The Ultimate Guide to Design Templates

 If someone asked you to create an infographic, where would you start?


Surely not with a blank Google Doc or sheet of paper. No, you’d likely search for an infographic design template to use as a starting point — or at least draw ideas from.


Design templates are incredibly helpful tools for today’s marketers. They provide guidance and inspiration for almost all types of content and save precious time and energy.


We created this guide to help you make the most of design templates for your business. Keep reading to get started or use the chapter links below to jump ahead.


Access 195+ Marketing Design Templates

What's a Design Template?

Benefits of Design Templates

How to Use Design Templates

What is a design template?

Design templates are pre-made designs and documents that can be customized. Templates are often designed to meet specific standards or specs so they’re consistent between users and mediums. You can use pre-designed templates from template libraries and websites or create custom templates for future use.


Benefits of Design Templates

Good design is valuable, but not everyone can afford to hire a freelance designer or in-house design team.


Design templates remove any complicated design steps and equip even the most novice graphic designer to create gorgeous visuals.


Here are some other reasons to use design templates.


Design templates are convenient and fast.

Design templates save marketers (or business owners or even designers) the energy it takes to recreate the same design time and time again. They provide a shortcut so you only have to spend time filling in the critical details.


Design templates also save you time. Facing a deadline for print ads or postcards? Preparing for a restaurant launch and need a new menu? Grab a design template, fill in the necessary text, and send it on its way.


Design templates are systematized.

Design templates, when downloaded from reputable sites, are created to meet whatever specs and specifications are required for their intended purposes.


If you’re downloading a design template for your Etsy shop cover photo, it’s likely already set to the proper width and length as designated by the site. The same goes for other social media and print design templates like postcards, business cards, email headers, and Facebook ads.


Design templates also help to preserve brand guidelines and consistency. When a company defines a brand, creating design templates for all major visual, written, and print components can help maintain consistency across the organization, regardless of who’s creating the ad or marketing asset.


Design templates are optimized.

Bad design hurts SEO. When people visit your site and can’t easily navigate a content offer or web page, they’re likely to leave … or “bounce” out of your site to find another. This tells search engines that your website isn’t a good answer to search queries.

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