Every designer knows the intimidation and thrill that comes with a blank canvas. Some might draw strength from its endless possibilities, while others grow paralyzed, their creative engine at a standstill.
Regardless of how you feel about starting designs from scratch, knowing that design templates are always an option can alleviate the pressure of entirely relying on your creativity at every stage of the design process.
But it’s not just creativity that graphic design templates support. They come with a handful of perks—including making quality a centerpiece across your designs.
Our guide will walk you through the basics of graphic designing templates to help you understand what they are, why you may benefit from using them, and how they fit into your design toolkit.
Table of contents
- What are design templates?
- 6 types of business template designs
- Why you should use design templates
- When to use templates for design
- Where to find design templates
- Should you create custom design templates?
- How to create a custom design template
What are design templates?
Design templates are pre-designed formats that can be customized for a specific purpose. They are used as starting points for creative projects, a blueprint that keeps assets consistent and aligned with the demands of a particular project.
6 types of business template designs
If the definition above was vague or you still can’t visualize what graphic design templates entail, we’ll walk through a couple of different types below, covering:
- Social media
- Website design
- Posters
- Presentations
- Display ads
- Business cards
1. Social media templates for design
Let’s start with social media, as it covers an extensive umbrella of design templates. With so many channels and types of design available for each, there are plenty of social media design templates to choose from. These can differ based on the social media channel—Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, or Linkedin—and the type of content within these channels.
Some common types of design templates for social media are:
- Post templates
- Story templates
- Highlight cover templates
- Header and banner templates
- Ad templates
2. Website design templates
Website design templates are off-the-shelf website themes that can help you get your website up and running quickly, without needing extensive help from a professional designer or web developer. They involve a selection of ready-made website layouts that allow you to swap elements, such as images and texts, to create and launch a website without burning a hole in your budget.
3. Poster templates
While online promotion avenues are increasingly popular, they don’t make offline marketing channels obsolete. Posters can still be an impactful way to deliver a message, making poster design templates a valuable creation tool. For example, they can help small, local businesses promote their event or expand their community reach. Similarly, larger enterprises can use them for internal communications or as training material.
4. Presentation graphic design templates
Templates for presentations standardize the design of each slide. These then come together to create a flow of slides that are tied together with consistent fonts, color schemes, layouts, and icons. Some elements within these templates, such as placeholder images or text, can then be changed to convey your message and make the presentation uniquely yours.
5. Display ad templates
As is the case with social media, display ad templates come in various sizes and layouts. This is because they’re created with specific platforms in mind, such as Google Display Network or Facebook Ads.
Some designed templates you can find in this category include:
- Banner ads
- Responsive ads
- Retargeting ads
- Product ads
- Promotional ads
These typically follow industry standards and best practices, including suitable dimensions and aspect ratios, to ensure that final ads are platform-compatible.
6. Business card templates
If you’re using a poorly formatted or unprofessional business card, you risk giving contacts the wrong impression, deterring instead of attracting them. A business card template can kick off your networking interactions on the right note. They format essential information, such as your name, position, company, and contact details, in a readable and presentable way.
Why use design templates?
Making design templates a staple asset in your design toolkit or process can bring about a handful of solid benefits for your business:
- Speed up the design creation
- Lower design costs
- Maintain design quality and consistency
- Limit creative roadblocks
- Discover plenty of creative options
- Make design accessible to non-designers
Speed up design creation
Design templates help you slash your creation time, coming ready-made with fundamental design building blocks. With the structural layout, elements, and sizing already taken care of, design templates do the heavy lifting for you, giving you the freedom to focus solely on customizing the templates to fit your brand.
Lower design costs
Pre-set design templates come at a fraction of the cost of hiring a professional designer, with some even available for free. Using these as a starting point for design can save your business money—money that would’ve otherwise had to be spent on creating each design from scratch.
Maintain design quality and consistency
Design templates are typically made by talented designers who are up-to-date with the latest trends, visual design principles, and UI/UX best practices. Using their design templates means you get to tap into their best talents, applying these to your projects to create stand-out, qualitative assets.
