Brand Templates best practices guide

Templates work best when they’re easy to edit, predictable, and tailored to your team’s real needs.

By planning ahead and setting up your elements intentionally, you can create templates that anyone can update without breaking layouts or affecting brand style.

This guide shows the essential steps designers use to create templates that work across your organization.

A strong template begins with the right building blocks. Choose elements and structure that make updates simple for anyone who uses the template.

Select elements that teammates can recolor or replace without altering your layout.

Use SVGs for icons and illustrations. They scale cleanly and can be recolored using Brand Kit colors.

Upload SVGs

1. Go to Uploads, then select Upload files.
2. Choose an SVG file for best quality.

Frames keep images sized and positioned correctly. This lets teammates replace an image without adjusting the crop or dimensions.

Use Frames when one image needs to fill a fixed space.

Brand Kit colours keep templates consistent and reduce the need for manual updates later.

This keeps your template aligned with your brand across every update.

Your template should hold up when someone adds longer text, shorter labels, or new content. Structuring your text correctly keeps spacing stable and prevents layouts from shifting.

Reflow controls how text moves when lines are added or removed. A good setup prevents text from overlapping other elements.

• Keep text boxes wide enough for longer lines.
• Leave space between text boxes so they can expand as needed.
• Match text box widths using Cmd or Ctrl + Shift + J before grouping.

Grouping ensures related elements behave as a single unit during layout changes.

Group items like:

• Headlines and subheadings
• Icons and their text labels
• Decorative elements that form a single block

Avoid grouping:

• Elements that need to move on their own
• Unrelated sections of your layout

Anchoring controls where text expands from when someone edits it. Matching anchors across grouped text keeps layouts consistent.

What good anchoring looks like:

• Headlines expand downward
• Centered titles stay centered
• Body text grows in one direction

Once your layout is structured, lock the elements that define your template’s visual identity.

Lock items that should stay exactly where you placed them:

• Logos
• Background shapes or images
• Decorative lines or icons
• Layout blocks that define spacing or structure

Positional locking keeps elements editable but prevents them from being moved accidentally. This is useful for:

• Image frames
• Buttons
• Reusable content blocks like bios or stats

Locking ensures your template stays intact, even when multiple teammates use it.

Effects like overlays and transparency can enhance your design, but overly complex effects can make image replacement harder.

If you are using overlays or textures:

• Apply transparency to the overlay, not the image
• Keep the image above the overlay so it stays easy to replace
• Avoid blends that require manual repositioning

Simple effects keep your template flexible and easy to maintain.

• Ensure there’s space between text boxes
• Leave space around text inside shapes
• Confirm all grouped text uses the same anchor setting

• Layer the image above the translucent shape
• Apply transparency to the image instead of the shape

This keeps replacements easy with drag and drop.