One design style is needed on every medium a customer sees: decks, proposals, business cards, contracts, email signatures and social media. Start with the ones that take part in sales, and build master templates that managers rather than designers can use.
Key takeaways
Corporate materials are every medium on which a company speaks in its own name, from a deck shown at a meeting to an invoice sent by email. Day to day they are made by a manager, an accountant and a content editor rather than a designer, which is why they drift out of style first.
Materials do not create a style, they apply it. The system of decisions itself — mark, palette, typefaces, graphics — is covered in our piece on brand identity, and the document that keeps it alive is covered in the piece on brand books and design systems. This article is about something else: getting those rules to the people who lay out documents between calls.
Start with the ones that take part in sales and reach the customer most often: the payoff is immediate, and you avoid redoing everything at once.
| Medium | Who sees it | When | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deck and proposal | The decision maker and whoever the file is forwarded to | While a supplier is being chosen | 1 |
| Email signature | Everyone you correspond with | Every working day | 1 |
| Contract, invoice, certificate | The client's finance team and manager | At the deal and payment stage | 2 |
| Business card, paper and digital | The person across the table or at an event | Once, but it stays around | 2 |
| Social media | An audience that has not become a customer yet | Constantly, at high frequency | 2 |
| Packaging, merchandise, uniform, vehicles | The customer offline and passers-by | On delivery and at the pick-up point | 3 |
Priority follows the number of contacts rather than the budget: an email signature goes out more often than any advertising and costs one edit to a template. Third-level media come into play once the business has a physical point or its own delivery.
A proposal is read without you in the room: the file gets forwarded inside the company and opened a week later. So the structure stays fixed and the wording has to make sense to someone who was not at the meeting.
A document you are happy to see forwarded to a director keeps selling after the meeting. The same order of sections also speeds up preparation: a manager does not have to work out where to start each time.
A template is not a pretty file but a locked system of styles: colours, typefaces and the grid are set once, and only text and images are meant to change.
In decks that job belongs to the slide master. Microsoft documentation puts the mechanics plainly: when you edit the slide master, every slide based on it carries the change. The logo, margins and heading styles therefore live in the master instead of being placed by hand on each slide.
| Tool | Who it suits | Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| PowerPoint | Sales teams and corporate clients | Opens everywhere, with slide masters and themes | Appearance depends on the version and installed fonts |
| Keynote | Teams working on Apple hardware | Neat typography and animation out of the box | A client on Windows will need a converted file |
| Google Slides | Distributed teams | One version of the document and joint editing | Less control over print output and fonts |
| Figma | Marketing teams and designers | Shared libraries of styles and components | Needs a skill: it is not an office tool |
When several people produce materials, styles are best kept in a shared library. Figma's help centre describes it this way: a published library makes an update available in every file where the component or style is used, and the editor of that file decides whether to accept the change.
Tip A good template is hard to ruin: colours and typefaces are set in the master, stray styles are deleted and the logo cannot be nudged by accident. If a manager can assemble a document without stepping outside the rules, the template works.
Small media are underrated, even though they are the ones that end up in a customer's hands and sit in their inbox for months. The rules here are simple and cost almost nothing.
A digital card does not replace the paper one, it covers a different scenario: the contact is saved to the phone straight away and is not lost. The vCard contact format is defined in RFC 6350 — a standard for exchanging contact details that address books and CRM systems read, which is why a card page with a QR code and a contact file opens without a separate app. Which versions of the mark such media need is covered in our piece on logo design.
Print differs from screen in three things: the colour model, resolution and bleed. A layout that looked perfect on a monitor can turn muddy in a print run or lose its edge.
The exact bleed values, colour profile and file format always come from the printer, and you ask for them before layout rather than after. Industry specifications for preparing print-ready PDFs are published by the Ghent Workgroup, an international body of the printing industry.
Order comes from priorities rather than from one big clean-up: first the standard, then the everyday media, and the rest as it comes up.
A one-off clean-up without rules brings the chaos back within a quarter. What works is templates plus an owner: someone responsible for everyone having the same current version.
A template is tested on a live task rather than at a presentation: ask someone who did not build it to put together a proposal and a post.
Everything that person asks out loud is a hole in the template or in the guide. Fixing it now costs less than explaining it to every new employee.
We build media around the way they will actually be used: the sales team ends up with a template rather than a one-off layout, and the rules are written so that a non-designer can follow them.
In our QADAM case the system went well beyond the screen: a brand pattern, icons, packaging, merchandise and courier uniform, vehicles and a pick-up point, with the rules collected in an interactive brand book of 14 sections. The product deck was made there too, in the same style as everything else.
Design works in one team with development here, so documents and digital media do not drift apart: colours, typefaces and states are described in a way that transfers into code and into a template without guesswork. The design of digital media is part of website development — a company site from $1,900, including the prototype, the design and the build.
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A designer builds the system and the templates; the team assembles everyday materials itself. A good template is hard to ruin: the styles sit in the master and only text and images are meant to change. The designer steps in for unusual tasks and for new types of media.
Do not redo everything at once. Fix the standard, move first-level media onto it and update the rest as they come up: when the business cards run out, print the new ones from the template. A one-off clean-up without rules brings the chaos back within a quarter.
At the start, yes. A small company usually needs a set of templates and a single page of rules: where the files and fonts live, what may be changed and who to ask about anything unusual. A separate document becomes necessary once several teams and contractors produce materials.
For office documents you choose a fallback from the system fonts in advance and write it into the template. Otherwise a deck opened on someone else's computer shifts: lines move and headings wrap. For files that go outside the company, PDF is safer.
They cover different scenarios. The paper one is handed over at a meeting or an event, while the digital one saves the contact to a phone immediately and is easy to update when a role or a number changes. The style rules are the same for both; only the medium differs.
