Why is template design important?

Template design is vital for your company’s brand. It influences how communication materials are perceived by their audience, regardless of whether they are being used internally or externally.

For usability and brand consistency, it’s important to consider the placement of company logos, icons, legal disclaimers and other elements across different document types. For example, a legal contract template and a sales presentation template must differ according to purpose, but both must contain clearly recognizable branding. A further factor to consider is cultural style conventions. Each country has distinct requirements for the information that must be included in legal disclaimers, and every document template must take this into account.

The template design process

To begin with, internal stakeholders should create a brand identity manual that includes approved fonts, logo designs, color schemes and graphics, to provide designers with all the necessary brand elements. Next, the documents that templates will be created for need to be decided. These could be letters, contracts, memos or presentations. The audience should be considered when the templates are being decided.

The next decision is whether to outsource the design process to a design agency or use an in-house graphic designer. Depending on the organizational structure of your organization, there may be various stakeholders such as brand teams, marketing teams and document managers. Any colleague involved in creating and maintaining corporate visual identity will need to be involved in the document template design process.

Implementing templates into Office applications

Once the templates have been designed, the final product will be in a publishing design format. Most templates cannot just be uploaded to create Microsoft Office templates that are ready for use by employees. The final design must be deployed so that the styles, margins, paragraph spacing in Word and layouts in PowerPoint are managed and structured to ensure the final document is as close to the design image as possible. Large companies may have template managers who are responsible for this task, but it is usually necessary to work with a template implementation company.

Implementation of corporate document templates

Implementation companies have expertise in the specific code required for creating document templates in Word or PowerPoint. They enable the template design so it is compatible with Office applications. Implementation companies manage and structure the styles, margins, paragraph spacing for Word and layouts for PowerPoint to minimize potential mistakes that could be made by employees. This is particularly important if your organization is using intelligent, or dynamic, templates, as these require more coding.