A inquiry has landed in my inbox seeking help with setting up Indesign templates and style sheets. I thought others might find it helpful to read these basic steps toward effective templating of a new design (most of which which probably would apply to Quark as well):

1) In my view, you need to try for as few templates as possible. When I worked on the revamp of Advertising Age, they had at least 87 templates – in my view, far too many to manage effectively over time. One for a left hand page with 3 stories and 2 briefs. One for the right. Another for a left-hand page with 2 stories and 4 briefs. Another for the right. And so on. We simplified this dramatically. The ideal is to create a basic, blank template, on a grid, and give your staff the tools – via training, style guide, and clear mockup pages – to execute the pages daily. I know some editors will disagree with that – and say they cannot trust the layouters or subs to execute the design properly, that the staff doesn’t have time, so every possible permutation of page must be templated. However, this does create a big chore of maintaining style sheets over time, and ensuring that people are working off the same page, so to speak. If you have a small stable of workhorse templates, you can go in and adjust the style sheets easily over time. This is not just style sheets but document preferences as well – grid lines, gutter widths, defaults on the tools palette, print preferences, etc.

2) Naming protocol is critical, both for the templates, and for style sheets. For templates, I like to include the name of the page and the date it was last modified, so everyone is sure they are working from the most recently version. i.e., something like : “NameOfPaperEditPage080908″ where you have month, day, year in the file name. For style sheets, you want a menu that is logical and easy to navigate through – thus, all the headline styles begin with HED or HEAD, then some kind of logical descriptive: HEAD-NEWS-BLACK. (Your tech services team may require a specific protocol as well, for copy flow purposes, so always involve them early when redesigning.) Some variations include tacking on the point size if that is pertinent, or sans vs. serif, and so on … but as with templates, you want as few as possible. I don’t like having a huge style sheet menu to wade through, so I don’t care for having every point size variation of the lead news headline style as its own entry, for example. Trust the staff enough to change the point size and position it properly. (Some editors don’t have that trust, alas, and they end up with 200 items in the style sheet menus – very hard to wade through).

One point about the naming protocol for templates, and using a date: this is important especially in the first few weeks of your relaunch, as you almost certainly will have to go in and make tweaks over the first week or two. Thus, you may change the styles (and date) on one template but not another, at least not right away, but say on Oct. 1, you want to make sure they are all refreshed, so you go in and update them. File management has to be someone’s job along the way. Be mindful of that.

3) Color palette should have a logical naming structure as well. I always suggest a very limited palette, to minimize fun and games.

4) One big challenge will be to balance what goes in the style sheet menus with what goes into the Indesign Library, or on a template. I typically don’t like syle sheets for things like front page promos – why bother when they typically will be used only once? Keep those on the template for the front page, or if you must, put them into a library. (You may have 4-8 variations of styles for promos, in which case, I’d put them in a library, versus creating 8 variations of the page one template which creates clutter – this is just my preference, I know others would disagree). Keep in mind that anything you put in a library is harder to change – if you make an adjustment to the leading or tracking of an item, it needs to be dragged out, reimported, and the original killed from the library – a hassle. Typically, libraries are best for things that are really set in stone, like columnist logos, that don’t have a lot of text. That said, you’ll have to decide with things like at-a-glance boxes: do you wish for them to be built from scratch, reside on a template, or reside in the library. There’s no firm answer, my preference is to put it in a library, but then you have to teach people the proper way to import text to override the dummy text after you drag and copy the library item.

5) As far as the management of all this, I would advise writing up a policy, and putting it in your stylebook, in memo form, in emails to the staff, training sessions, etc. Be very clear on :

• naming protocol for templates, library items and style sheets
• where templates and libraries will reside (server versus hard drive – i almost never like for these things to be stashed on an individual’s hard drive)
• where live pages should be kept while in production, how they should be renamed (i.e., with the date or day of week)
• where pages will be archived when finished, in what form – Indesign and/or PDF
• who has the right or duty to change a library item or template, and when – i.e., will it be allowed for someone to improvise a style sheet if they just don’t find what they need for a particular page. (The papers with the most DESIGN INTEGRITY say NO to this kind of nonsense – yours should aim to do the same.)

This information is © Ron Reason. Feel free to pass along but only with attribution.