I believe that good design can make the difference between your message being understood and getting completely lost.
It seems like many organisations are also seeing the value of investing in professional design.
Even if you have a dedicated designer with plenty of capacity, there will be times when other members of your team must produce documents themselves. There will also be times where you need simple documents and budgets and timscales are tight. In these cases it makes more sense to use an internal resource than a professional designer. This need not be at the expense of good design though. Starting off with a custom template can make it a lot easier to get good results.
You don't need to invest heavily in professional design software and training for your team. In many workplaces Microsoft Office is ubiquitous. With custom templates for the MS Office programmes, your team can create nice looking documents with the tools they already use every day.
It's important to pick the right tool for the job. As you'd guess from its name, Word is best for text-heavy documents. For documents where you need a bit more control over the layout, like a simple flyer or a newsletter, Publisher is best. Whilst a host of other presentation tools have emerged in recent years, a professional Powerpoint template with good attention to detail can still deliver slick, impressive results. You can even set custom styles for Excel files if you're working with lots of data.
Key candidates for Office templates are regularly updated items. Things like newsletters, internal communications posters or events listings. Once you’ve had the template produced, the teams responsible can quickly and easily update them as and when required. As well as potential long-term cost savings, you can also save a significant amount of time and become much more responsive. What’s more, the end results will look great alongside your professionally-designed collateral.
Recently I produced some document templates for the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. Among these were Microsoft Publisher templates for their ward information leaflets. There is certain important information about each ward at the hospital which new staff members need to know. Using Publisher templates, the wards can keep that information up to date themselves. I also created templates for posters used to promote their series of monthly events.
Making your content easily understood should be an essential part of any organisation's communications strategy. There will always be some instances where you'll need a designer's eye to make the most of your content. By investing in some custom Microsoft Office templates you can also make sure that the day to day documents produced in your organisation can sit comfortably beside the professionally designed ones and represent your work in the best possible way.
Get in touch to discuss what kind of templates would help your team.