Do you know of any good templates ?

Looking back I have always loved to draw. As a kid I remember taking a large color crayon awkwardly in my fist and feverishly waving my hand back and forth sometimes making it on the paper. Eventually, I worked my way up to coloring books and took extra care to stay in the lines. This idea of staying in the lines was also learned with practice, when using stencils. Over time I learned how to hold a writing implement properly and make deliberate mark on a black sheet of paper. I wouldn’t say that I am good at drawing, but I do know how to get my point across.

As designers we use stencils and templates all the time, but do we ever stop to think about what we are doing?

When I use a template I find making less decisions and forming to the template. The structure of the template starts to tell me what decisions to make and where to place them. I start thinking less about what is appropriate for the design and blindly fill in the boxes provided. The template becomes what I am designing for and not the original reason I needed to use the template in the first place. The template also fools me to believe that my designs are complete. I think the convenience of templates are great, but I think we start to loose control of what we are designing. For practical reasons templates make a lot of sense, but we need to be aware of what we are doing when using one. Is the template being used as tool to help us meet our goals or is the template using us a tool to meet it’s goals. I think when we make the template ourselves we become more deliberate about the choices we make and are forced to think of whats important. It should be noted that some had to design the template we find ourselves using.