What to look for when choosing a document template designer
What to look for when choosing a document template designer
Most organisations do not choose a template designer very often. When the need arises, it usually comes with some urgency — a rebrand has just landed, an annual report is six weeks away, a new team member has pointed out that the shared templates look nothing like the current brand.
In that context, the instinct is to find someone quickly and get started. The brief goes out. A few options come back. Someone gets chosen.
What does not always happen is a clear-eyed assessment of what to actually look for. Template design looks like a narrow service, but the range of quality and approach within it is significant. A template that looks right on the day it is delivered is not the same thing as a template that holds up six months later when 40 people are using it.
Here is what separates a template designer worth working with from one who will deliver something that looks good but breaks under real use.
They review before they build
The most reliable indicator that a template designer knows what they are doing is whether they ask to review the design before the build begins. A designer who jumps straight from a PDF handover to building in Word is skipping the step that prevents most template problems.
A pre-build design review looks at how the design will translate into Word, PowerPoint, or Excel before anything is built. It catches font compatibility issues, heading structures that will not work as named styles, layered elements that become unpredictable in an editable document, and spacing logic that only holds on a single showcase page.
If a template designer does not offer this, or does not know what it involves, that is worth noting.
They ask about the people using the template, not just the design
A template is not a design artefact. It is a tool that real people will use, under time pressure, on machines they did not set up themselves, with content pasted from other sources, on a Tuesday afternoon when they have four other things to do.
A good template designer asks about the people using the template before they think about the design elements. How many contributors will be working in the document? What is their level of formatting experience? What machines and Office versions are they using? What are the most common ways documents go wrong in this organisation?
The design informs the template. The users determine how it needs to be built.
They understand the technical specifics of the platform
Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Google Workspace each have specific constraints, quirks, and capabilities that determine what is possible and what will cause problems. A template designer who works across all of them should be able to explain those constraints in plain language without jargon.
Ask them: what is the difference between a style-based template and a direct-formatted one, and why does it matter? What happens to your template when someone opens it on a machine without the brand font installed? How does section protection work in Word, and when would you use it?
If the answers are clear and specific, the designer knows what they are doing. If the answers are vague or reassuring without substance, that is a signal.
They test under real conditions
A template delivered without testing is a guess at a template. Testing means opening the finished template on different machines, in different Office versions, pasting content from other sources, adding and removing sections, and working through it the way the real users will. It means finding the things that break before the client finds them.
Ask the designer how they test their templates before delivery. The answer should be specific.
They are clear about what they are delivering
Some template designers deliver a file. The better ones deliver a file with clear documentation about what has been protected and why, what the styles are called and how they work, and what to do when something needs changing after delivery. The even better ones offer a handover session.
This is the difference between a finished product and a system the organisation can actually maintain.
If you are assessing template designers and you would like to talk through what to expect from a properly scoped project, book a time with Tim.