How to Use a Template Without Feeling Like A Hypocrite
In design school, I believed something that took me almost a decade to unlearn: if you didn’t make it entirely with your own two hands, it didn’t count.
This applied to everything within the realm of design: each icon, texture, and tiny decorative detail tucked into a corner of a layout…everything had to be created by me. I was taught (perhaps I merely picked up from the program's culture) that the only authentic way to produce anything was to draw it by hand, scan it, assemble it in layers, add my own texture, craft a pattern from scratch, and sketch numerous compositions for a square Instagram grid post. Anything else was considered fake.
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t much of an illustrator. At best, I would call myself a doodler. So when a project called for a custom illustration style, something rich and specific with a well-thought-out, layered composition and beyond what I could produce quickly, I felt dread. I’d think, this is my cross to bear; I’ll figure it out. And as I sought out reference photos and sketched pieces over and over again, I never factored that time into what I charged. I just quietly accepted that some projects would take me twice as long as they should, because doing it any other way meant I hadn’t really done the work.
As I’m writing this, I’m realizing what I thought was honorable was really me punishing myself for not being a skilled enough illustrator, in a discipline that isn’t illustration. I’m a brand designer, a web designer, a strategist. Nobody hired me for my linework. But more often than not, we are expected to be jacks of all trades, skilled in motion and animation and coding and illustration and marketing and copywriting, oh, and graphic design.
The shift in my perception happened while at an agency. I remember sitting in on a project where we needed a set of hand-drawn-style textures for a packaging system, and instead of anyone picking up a pencil, someone pulled a license from Creative Market and subtracted the cost from the project budget. Nobody flinched. Nobody whispered about it in the hallway. It was just... a tool. The client never asked, and if they had, the answer would have been simple: we sourced this to get you the best result in the timeline you gave us.
That was the moment something reorganized in me. Our clients didn’t care if the pattern on their coffee bag had been hand-illustrated by me personally at 11 pm three nights before the deadline. They cared if it looked expensive, felt on-brand, and made them want to pick the bag up off the shelf. Original wasn’t the metric. Right was the metric.
I used to be pretty vocal about looking down on Canva and Creative Market, if I’m honest. I thought of them as a kind of bastardization of what real design was supposed to be. Now I think of them as an asset. Somebody else has already done the heavy lifting of figuring out what makes a layout eye-catching, and I get to take that as a building block and shape it around the brand I’m actually working on. That’s not a lesser process. That’s just a smarter use of my hours. And these creators want to be paid for their hard work! It’s a gig economy, baby.
So this is the ethos I’ve come to after years of feeling like I owed every project a hand-built miracle: templates and sourced assets aren’t shortcuts around the work. They’re infrastructure that lets you spend your energy on the part of the work that’s actually yours.
That’s not to say that you should outsource everything (although I wouldn’t blame you if you found a way to white-glove the whole process!) I still believe in pushing yourself to build something from scratch, to develop a new illustration style, or invent a layout nobody’s seen. I still do that. I still love doing that. And it does give you a deeper level of pride in your work. But I’ve also given myself permission to not do it every single time. Paying someone whose entire craft is illustration, and letting their strength cover a gap in mine, isn’t a compromise; it’s collaboration. Obviously (and I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this but I will anyway), pay people properly, credit them clearly, don’t pass someone else’s original work off as your own concept. That’s not a gray area. But using a licensed asset, or building from a proven layout structure, inside your own creative direction? That’s just how the work actually gets made at a professional level.
If you’ve been carrying the same guilt I carried, quietly overbuilding every project because some version of design school is still living in your head, this one’s for you.
Below, I’m breaking down the four places templates and sourced assets actually show up in my design practice, where the line sits between infrastructure and genuinely generic work, and a real project where I used both approaches in the same brand system.
1. Creative Assets: Illustration, Pattern, Texture, Stock
This is the category that used to trip me up the most, because it felt the most personal. Illustration and pattern work are part of the soul of a brand system, so sourcing it can feel like outsourcing the soul.
