Templates That Hold
Robust when text runs long or an image is the wrong shape.
Marketing Collateral Design
Marketing Collateral Design Including the Templates People Actually Use
A beautifully designed brochure is used a few times a year. A proposal template is used weekly by people with no design training and a deadline. Marketing collateral design should cover both — and the second usually matters more, because it is where the brand actually meets customers.
We Design for the Non-Designer
A template that requires design skill will be broken by the second person who uses it.
Editable in Real Tools
The software your team actually has.
Everyday Materials Included
Proposals, quotes, presentations, one-pagers.
Print Specs Correct
Files a printer can use without querying them.
Documented Simply
How to use it, in the file itself.
Collateral, Explained
What Does Collateral Include?
Four categories, and the everyday one is the most used.
Discuss Your Materials →- 1
Sales Materials
Proposals, one-pagers, case studies.
- 2
Everyday Templates
Presentations, quotes, documents. The highest-volume items.
- 3
Print Materials
Brochures, leaflets, exhibition graphics.
- 4
Digital Documents
PDFs designed to be read on screen rather than printed.
What Collateral Work Covers
Designed materials and templates the team can use unaided.
Governance across a larger organisation is covered by corporate branding.
How We Approach Collateral
Find out what the team actually makes, then make that easy.
Review What Is Produced
Including the documents nobody designed.
Prioritise by Volume
The weekly items before the annual ones.
Design Robust Templates
That hold when text runs long.
Test With the Team
Watch someone use it without help.
Distribute
Somewhere the current version is obvious.
Templates
Why Templates Break
They are designed with ideal content and used with real content.
What breaks them?
Text longer than the placeholder, an image with different proportions, a section that needs to be duplicated, a heading that wraps onto a third line.
A template designed with tidy content has no defined behaviour for any of that, so the user improvises — reduces the font size, crops the image badly, deletes a margin.
Designing with deliberately awkward content, and building in what happens when things overflow, is what separates a template that survives from one that produces four inconsistent variants within a month.
Why does the file format matter?
Because a template in software the team does not have is a template that gets recreated badly in software they do.
The temptation is to build in professional design tools, which produce better results and are unavailable to the salesperson writing a proposal on a Friday afternoon.
Building in the tools people actually have constrains the design and is the only version that gets used, which makes it the better outcome.
Questions,answered.
Marketing collateral design produces sales and marketing materials plus the everyday templates — proposals, presentations, quotes — that non-designers use most often.
Because they were designed with tidy content and are used with real content. Long text, differently shaped images and extra sections have no defined behaviour, so users improvise.
The software your team actually has. A template in professional design tools produces better results and gets recreated badly by whoever cannot open it.
Usually the presentation and proposal templates, because they are used weekly and reach customers directly — considerably more often than a brochure does.
We produce correct print-ready files to the printer's specification. Print buying and production management can be arranged separately.
Still deciding if marketing collateral design is right for you?
Talk to UsThe Salesperson Made It on a Friday Afternoon
A proposal template is designed carefully, with balanced text blocks, well-proportioned images and generous margins. It is approved and distributed, and it looks excellent.
It is then used by a salesperson with a deadline, whose client name runs to three lines, whose case study is twice the length of the placeholder, and whose product photograph is the wrong shape entirely.
They reduce the font size, crop the image badly, and delete a margin to make it fit. It goes to the client that afternoon, and the version they saved becomes the template everyone in the team uses next.
Free Review
Find Out What Your Team Is Producing
Send us a few recent proposals and presentations. We will tell you where the templates are failing and what to fix first.
Claim Your Free Marketing Audit
Enhance Your Brand Potential At No Cost!
- Expect a response within 24 hours
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