Seven Principles of Great Template Design

July 29, 2008

Great templates are created through a carefully planned combination of individual tools and technologies. Like a machine, all of the various parts work so well together that when using it, everything seems to be operating from a single intelligence.

To succeed in perfecting your page production machine, it's important to understand some of the foundational principles that support the creation of quality templates. Use the seven principles covered in this article to guide the decisions you make throughout the template construction process.

1. Know Your Tools

As graphic designers, your first instinct is to focus on the visual aspects of a project. Your training has been centered on how best to present a message, and your professional strengths lie in the creation of inventive layouts. Consequently, you often fail to concentrate on honing your production skills, which are analytic in nature and don't necessarily come easy to you. When learning to design templates, you must embrace the full range of tools and technologies that InDesign provides.

When designing a publication intended for one-time use, the specific tools and methods you use to produce it aren't that important. As long as you create the desired results, you can get away with a poorly executed layout. However, when constructing templates, it's essential that you take a much more strategic approach to page layout and employ the most effective use of each tool available.

During the template-building process, you'll be frequently challenged and sometimes confused about the right tool or strategy to use. With a deeper understanding of the tools, including knowledge of their capabilities and limitations, you'll be able to make the most informed decisions in any given situation.

2. Design with a Goal in Mind

Any experienced designer will tell you there's nothing worse than a project without goals. It's like trying to paint the entire expanse of the night sky. What part of it do you paint? As creative professionals, you like lots of room to be creative, but without clearly defined limits, there's really not a problem to solve.

All successful and innovative template design is created in conjunction with a clearly defined set of objectives. No template project can begin without first defining its design and workflow requirements. After the specifications have been defined, the overall template design process will go smoothly—without wasting valuable time and money.

Consider a template that has been thrown together with little thought. No doubt there will missing elements, because there wasn't clear direction from the beginning. The wrong tool will probably be used in a particular solution, because the workflow requirements were not previously clarified. Most of all, the template will be poorly organized, harder to implement, and almost impossible to manage. You'll be left with a template that isn't fully functional and involves a lot of production time—defeating the very purpose of the template.

3. Speed Is a Priority

Well-built templates are built for speed. They eliminate the stress of repetitive formatting and automate routine tasks as much as possible. While constructing a template, continually ask yourself: Is there a better or faster way to create this? How can I bring this layout together in fewer steps?

Many of InDesign's tools are designed to work together. For example, by setting up a nested style, you can apply a character style in the same click that you apply a paragraph style. In addition, making a paragraph style part of an object style's definition allows you to apply the paragraph style at the same time you apply the object style. If the paragraph style also contains a nested style, you'll be combining three tools into one. What would have taken you three steps to produce you can now create with just one simple click.

As you become more familiar with InDesign's toolset, you'll discover new and better ways to reduce the number of steps it takes to produce a document. The templates you design will employ the smartest production strategies and will avoid manual labor whenever possible. At times, you may not find a better or faster way to produce a particular layout. If so, consider modifying the design, if possible, to make it easier to create. Sometimes all it takes is changing one element to drastically speed up production.

4. Design for Ease of Use

The best templates pull together a variety of individual tools and technologies to create a coherent production experience. They are well thought out, organized, and highly intuitive. Any designer should be able to start a new document based on your template and begin working without having to first overcome a steep learning curve.

Always look for ways to make your template easier to use. For example, use clear, concise, and consistent naming conventions. And don't create too many style sheets, color swatches, layers, or master pages. Otherwise, the template can become unwieldy and make designers work harder to find what they need. It also helps to create a high-quality style guide that specifies exactly how to use your template. These are just a few examples of how you can create efficient templates. Throughout the book, Instant InDesign, you'll be given countless tips on optimizing your templates for ease of use.

5. Employ Good Production Practices

A poorly constructed template leads to sloppy results. Consider the principle of least effort. This theory states that users will tend to utilize the most convenient method available to them. Most designers would rather use what you provide to them as a starting point instead of re-creating a layout themselves, even if it means they have to work a bit harder to produce a publication.

In other words, the way you construct the individual elements of a template determines how others will produce a publication based on it. So, it's imperative that you employ good production practices when constructing a template. Anyone using your template should be productive and be able to avoid any printing issues and other costly mistakes. The book, Instant InDesign, is dedicated to teaching you excellent production techniques and will guide the choices you make throughout the development of your templates.

6. Continually Test and Explore Other Solutions

While constructing a template, incrementally test your work as you go. Although you'll be conducting a final test upon completion of the template, don't wait until the very end to examine your work. You could miss out on a valuable opportunity to improve each solution as you build it.

Testing gives you firsthand experience of what it will be like to produce a document with your template. As you test, decipher where improvements can be made and explore other options and solutions. You'll find that testing helps to transform the solutions you've come up with into better and more productive results.

Experienced designers spend a significant amount of time fine-tuning their templates, because they know their efforts will be more than repaid in time saved later, and in the final appearance of a finished publication.

7. Choose Between Flexibility and Rigidity

How rigid or flexible should your template be? The answer to this question depends on your specific workflow and design requirements, because every publication is different.

Flexible templates are structured to serve a variety of design choices. They don't lock you into one particular format, yet they can still save you a lot of setup time. For example, if you're creating a template for a publication that allows a lot of creative freedom, you might want to set up the template with just one or two master pages, a simple layout grid, and a few style sheets. Such a template can save layout and revision time while giving your document a consistent design and plenty of creative flexibility.

Rigid templates, on the other hand, are precisely constructed to reproduce a predictable and consistent layout, such as a catalog or price list. They contain highly structured master pages, a well-defined grid system, and an assortment of style sheets. They often even utilize custom scripts, Data Merge, or XML technology to automate production. Such templates are the most productive, because they can significantly reduce, if not completely eliminate, redundant tasks. They also require the most forethought and planning, and are certainly more difficult to construct.

In many situations, your template will lie somewhere between both extremes. It should be flexible enough to accommodate several design variations, yet rigid enough to automate redundant formatting whenever a layout follows a predictable pattern.

Excerpted from Instant InDesign: Designing Templates for Fast and Efficient Page Layout by Gabriel Powell. Copyright © 2008. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Adobe Press.

Posted in Book Excerpts

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