Chief
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Pro
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Your templates only work for your own personal mental model. Everyone is different. Especially artists and creative types. As annoying as it is, I am not surprised when an artist has messy files. I allow for some cleanup in the scheduling.
Back in the day we used to hire separate production artists (mechanical artists) from the designers, and separate designers from the art directors.
The art director would think of ideas with the copywriter. Creative concepting.
The designer made everything look good and did the layouts. This person has aesthetic talent.
The production artist would tweak the designs to fit exacting specs. This person is OCD about templates and file handling.
In my experience, the exceptions aren’t rare. They’re extremely common. And if they come up with any regularity at all, then your template is USELESS.
Sit down with a copywriter when they’re trying to write a script and watch how your template makes it take twice as long. If your template wastes my time, then your template is useless.
You’re also demonstrating exactly why no one uses it: we are telling you what the problem is, and you’re still just going, “I don’t get it! What’s the problem?”
Templates are hypothetical and a “one size fits all” approach doesn’t apply to creative decks. I’m not going to make my life more difficult or sacrifice how to effectively sell work just to adhere to these pre-designed templates.
Do I appreciate them? Absolutely, but they rarely ever work in their OG form all the way from Slide 1 though 35 (or 105 🥲). I wish they did!
Ideas need to be expressed in a way that allow them to be clear and understandable and that sometimes does not adhere to a preconceived idea of how to present them
Chief
Hahahaha too real
If a script has a title that’s longer than about 15 characters, your template breaks. Right there, that’s a reason not to ever use your badly designed template again, but I’ll keep going.
If a character name in a script is too long to fit in the space you’ve allotted for it, your template breaks.
If I try to move all the dialogue over to fit the long character name, your template breaks.
If I want to put stage directions on the line directly below the dialogue, your template breaks.
If I want to change a font color or size, your template breaks.
You designed your template without thinking at all about how it would actually be used.
Chief
You are jumping to conclusions here. We have multiple slides thinking of multiple text sizes, image sizes. We have multiple options for every scenario. I guarantee it doesn’t break if you just follow the guidelines.
Now you just gave a glimpse of why it fucks up. Why do you need to change the font color and size if the template was very thoroughly designed to need all sorts of scenarios
If your text doesn’t fit on this slide, you picked the wrong one. Choose the other one that is designed for longer copy. If you need a different color, we usually make a few combinations of color too. Just go pick a different one.
If there’s something you need that is not on template, ask us, we can do it faster than you and then we don’t need to come back fixing your mess in a rush because you did a sloppy job.
Pro
Because templates suck.
Usually, they’re designed with some aesthetic that instantly ages, with logic that makes sense to designers (“we’re using elements from the logo”) but looks horrific to creative eyes, or are so one-size-fits all that you feel it.
When I present work, I either want the deck to look like it’s built for that presentation, or I want it to look simple and sexy. Full bleed images, text over it, not a million headlines and subheadlines and boxes in the brand color palette so that the work looks like it was put together in Google Slides.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Chief
If you found a better system by no means use it. But that’s not the reality I face. What happens, and I specifically called that out in the post, is that we do have to go on the deck to put it back into template on a rush 30 min before the presentation because the whole thing is a mess.
The problem is not the template not working. We know it works because we redo the work later anyways.
If you found a better system than it should work without us fixing it. Wanna do it your way, own it.
My experience is that “beautiful templates” are developed by those who rarely if ever use them, ending up with slide masters that have 90+ variations and useless animations. The template ends up being so big it takes forever to open/edit/save. And file transfers or online collaboration? Forget about it. I usually end up taking the basic design elements (fonts, colours, images) and streamline into a template that’s more useable, without all the junk.
you’ve answered your own question
I have to design my own slides because yours only work if the content is the the exact length and structure of the lorem ipsum you built the template around
Chief
WT that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Pretty much everyone here were very dismissive and put the blame on everything but themselves.
If the template doesn’t work it’s one thing. I’m talking when it actually works but people just ignore, like you said. Apparently people ignored what I wrote in full and just catapulted into conclusions.
In response to those here who (completely validly imo) say that the templates they're supposed to use are inadequate.
Why not just brief in new slide masters that fit your requirements? Obviously it'll take time to get them designed, but having fit for purpose slide templates would surely be more efficient in the long run?
Chief
We definitely do that C 1.
I used to work at WK, not as a designer. As a creative. It is my opinion they had the best decks. And I have saved a few of them that I used as base.
I also have an are.na board called unsolicited deck pics with a lot of presentation inspo.
We usually get clients kudos for how tight our deck looks. I just wished that people just took a bit of their time to stick to it instead of calling us after pencils down to do a “touch up” that looks more like a completely redo because it’s a hot podge of slides copied from another deck, and people just doing things their way.
And again if people want to do something different it’s fine. But 10 people doing their way doesn’t work. In the end something gotta give and we are trained to make shit looks nice. So a little trust on us would be nice.
Chief
The problem is when creative, account, media and strategy are all dumping their disparate slides into one RFP or pitch deck. One-off decks are fine.
Part of the issue might not even be your template though, I find that most people are crap at using Google slides. The shit UX doesn’t help.
It’s inane to see people who work in marketing, an industry that relies more than anything in image selling and communication, have zero interest in learning the tool they use to sell the work to clients. It really isn’t that difficult.
But ultimately I’d say if people are bypassing the product you designed, the design is poor. Either the UX of G slides is too much of a learning curve for people or your slides are not fitting the need of people’s presentation.
I suspect the former because if someone knows how to use templates and the software your team wouldn’t have to keep going in to reformat everything.
Tell me about it 😩
Sometimes our clients ask to see something in a format that doesn't really match the template so we try to use the template as a jump off and make a few small tweaks...and then it's all downhill from there. Sorry :(