Which visual identity templates does your team really need?

Why templates achieve more than rules

A brand manual tells you how it should be done. A template does it for you. Anyone who opens a good template doesn’t have to think about margins, colours or where the logo goes. It’s already there.

That’s why templates are often the quickest way to make your brand more consistent. You don’t have to explain anything. You give people a starting point where the right choices have already been made.

The templates almost everyone needs

Don’t start with everything. Look at what your team makes every week and start there.

If you work with volunteers or lots of changing people, start with the templates they use. A flyer or poster for events is then often more important than a report template. Start small and add what people actually ask for.

For most organisations, this is a good basis:

• Presentation. A PowerPoint or Google Slides theme with a title slide, text slide, image slide and closing slide.
• Letter and document. A Word template with logo, colours, set typefaces and headers and footers.
• Email signature. One fixed layout for everyone, with name, job title and logo.
• Social media. A few fixed formats for posts and stories, with room for your own text and images.
• Quote or report. For anyone who regularly sends something to customers, members or funders.

How to build a template people actually use

A template has to be easier than making something yourself. Otherwise everyone starts with a blank document anyway. Keep these points in mind:

• Use built-in styles. Set up headings, paragraphs and colours as styles in Word or PowerPoint, so one click is enough.
• Lock the logo. Place it in the slide masters or header and footer, so nobody moves it by accident.
• Choose a fallback typeface. If your own typeface doesn’t work everywhere, set a system font in the template.
• Provide sample text. Show what goes where, for example ‘Title of no more than two lines’.
• Keep it short. A presentation template with forty slide layouts is off-putting. A handful of good variants works better.

One place, one version

The biggest risk with templates is that after a year five versions are doing the rounds. Someone has an old copy on their desktop, someone else uses a file from a shared folder. So agree that templates live in one place, and that you always get them from there.

Give templates a clear name and don’t put a date or version number in the file name. When you update, replace the file in that one place. Let old versions disappear, so nobody picks them up by mistake.

In MarkBase, templates and presentation themes sit alongside your logos and colours. With version control you can see which version is current, and old files disappear from view.

Keep them alive

Ask colleagues now and then which templates they’re missing. If you see someone keeps putting something together themselves, that’s a sign a template is missing. After a rebrand or a small change to your visual identity, also check whether all templates are still correct.

Appoint one person as owner of the templates. They decide on new variants and make sure no unofficial versions quietly appear.