THE IDEA IS SIMPLE. Modifying a well-designed template is far easier than starting from scratch. With the ideabook, you tap the talents of designer and author Chuck Green. He has researched, designed, and meticulously formatted over 300 extraordinary layouts—you just add your message, make as many or as few changes as you want, and send it to print.
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.
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. The first 10 categories (more below):
Designers: Re-inventing the wheel is a waste of billable time!
The Ideabooks free you to devote your time to the message. Instead of spending 15 minutes to create a basic layout, you'll spend 15 seconds. For complex documents such as books, newsletters, catalogs, and reports—you'll save HOURS.
Each file includes all the pieces of the document puzzle. An annual report layout, for example, includes front and back covers, a table of contents, editorial and financial sections, and more. Page sizes, margins, and columns are set, fonts are suggested and sized, and space is reserved for graphics and photographs. 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.
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. In fact, we have 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.
Why Ideabook templates?
Ideabook templates provide a flexible framework. "Stock" or "cloned" layouts (those with the identical images, color scheme, and typefaces as someone else's) concede one of the main marketing battles: to show what makes your product, service, or idea, unique.
Ideabook templates include 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.
Ideabook templates make 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:
Ideabook templates include 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.
Ideabook templates are ready when you need them. 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 be able to find 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 the author of The Desktop Publisher's Idea Book (published by Random House) 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.
Chuck 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, CS4; 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.
