Build Templates You Can Reuse

Most of what you publish falls into a few repeating types. A template for each one means you never begin with an empty canvas, and the result is consistent even on a bad day.

Photo: “Office Work” by energepic.com, CC0.

The three that cover almost everything

1. The announcement. Release out now, new video, show date. Photo or artwork in the background, three levels of text as in step 20, your wordmark in a fixed corner.

2. The date list. Tour dates or a month of shows. Mostly type on a palette color. Rows with date, city and venue, aligned in columns.

3. The quote or text card. A lyric, a line from a review, a thank you. A few words in your title face with plenty of empty space.

Make each one in the shapes you use most. For most artists that is portrait for the feed and vertical for stories, as in step 18.

Build each one properly, once

A template is more than a nice post saved for later. Set it up so that reuse is quick and safe:

• Text boxes with your typefaces, sizes and colors already applied
• Margins and guides in place
• A clearly marked spot where the photo is swapped
• The wordmark locked in position
• Your texture or frame from step 10 as a top layer

Free and paid design apps all support this. Use whichever you already know.

Protect the template

Keep an untouched original and always work on a copy. Otherwise each small improvised change becomes the new starting point, and in three months the template has drifted into something else.

Name them plainly: TEMPLATE_announcement_4x5, TEMPLATE_dates_9x16.

A good template makes the right result the easiest one to produce.

Leave room for variation

Templates should make posts look related while leaving each one its own. Build two or three variants of the announcement, with text at the top, text at the bottom and one on a solid color, and rotate them. Combined with different photos, that is enough variety for a year.

What templates are not for

Use them for information. Use photos and video for presence. A profile made only of templated graphics looks like a noticeboard, which is the imbalance step 22 warned about.

Hand them over

If someone helps with your content, give them the templates and the style guide from step 26. With both, they need very little supervision.

Do this now

Build the announcement template in one shape. Use it for your next real announcement and note what was awkward, then fix the template itself.

We build the templates together with the identity, so the artist can keep producing on their own. See how.