Corporate Branding Template Nightmare

[xjester]

Hi guys,

I have only just started as a graphic designer in a new company and have so far created a corporate look and feel. As the intention was to 'theme' marketing documents each document has been individually designed on InDesign with the same formatting and feel.

It has now come to a point where the boss likes these design and wants me to start adding contracts and policy type documents in this theme via InDesign. As there are a lot of these (and is a waste of resources in my opinion) does anyone have any experience with creating a 'secondary' template. Which would be a watered down version in the form an MS Office document template. I'm sure I've seen Adobe having really fancy/arty marketing materials, then a basic Word type template for documentation. Perhaps there has been some studies on this, but I wouldn't even know what keywords to search? It will also be useful to reference to the boss.

Thanks again everyone

 

[Dave L]

It's possible I may be missing something here but I'm not really getting either the nightmare element or the need to source studies. It's a widely applied norm for businesses to make branded MS Office templates (or similar) available to employees for the production of the kinds of documents you describe. As you say, these won't sing and dance in the same way as higher-level marketing collateral but are rather a simple means of enabling employees without a design focus to stay broadly within the corporate identity without the need for specialist skills or software. In my experience, simplicity is the key and the user is the person to keep in mind when creating templates - and the larger the organisation, the greater the need to work on the assumption of low-level skills: the more basic and limited the choices available to the user, the greater the likelihood of everyone being able to produce materials to the same standard.

Stick a logo in the header/company information in the footer and use system fonts (e.g. Arial) for default text and your done: every corporate brand book I've ever seen makes provision for this along the same basic lines.