Do More with Design Templates
04 January, 2022
Bottom Line Up Front: Design templates are a professional starting point you can use to quickly modify and personalize a design for customers. Find out how this handy tool can help you and your team wow more customers and boost productivity in the art department.
“I don’t like this.”
“Can you give it more POP?”
“I’m not sure what I don’t like about it, but it’s not quite right.”
How often do you find yourself going around in circles when you’re building designs for your customers? It’s frustrating and adds more time to your art department’s workload. Sometimes, back-and-forth with a client is unavoidable, especially if it’s a super-detailed design. But in many cases, you can cut down this friction and time burden by standardizing your process.
We’re talking about design templates.
If that’s a new term to you, let’s break it down:
Basics of a Design Template
A design template is your starting point when putting together a design idea for a customer. And, it’s a placeholder so you can save ideas and come back to them. With this type of template, you can quickly edit the design to personalize it depending on the customer’s needs and branding, whether that’s a change in colors, fonts, or even the primary graphic used in the design. It helps save you and your team massive amounts of design time and resources since it gives you a head start on the art approval process.
A design template usually includes:
- Background design elements
- Clip art illustrations
- Fonts and text effects
- Added effects or any design treatments
Here’s what those items typically look like:
Use GraphicsFlow for Design Templates
Here’s the best part, you can create professional design templates using GraphicsFlow. The platform’s art library is packed full of elements like fonts, graphics, and design ideas that are fully customizable.
Your team can quickly drop brand or organization name elements into these retail-inspired designs with minimal back-end work.
Give Your Customers Template Options with Art Portal
You can also start the design template process on the customer’s side using GraphicsFlow Art Portal. GraphicsFlow features an extensive set of clip art and fonts, and with Art Portal, you can give these customers access to a wealth of design ideas.
From there, customers can browse artwork, search by style, collection, and category, and send design ideas directly to you through Art Portal. This tool helps your customers visualize and articulate what they like faster. Plus, it puts you in the driver’s seat when finalizing the design since you have complete control over the artwork they’re submitting. Using Art Portal also speeds up the art approval process since you’ll spend less time building designs from scratch.
The artwork from GraphicsFlow is production-ready too. Once your customer approves the artwork, those graphics are ready to go. It’s a seamless move to production, whether that job is screen printing, embroidery, heat transfer, or other decoration methods.
Sticking Out From the Crowd
With design templates, you’ll not only make life easier for you, your art team, and your clients, you’ll have an extra tool that helps you stand out from the competition. And with Art Portal, you’ll have a unique tool to keep your customers engaged during the design creation process. The faster you’re able to put together more professional, exciting designs for customers, the more likely you’ll see return jobs and referrals from new clients too.
Ready to start using design templates and GraphicsFlow to grow your customer base? Contact a GraphicsFlow Client Advisor today for a personalized tour.
