InDesign templates on Adobe Stock need refining

[Mike Witherell]

Hey Adobe Stock,

I so love the idea of browsing Adobe Stock for InDesign templates.

Many of the templates are just beautiful.

I imagine the great time savings I am about to enjoy.

But then I begin to deal with paragraph and character styles in a state of confused overrides.

Individual styles are defined in ways that they shouldn't.

Layers are not employed in a consistent, usable way.

Color-block frames are rotated 90 degrees for no reason.

Parent pages disagree with document setups.

Grid and guides need consistency. Frames don't cooperate with grids.

A well-made template might also have notes that warn about the language the template was built in, the color model, the document preference settings, among other things.

Two things are equally important in a template:

The beautiful artistry of the layout and also the efficiency of the fundamental building blocks of long-document needs.

Otherwise, it can lead a user to take longer to produce a finished piece.

And that tends to nullify a principal reason to acquire a template from Adobe Stock in the first place, no?

[Gord@APL]

...To be fair, that sounds much like the state of templates created by professional Designers I've worked with in the past... and that's on the rare occasions I've worked with Designers who bothered making templates in the first place. There's a huge disconnect between what one finds useable for oneself, and what is useable to everyone else.

Not to say I am entirely without guilt, but I do try to build templates with clarity and consistency in mind.

[Peter Spier]

In line with what Gord@APL has said, I wonder how many of those templates were created as templates to begin with, and how many are document projects someone converted and posted.