The NOLS Catalog Cover Happens By Design

At NOLS we feel the cover is one of the most important elements of our catalog. It’s the stuff that’s inside that is critical, but our cover gets our prospects there. And it has to “tell” our story.

So what goes into a NOLS cover? We have a very disciplined approach.

• Every NOLS cover includes the NOLS identifiers: logo, the words “National Outdoor Leadership School” and our tagline, “The Leader in Wilderness Education”.
• The cover photo has to tell the NOLS “story”:

o Leadership and Teamwork
o “Deep” wilderness
o Education
o Outdoor skills

As part of the story we also try, through the photo, to indicate that we are an international organization and we have a diverse student body. For a while we used insets to get at the message. It didn’t require as much discipline, but we felt that we had too much “going on” on the cover.

No cover is perfect. How’d we do this year?

Bruce Palmer, NOLS marketing director

p.s. For more on book covers see Seth Godin’s “Judging a Book by its Cover”.