Templates: To use or not to use

That sounds like a heading for an 80s drug campaign doesn't it? Ideally, when a client contacts you with a project, you will have all the time in the world to draw inspiration from whatever has influenced you lately and you'll have a few weeks to pull together a mockup. I never get those ideal timelines.

Rather, I'm told a big apology for needing the project done by the end of the week and that the only direction they can give me is that it has to be good with no explanation on how or why.

The most recent of these projects had me tearing my hair out because a week before the deadline my mockup was thrown out, a new client was introduced with the old client having parachuted out of the building and I was left with the only direction "Make it bold".

Politics aside from what made this project fall apart, it's all too similar a situation that makes you put down your pencil you use to sketch out a storyboard and start looking at the available templates out there. It's so tempting! And to be completely honest, I've bent the knee several times and I'm starting to feel a lot less concerned each time I do.

I have a few rules for myself though.

1. I try to never use a template that I know I couldn't create myself. At least then, I don't loose complete connection with what I'm doing. I feel like the worst you can do is alienate yourself from the project. This also has the added benefit of letting me adjust the template. Lense flare obscuring text or faces in dropped video? No problem, I can probably find the effect about as easily as finding someone's drink glasses in a friend's house. That's assuming the author doesn't hate me and has flattened the entire background .The equivalent of this would be your friend having melted the drinking glasses into a blob with all the kitchen forks and knives and has fashioned it into a giant chair for him to watch HBO with. Pretty cool to look at, not much I can do with it.

2. Try to change it enough so you don't feel like you completely "dialed it in". This adds more time than you may have to finish but I've found a few quick workflows that get by. Break apart the template and sprinkle it about. This works more for video than something like a photoshop template but its a quick way to make it not all about the template and more about the project and the client.