The Uline print catalog is impeccably designed

A shipping supply catalog is an odd place to seek design inspiration, but hear me out. I believe that the Uline print catalog is impeccably designed. At less than an inch thick, it somehow contains 907 pages of pure design bliss. Every product inside is advertised in exactly the same, boring manner. Each listing contains:

• A heavy title in all caps, such as SHIPPING LABELS
• Up to, but no more than 5 bullet points describing the product. The bullet points are double-spaced apart, and never contain more than about 15 words. Many are much shorter
• An image, usually paired with a relevant caption. The caption never merely describes the image, but provides a place for additional product data, such as a SKU number
• A table of product information, to inform a purchasing decision

And that’s about it. This information framework is extremely consistent throughout the catalog. There are very few design cues present, yet there are absolutely zero people in this company’s target demographic who would fail to grasp their offering.

The Uline catalog didn’t come with a separate tutorial, or training guide, and it didn’t need one. Even many people outside of Uline’s target demographic would understand what this catalog is for.

The footer of each one of those 907 pages says the exact same thing.

Left Page

ULINE   Order by 6 p.m. for Same Day Shipping    PHONE 1-800-295-5510

Right Page

ULINE   Shipping Supply Specialists    PHONE 1-800-295-5510

In other words, these are the four things Uline would like you to know about this catalog.

1. ULINE is the company who made it
2. ULINE guarantees that your product will leave their warehouse, if you order it by 6 p.m.
3. ULINE are experts at shipping.
4. ULINE can be reached by good, old-fashioned, copper-wire technology¹

Fonts

ULINE uses 1 font style (Avant Garde Gothic, a sans-serif font), 3 font weights (light, medium, bold), 3 font sizes, and 3 font colors (black, white, red). 27 combinations, but in reality only about 9 of them appear in 90% of situations. Given that there are about 850 content pages², each with up to 25 items, this is no small feat of standardization for seemingly every industrial product under the sun. No particular item, brand, or category receives undue attention by featuring a fancier font in a larger size. In the Uline catalog, each product vies for your dollar equally.

Images

Perhaps you are picturing something that looks like a phone book. But no, the Uline catalog isn’t a text-only catalog! Each page is full of beautiful images, exquisitely lit, and usually isolated from its background. There is no extraneous data in the image, and there is no need to imagine what is missing from each image either. If you don’t know what a “platform truck”, “eurotote”, or “excelsior” is, you will after merely glancing at the image.

Tables

Tables get a bad rep. Boring, for nerds, ugly, etc…

Tables have some highly underrated properties. They:

• Always look the same
• Read from left-to-right, top-to-bottom
• Can factor out information effectively. Instead of repeating the $ unit 10 times across 10 items, just write it once in the column header!

Uline’s tables are great. They use only two border thickness (thin and thick), prioritize numbers (always aligned such that they may be rapidly compared), and tell you everything you need to order the item. The wood platform truck on page 459 of the Spring/Summer catalog features this table:

It’s almost as if Edward Tufte designed the table himself.

There are thousands, perhaps ten thousand tables across this catalog covering every imaginable product, from “A-Frame Panel Trucks”, “Baby Changing Stations”, and “Cabinet Workbenches”, all the way to “Wafer Seals”, “X-Acto® Knife”, and “Zebra Printers/Supplies”. Yet they all have an identical format and design. If a reader understands one table, they understand them all.

Flippability

The Uline catalog is “flippable”, in other words, and it’s something to learn from when learning to design UIs. A huge amount of data can be ingested by simply flipping through the catalog and scanning for interesting headings. There are no advertising gimmicks. You know what Uline is there for. It’s to put things in the mail for you today, if you order by 6 p.m.

For those who know what they want, towards the end lies a good old-fashioned phonebook-style index. If you know the first letter of what you want, you can do a sweet plain-paper dictionary lookup and find it! That’s the only way to discover things in this catalog, and it works brilliantly! Want a new eurotote? Just look in the “Eurotote” section on page 462, silly!

Conclusion

The Uline catalog is a customer interface. They talk to their customers through the catalog, and the customers talk back to them by clipping out a section of page 892, filling out the information, and sticking it in an envelope and mailing it to Pleasant Prairie. Well, they probably did in 1985. Maybe not so much today.

Uline is a shipping machine. Their catalog is your terminal interface to that machine. Pick a product, put order in, receive shipment. That’s it. They have no mission to “democratize shipping solutions”, and run no ads that intersect with collateral lives and unnecessarily expose us all to advertising drivel. Uline doesn’t want you to follow them on Instabook-Tok, doesn’t invite you to “join their community”, and doesn’t try to be something that they’re not.

They sell you things. That’s the full extent of the deal. And for that honesty, I appreciate them very much.