ensure the quality of the French, do the prepress and all other tasks necessary for the advertisements and the pages to be approved and delivered to time.

Working in close collaboration with the marketing director, we oversee the general ideation of the pages, the design of the sets, the search for shooting locations and the selection of models. The Marketing Director takes care of all the hiring, planning and all the trend-fashion aspect with stylists, hairdressers, make-up artists and models. She is also in charge of obtaining all the approvals from the merchants, whether for advertisements, product descriptions, prices, etc. A team of 8 to 12 freelancers joins us for photo shoots. I also use the services of a writer and a reviser to ensure a distinctive touch to the texts and impeccable French.

Timeline
I collaborated with the Carrefour du Nord in the creation of around thirty Shopping Guides from 2007 to 2016. For each edition, my services were carried out over a period of 6 weeks. The production time was short and the delivery date was very important, because the Shopping Guide was printed in group with the other Shopping Guides of the Westcliff Group. We are proud to say that we were always on time!