February 24, 2008

Print Publishing Templates: Building A Solid Foundation

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Everyone knows that you can't build a house without a solid foundation. If you were to live in such a house, you might not have to worry about the extreme case of the whole thing falling down, but you would constantly be fixing things like cracking walls and drooping ceilings.

Templates for a print publication can be thought of in a similar way: They are the foundation for all pages that will be created in a given publication. In many cases, bad foundations lead to a lot of "band-aid" solutions. Just like the rooms of the house being affected, if a publication's templates are not constructed soundly, the pages will not be either and will require extra work. 

Just as each house is built with a different floor-plan, templates from one publication to the next invariably will be very different. In the same way construction workers carefully build a mold and pour concrete for the walls that will go above, consideration needs to be made for how each element of the template will be used down the road. For example, how graphic designers use an element of the template can determine how that element will be implemented.

Taking care to create effective, usable templates can alleviate headaches later in the production process. Rather than having to constantly patch and repair files, a designer can use the new-found time to focus on creating great pages. For this reason, whoever will be using these templates should be involved heavily in their creation. It gives the user an intimacy with the templates that allows him or her to work most effectively once the templates are in production mode. Just as architects have very personal knowledge of the buildings they have worked on, designers will know these files inside and out.

There is, however, always need for maintenance. Keeping a house in tip-top condition takes a little bit of work here and there to prevent a lot of work in the future. Once a template is put into service, the need may arise for revisions. A user can't think of everything while producing templates, and sometimes elements that are necessary or unnecessary aren't apparent until the templates are used in production. Rolling the necessary changes back into the template will keep the designer from having to make constant repairs.

Posted at 07:17 pm by Robert Underwood

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