The reason some designers and marketers shy away from using templates is they assume all templates are "finished" designs: boilerplate layouts complete with photographs of people shaking hands. You add a phone number and address and send it to the printer. I wouldn't use those any more than you would. They miss the point!

Clients and the organizations we produce documents for NEED what we bring to the table—they want something UNIQUE! Imagine going to all the trouble and expense of writing, producing, and printing a brochure and finding out a competitor is using the exact same boilerplate design—man, would that be embarrassing.

The Ideabook templates are something else entirely. They offer a detailed FRAMEWORK for finishing, not a rigid layout—BIG difference. As a designer, I'm sensitive to a designer's needs and when I create a template, I do my best to keep it clean and simple. That, to my way of thinking, is the ideal form for another designer to pick up and run with.

The book AND templates are jam-packed with creative ideas—interesting and intelligent ideas for making run-of-the-mill documents new again and for creating marketing and promotional materials you may not have even thought of.

Here are a few examples from 10 of the 19 categories (more below):

You get 19 categories in all—315 templates on a dual-format Mac/Windows CD-ROM plus a 276-page how-to ideabook including chapters on: Turning Ideas Into Results and Adding the Professional Touches, and a fully indexed template catalog.

Re-inventing the wheel every time you start a project is a waste of billable time!

The InDesign, QuarkXPress, and PageMaker Ideabooks get you back to making money—they free you to spend more of your time doing the important tasks. Instead of spending 15 minutes to create a simple layout, you'll spend 15 seconds. For the complex stuff—books, newsletters, catalogs, reports—you'll save HOURS.

All the information elements are in position: placeholders for text and graphics (a great reminder of what to include); page sizes, folds, margins, columns, gutters, and guides are set; styles palettes are configured, ready for you to insert your text. Whether you use a template as-is or as a framework for your own design, the Ideabook helps you produce good-looking, marketing materials, better and faster than ever before.

In addition to the items below, each Ideabook includes 25 YEARS worth of monthly calendars in three different layouts—900 pages of information.

More template examples from design categories 11 through 19 (more above):

Not a designer? Learning to design? Read this:

If you're just getting started using InDesign, QuarkXPress, or PageMaker, you're really going to appreciate the Ideabooks. Lots of folks use them to get started with projects they don't feel confident in creating from scratch. I have even heard from educators who use them as a teaching tool!

Here's a tip: If you are not using the “styles” feature of your desktop publishing program, take half an hour to learn how. (Styles are explained in your program's guide and help menu.) They will cut the time it takes to create a document in half—or more. AND, all the Ideabook templates are formatted using comprehensive style palettes that equip you to format entire pages of text with a few clicks of the mouse. If you just used the Ideabook layouts as-is, you'd miss out on half the potential horsepower.

What makes a great template?

A great template provides a flexible framework. "Stock" or "cloned" print materials—those with the identical images, color scheme, and typefaces as someone else's—concede the marketing battle—to demonstrate your uniqueness.

A great template provides comprehensive style palettes. Paragraph styles allow you to format any document, large or small, in the least amount of time and to make extensive changes easily.

A great template makes designing more about design. A collection this large and comprehensive provides literally hundreds of hours of setup and formatting you need not repeat. With your images and color choices—expect results like this:

A great template includes all the fine print and details. All the informational parts and pieces, placeholders for illustrations and logos, and nice touches such as word counts that help you gauge how much text fits where.

A great template is close at hand. A template is worthless if you can't find it fast. When you have 300-plus documents all cataloged and indexed in one place, you'll have what you need when you need it.

About the Author

Chuck Green is the principal of Logic Arts Corporation, a design and marketing firm and sponsor of Ideabook.com.

Chuck is the author of The Desktop Publisher's Idea Book (published by Random House), Clip Art Crazy (published by Peachpit Press), and Design-It-Yourself: Graphic Workshop (published by Rockport Publishers).

He is a contributor, past and present, to Before & After, Layers, Dynamic Graphics, and Home Office Computing magazines, and to many online publications.

Green has designed and produced company corporate identification, brochures, Web sites, annual reports, and advertising for a long list of organizations.

System requirements? There are none.

If you're using InDesign 2, 2.1, CS, CS2, CS3; QuarkXPress 4.1, 5, 6, 6.1, 6.5, or 7; or PageMaker 7 you already have everything you need. There's no program to install and nothing new to learn; you open the files just like the documents you create yourself. A complete, illustrated catalog of the templates and a comprehensive index helps you find exactly the layout you need when you need it.