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Templates

Years of watching the wheel being recreated made it clear there is a better way. From designing and creating Microsoft Office templates — PowerPoint, Word, and Excel — to providing the support for their execution: these are the tools you need to reflect and reinforce your brand visually in all communications, firm-wide. Templates provide the opportunity to leverage a strong identity across the board: for presentations and leave-behinds, business collateral, reporting documents and fact sheets, stationery systems (letters, faxes, memos), forms, and RFPs.

THE POWER OF A TEMPLATE

The benefits of a tool that flows text and data into documents that reflect a visual system are innumerable. A well-designed template will:

  • reinforce firm identity in materials produced in-office, capitalizing on the ubiquity of Microsoft Office and making for a responsive and flexible marketing tool
  • save time, especially when deadlines are tight and last-minute changes are common
  • present a visual coherence and information hierarchy that doesn’t rely on proofreaders, carrying the added credibility consistency of form confers and helping authors to organize information into your company's branded visual system
  • automate what many users do manually, executing text design changes throughout a document — globally, in a fraction of the time, and without the need to memorize or consult style guides
  • provide for ease of use, especially convenient where there are a high percentage of end users not yet trained in an application
  • strengthen process by integrating that process into the template
  • lock down areas of a document that should never change

TEMPLATES IN MICROSOFT OFFICE

Microsoft Office is an essential element in identity and design execution, since the reflection of that identity so often ends up in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Common examples:
  • Word — electronic letterhead, memo, or fax (i.e., logos and mastheads embedded); templates that allow for printing on letterhead, labels or other custom stock; long and short online forms (e.g., questionnaires or order forms); proposals and Request for Proposal response forms; merge documents (i.e., form letters)
  • Excel — charts and tables exported to Word or PowerPoint leave-behinds, appendices, or internal reports; stand­alone reporting fact sheets with formulas and links intact
  • PowerPoint — presentations and companion annotated leave-behinds; slide libraries

INDESIGN TEMPLATES

Books, business collateral, brochures, and flyers require tools that provide more refined control than is allowed for in Microsoft Office. InDesign templates are offered for content that requires sophisticated text handling and color management. InDesign is the preferred application, for example, where design relies heavily on typography, where text flow control is vital, where PMS color-matching is necessary, where tools for providing the offset printer with information and assets for the job are built into every step of file creation.

Email or call for more specifics and to learn how templates can work for you.

Templates are to
a visual identity what spell check is to content — a visual “spell check” that reinforces your brand. And: it’s the most reliable way to automate design throughout the back office