Limit creative roadblocks
Design templates reduce creative roadblocks, typically brought on by fatigue, high stress, or having to create dozens of asset variations. They reduce decision fatigue by limiting the number of choices designers have to make when creating designs.
Discover plenty of creative options
Another benefit of template designs is their variety. Not only are there different types of design templates available—such as the ones covered in the section above—but they can also be filtered down into specific use cases, such as industry, occasion, device, and skill level. For example, beginner-friendly design templates may focus on drag-and-drop edits, while others may offer more complex editing capabilities.
Make design accessible to non-designers
With templates for design, non-designers no longer have to rely on experienced designers to walk them through the design process. They can take over the creation of assets themselves, making edits bounded by the permissions set by designers. Smaller businesses without dedicated design teams may benefit from this the most.
When to use templates for design
Design templates are perfect if you have to meet tight deadlines or if there’s a lot of repetitive design work involved. This can be the case, for example, if you need to create many assets for an omnichannel marketing campaign or A/B testing, where each asset is predominantly the same but requires minor differences.
They’re also great for easing new or non-designers into content creation. Design templates and the built-in constraints these entail allow contributors into the process without needing extensive training or worrying that they’ll mess things up.
Yet, despite their plentiful benefits, design templates aren’t always the best option. In certain scenarios, net new creations may be the way to go. For example, if you need original, one-of-a-kind visuals or niche design requirements—as may be the case with technical, high-stakes presentations—templates can fall short of your audience’s expectations.
Where to find design templates
The internet is rife with graphic design templates, and if you’re just wrapping your head around the possibility of using these, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with choice and abandon the idea of using these altogether.
To help you out, we’re listing some of our favorite online resources for design templates. Some are focused on specific design templates, while others branch further out, taking a more overarching approach.
- Creatopy: Best for social media and ad templates.
- Webflow: Best for website templates.
- Venngage: Best for infographics, reports, and brochure templates.
- Canva: Best for versatile, non-designer-focused templates.
- SlidesCarnival: Best for presentation templates.
- Vistaprint: Best for business cards and print templates.
Whether you’re working on your social media ads, business presentations, or printed materials, you’re bound to find an appropriate template in at least one of the sources above.
Should you create custom templates for design?
While pre-set design templates are helpful, they don’t always hit the mark. They might not suit your style, be a poor fit for your audience, or simply not meet your customization needs.
In such situations, you’re better off taking matters into your own hands by creating custom, reusable design templates from scratch. While this takes longer than using off-the-shelf design templates, it’s certainly worth it if you want to go that extra mile.
If so, you can use designers’ help to create custom, made-to-fit graphic designing templates specifically for your brand. And if you’re a designer who wants to take over template design but doesn’t know where to start, check out our bite-size how-to below.
How to create a custom design template in 6 steps
- Clarify your design template’s users and audience: Get a better initial understanding of who’ll be using the template and who the final audience is to create a suitable design template.
- Choose a fitting template design tool: The right design tool allows you to customize your design template for its purpose while adjusting user permissions in line with the capabilities and design experience of those using it.
- Pull up your brand guidelines: Keep your brand guidelines close, using these as a reference guide when considering the creative direction of your design template.
- Choose the size of your template: Consider the channel for which you’re creating the design template and pick the appropriate size, saving you the hassle of resizing and reformatting designs later on.
- Perfect your template’s creative layout: Put your creative hat on to craft a design that conveys your message, tells the audience who your brand is, and is pleasing to the eye.
- Save and share your template: Once you’re done, save the designed template in a place where it can easily be found, then share it with those who’ll use it so they can start editing it right away.
Additional reading: 5 Must-Have Template Design Tools for Different Use Cases
Get started with design templates
Using design templates can save you the hassle of creating individual designs. Not only that, but it can also cut down the amount of time and money you spend to get your designs up and running. So whether you’re happy using pre-set design templates or want to go above and beyond by creating your own custom, branded ones, design templates are a surefire way to blend creativity and efficiency in your creative workflow.
If you want to get started immediately, pick one of Creatopy’s templates and start customizing it right away.