Noble Outfitters Workwear Guides
Noble Outfitters Workwear Guides, Four seasonal catalogs, 40-56 pages each, serving both consumers and member retailers.
Role: Designer — Mid-States
Focus Areas
Editorial Design, Layout & Pagination, Print Production, Copywriting, Email Design, Multi-Brand Systems
Four seasonal guides, 40 to 56 pages each
Noble Outfitters is a workwear brand in the Mid-States portfolio, and its seasonal guides do two jobs at once. For end consumers, they're a product catalog. For Mid-States member retailers, they're a sales tool, the source for product imagery and merchandising information the stores use to build their own advertising.
I designed four of them across two seasons: Fall 2024, Holiday 2023, Spring 2024, and Spring 2025. Forty to fifty-six pages each, roughly two months from kickoff to distribution.
Building the book
I inherited a layout system and a pagination structure from a guide the Creative Director had done previously, and had freedom to work inside it or move beyond it, adjusting spacing, reworking the flow, adding layouts, and building new page types where the product line called for them.
Each guide started with the category team's product lineup for the season. From there I built the pagination, deciding how many pages each category earned and how the book should flow, then designed it in sections: men's, women's, kids'. The Creative Director reviewed each section as it was completed, then the finished guide went through creative, marketing, and category review before release.
Product descriptions came from the category team. On the earlier guides I worked with marketing on section headlines and connective copy; on the later ones I wrote that copy myself, using AI to draft and iterate before shaping the final language.
Photography came from the brand's existing library. My job was selecting and sequencing it, deciding which lifestyle images anchored a spread, which product shots needed annotation, and how a page balanced the two.
Two audiences, one book
The guides had to work for a customer deciding what to buy and for a store owner deciding what to feature. That meant product pages carried enough specification to be useful, callout diagrams, fabric details, full color ranges, without turning into a spec sheet, while lifestyle photography kept the brand's promise visible: workwear worn by people actually working.
Each season had its own treatment within a consistent system. Fall ran warm and cream. Holiday introduced snowflake patterns, ribbon elements, and a cooler palette. Spring lightened with a textured rice paper ground that gave the pages an airier, seasonal feel. The structure stayed the same so a member retailer always knew where to find what they needed.
From pagination to distribution
Once approved, each guide was published to Flipsnack as a digital flipbook and distributed by email to Mid-States member retailers, along with a link to the SharePoint library where they could download the guide and individual product images for their own store advertising. I designed the launch email and imagery for each release.
What else we've built
Each one different. Each one deliberate. A growing body of work across brand identity, digital experiences, and motion design.