By Kelly Kordes Anton

Whether you are an experienced graphic designer or a novice needing a helping hand, using design templates, you can gain artistic guidance and enhance client communication while streamlining tedious production tasks. Call it design inspiration, if you will.

Even the most revolutionary artists of an era are inspired by the past and by the world around them. Right now, a traveling art exhibit titled Inspiring Impressionism showcases the influence of the old masters of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic art movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries on the impressionists. Side-by-side comparisons and analysis of 100 or so paintings and drawings prove the point at this exhibit shown in Atlanta, Denver, and Seattle. At the time, the Impressionists were considered "daring, provocative, and revolutionary," but they may have simply reinvented the past to fit their present.

As the lasting popularity of the impressionists shows, artistic inspiration is a good thing. As a graphic designer, you are no doubt similarly inspired by the past and present in order to speak directly to the readers and viewers of today, but how much of your creative quest is spent coaxing information out of clients to uncover their preferences? Setting up documents of just the right dimensions? Digging through photo CDs in search of just the right image? If the answer is "a lot," StockLayouts may be the perfect source of inspiration for you.

A design resource

StockLayouts, an Oregon based company founded in 2001, offers creative inspiration in two ways — through hundreds of expertly designed templates and through its design boxes of samples to show clients. Both methods work to get the creative juices flowing while streamlining production and enhancing client communications. The company's reasonable prices more than compensate for the time a designer might spend on producing documents and creating rejected concepts. Take a look.

Not just your run-of-the-mill templates

StockLayouts provides high-quality, royalty-free templates — that include stock photos licensed from Getty Images along with original illustrations — for typical publications suited to many business types. On StockLayouts' web site you'll find professional-quality templates for brochures, newsletters, business cards, letterheads, postcards, ads, and fliers. You'll also find logo designs, posters, menus, invitations, greeting cards, and more. Plus, the templates are specifically designed to target a multitude of industries, including travel and tourism, sports and fitness, food and beverage, education and training, retail, finance, high tech, medicine, religious institutions, and real estate. Figure A shows the interior pages of a brochure template for a marketing consulting company.

Figure 1 StockLayouts' templates include all the necessary vector graphics, stock photography, and color definitions to create the entire projects such as the design shown here. You can easily personalize every aspect of the design — replace the images, change the colors, or simply use the structure as a starting place.

"These are really design resources," says StockLayouts' founder and president Tami Cooper. "They bring together five facets of design — layout, color, imagery, copy, and type." Designers might be inspired by one — or all five — facets of a template. "These are not necessarily just plug-and-play templates," says Cooper. "You might select a layout for one facet of the design; for example, designers typically select a layout that is structurally what they need."

In other words, designers can take or leave the overall look, using it as inspiration or simply as the shell of a new design. "We've brought it all together in one piece, but nothing is locked down. You can tear the template apart, separate it out, and mix and match." The high-quality layouts tailored to various industries lend themselves to design emergencies as well. "There's so much content to build on that when you're really in a time crunch, you can just use the template," adds Cooper.

Mike, a graphic designer in Schaumburg, Illinois, describes just this design-emergency scenario: "It was every designer's nightmare. The call came in from the client late afternoon and they needed a rush brochure layout by the next day to show a prospective new advertiser. To make matters worse, they had no photos, no logo, no content. Just the product, and, of course, they expected a finished brochure design by 2 p.m. the next day.

"I had just purchased the compilation CD of StockLayouts templates and was curious to see if there was something in there that would help jump start this design. Much to my relief, I found the perfect layout — all fitted up and ready to go. We shot product shots of the client's materials and dropped the digital photos into place. We then generated the copy, fine-tuned a logo, and sent out a proof to the agency. StockLayouts helped us generate a successful promo brochure and made us look like superheroes."

Figure 2 shows a highly adaptable template for a realtor newsletter. You can do everything from simply swapping out the logo and creating a seasonal color scheme to deconstructing the page entirely. Either way, you save the set-up time involved in creating a new document of just the right dimensions, setting up columns and guides, creating boxes, and more. This sample is QuarkXPress®, but don't feel limited, StockLayouts also produces quick-start, complete projects for InDesign®, Illustrator®, PageMaker®, CorelDRAW®, Publisher®, and Word.

Figure 2 A template for a realtor newsletter from StockLayouts might work for a variety of industries.

Other designers rely on StockLayouts for inspiration, as Howard, a graphic artist in Wellington, Florida, attests. "Sometimes, as a graphic artist, you hit a design roadblock that you just can't seem to find the enthusiasm to break through. Then, I skim through the StockLayouts' design collection and find something that gets my juices burning again. This has happened countless times and has saved me many hours of wasted time and frustration. In fact, in my daily morning routine of checking my online design resources for new ideas, your site is one that I look forward to checking to see if there are any new and exciting designs that I can use."

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