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.
How marketing collateral is assessed
Collateral is judged on whether it gets used. A beautifully produced sales deck that representatives quietly replace with their own version has failed, and the failure is usually in usability rather than in design. These checks look at both.
EditabilityWhether the people who need to update it can, in software they already have
Template integrityWhether editing one item breaks the layout of everything below it
Content fitThat real content fits the space, not the placeholder length it was designed around
Print specificationBleed, trim, resolution and colour space correct for the intended output
Screen and print parityThat the same item works as a PDF on screen and as a printed sheet
Accessible PDF structureReading order, tagging and contrast for documents sent digitally
Version controlWhere the master lives and how an outdated copy is identified
Claim accuracyThat every figure and statement is current and supportable
Brand complianceCorrect marks, palette, type and clear space against the guidelines
AdoptionWhether the team uses it, or has reverted to a personal version
File sizesThat a sales PDF can actually be emailed without being rejected
Localisation roomWhether layouts survive translation into longer languages
Adoption is the only row that measures outcome rather than construction, and it is the one worth checking three months after delivery. Collateral nobody uses is a cost with no return, and the reason is almost always that the correct version was harder to produce than an improvised one.
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. Governance across a larger organisation is corporate branding; the rules these templates implement are brand guidelines. Governance across a larger organisation is corporate branding; the rules these templates implement are brand guidelines.
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.
What determines how much collateral is worth producing
The right volume of collateral is set by how many distinct sales situations exist and how often each recurs. Producing an item for a situation that arises twice a year is rarely worth it; producing one for the conversation that happens weekly almost always is.
Field and outbound sales teams
Where the same conversation happens repeatedly and every representative currently solves it themselves. Standardising the recurring pieces raises the floor across the team, and the floor is what determines average performance rather than the ceiling.
Businesses that exhibit or attend events
A concentrated set of needs with a hard deadline: stand graphics, leave-behinds, follow-up material. The constraint is lead time on physical production, which is longer than most teams plan for and unforgiving of late content changes.
Professional services firms
Where proposals and credentials documents are the primary sales asset and are usually rebuilt from scratch each time. A well-structured template here saves more hours than any other single piece of collateral, because the document is produced constantly and always under time pressure.
Companies with distributed or franchised marketing
Local teams need material they can adapt without breaking the brand. That means templates with defined editable regions rather than locked artwork, and a clear statement of what may be changed — which is a governance decision as much as a design one.
Businesses whose collateral contradicts their website
A common and quietly damaging state, where printed material still carries positioning the site has moved past. Aligning them is usually a content problem rather than a design one, and it points back at brand messaging rather than at the collateral itself.
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.
The reason sales teams build their own slides
Almost every organisation with a sales team has an official deck that some proportion of the team does not use. The instinct is to treat this as a discipline problem and reissue the deck with instructions. That almost never works, because the behaviour is a rational response to a real gap.
Representatives build their own material for three reasons. The official version is too long for the conversation they actually have. It is not editable, so the one slide they need to change forces them to rebuild the file. Or it answers questions their prospects do not ask while omitting the objection that comes up every time.
All three are fixable, and none is fixed by better design. A modular deck — a short core with optional sections that can be added for specific situations — addresses the length problem. Editable, structured templates address the second. Building the material from the objections sales actually hears addresses the third, which requires asking them rather than asking marketing.
Print and digital are not the same document
A single file used both as a printed leaflet and an emailed PDF is compromised in both directions. Print needs bleed, trim marks, CMYK values and resolution that make the file large. Screen needs a smaller file, RGB colour, hyperlinks that work, and a reading order that assistive technology can follow.
The common failure is producing the print version and exporting it for screen. The result is a large file with untagged structure, dead links and colours that were chosen for ink. Recipients receive a document that is slow to open, impossible to navigate by keyboard, and visually flat.
The better arrangement is one design system with two outputs, prepared deliberately. Most of the layout is shared; the differences are handled at export. This costs slightly more at production and removes an entire category of embarrassment, particularly for material sent to organisations with procurement rules about document accessibility.
Collateral ages faster than any other brand asset
Printed material fixes claims, figures, personnel and contact details at the moment of production. Websites are corrected continuously; collateral is corrected when somebody notices, which can be years. This makes what goes into it a decision about durability rather than only about persuasion.
The practical response is to separate the stable from the volatile. Positioning, capability descriptions and the reasons to choose the business change slowly and belong in printed material. Specific figures, named staff, current pricing and anything with a date attached change quickly and are better placed in a digital layer that the printed piece points to.
This also affects quantity. Ordering a large print run to reduce unit cost is a false economy when the content has a twelve-month life, because the saving is smaller than the value of the stock that gets discarded. Matching the run to the content’s actual shelf life is usually cheaper than optimising the unit price.
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.
Fewer pieces than most programmes produce. The reliable test is whether a specific sales situation recurs often enough to justify a dedicated asset. A capabilities overview, a proposal template and one or two pieces addressing the most common objection cover most needs for most businesses. Producing an item for every conceivable scenario creates a library nobody can navigate, which is why representatives end up building their own anyway.
That should be a requirement rather than a hope, and it should be specified before the work begins because it constrains the format. Templates delivered in software the team already has, with defined editable regions and a locked structure, get used and stay on-brand. Templates delivered as flat artwork get recreated approximately by whoever needs a change, which is how variants proliferate.
It should follow the same identity and make the same claims, and it should not attempt to replicate the layout. The formats are different — a printed page cannot scroll and a website has no fixed dimensions — so identical layouts serve neither well. What must match is the substance: the same positioning, the same hierarchy of claims, and the same terminology for the same things.
A single named location for the current master, a version marker on the document itself, and a person responsible for replacing it. The version marker is the part usually skipped and the part that does most of the work, because it lets anyone holding a file tell whether it is current without having to ask. Digital distribution through a link rather than an attachment removes the problem entirely where it is practical.
In some contexts clearly yes — events, in-person meetings, and categories where a physical leave-behind carries weight the same content does not carry as a file. In others it is produced out of habit and discarded unread. The question worth asking is whether a specific piece will be handed to someone in person; if the honest answer is that it will mostly be emailed, it should be designed as a digital document from the start.
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.
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Send us a few recent proposals and presentations. We will tell you where the templates are failing and what to fix first.
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