The brand identity for Nook Cafe was a project that changed my thinking on this. I was building out a full brand identity for this café and packaged goods client, and the brand called for a warm, bistro-inspired illustration style: coffee cups, café scenes, and little food vignettes threaded throughout the packaging and collateral. I created every aspect of the brand—color palette, wordmark, lock-ups, cheeky copy, and even hand-drew an illustration of the café doors. But when it came to the full library of supporting illustrations the client needed across their packaging line, I did the math: creating hundreds of illustrations of food and vignettes from scratch, redrawing and redrawing until I landed somewhere close to the reference I had in my head, would have taken weeks I didn’t have and charged the client for time that wasn’t actually adding anything they’d notice or value. So I found an illustrator whose style already matched the mood we needed, purchased a full suite of illustrations from her, and built it into the final brand kit alongside the pieces I made by hand.
The client got a richer, more complete system faster than I could have built it alone. I got to spend my hours on the parts I was skilled in: the logo, the brand marks, the strategic decisions about how all of it would live together.
The illustrations added to the rest of the cozy feel
The question to ask yourself: is this the element that’s actually carrying the brand’s original thinking, or is it supporting texture around that thinking? Logos, custom marks, and anything that’s meant to be genuinely proprietary to the client is worth making by hand, or at minimum art-directing closely. But supporting illustrations, pattern, texture, the stuff that sets a mood rather than defines an identity? That’s exactly where sourcing well can save you real time without costing the client anything they were actually paying for.
2. Composition and Layout Templates
There are only so many ways to lay out a minimalist Instagram grid post. There are only so many ways to structure a simple, informative LinkedIn slideshow. I say this with love: nobody is handing out design awards for inventing a brand-new text-and-image arrangement every single time you need a social post.
I used to feel like I had to reinvent the layout every time, like reusing a structure that already worked was laziness or a lack of innovation. Now I see composition templates as closer to a mathematical equation. You’ve found a layout proportion, a hierarchy, a grid that reliably works. Applying a new brand’s colors, type, imagery, and voice to that proven structure isn’t cutting corners. In fact, it’s recognizing that the structure was never the creative act. The brand-specific judgment layered on top of it is.
It goes wrong when you stop at the structure. A generic template stays generic when you drop in stock photography, default fonts, and copy that could belong to any brand on earth. The same template, applied with real brand specificity, real photography, and a real voice, becomes invisible. Nobody clocks it as templated. They just experience it as well-designed.
P.S. You can always start with a template as a skeleton. I do this a lot: I find a composition to pull inspiration from, take the basic ideas, and build something more fitting. Starting with an empty canvas can be intimidating. Using a template allows for a creative starting point. It inevitably evolves throughout the project due to creative decisions and client feedback. Don’t reinvent the wheel every time! Work smarter, not harder.
3. Business Process Templates
This one’s less emotionally loaded but arguably more important. I’m talking invoices, proposals, contracts, onboarding documents. Nobody feels precious about these being “original,” and yet these are the systems most designers rebuild from scratch on every single project, which is exactly backward (hey, I did it for a while)
I’ve written before about building your foundation before you need it. This is that principle in its most literal form. Every hour you spend reformatting an invoice template or rewriting a proposal from a blank page is an hour stolen from the work your clients are actually paying for, your strategic thinking, your creative direction. Build these once, build them properly, and stop thinking about them. And if you need some starter templates, I’ve got a set dropping soon ;)
4. Presentation, Portfolio, and Mockup Templates
The last category is the frame you put your work inside, not the work itself. Your Loom presentation structure, your portfolio case study format, your mockup scenes. These should be consistent, because consistency here is what lets the actual creative work stand out project to project. If you’re redesigning your entire portfolio layout or presentation structure every single time you have new work to show, you’re spending creative energy on the wrapping paper instead of the gift.
Create an organizational structure that’s easy to pull from. Take some time to organize your Dropbox or G Drive with consistent folders, naming systems, and places where things will always live. Nothing wastes more time than digging through your hard drive, looking for an asset that you know that you have, but have no idea where it lives.
Additionally, I’m a big fan of mockup subscriptions. Bendito mockup and Mockup Mason are my two favorites for high quality collateral imagery and Death To Stock and Pexels are my go-tos for creative imagery (and cheaper than a custom shoot for showing off every project).
A strong templated system gives you one less thing to worry about, so you can focus on the design work.
If you’re still feeling guilty after reading this, here’s what you can take away: you can borrow the structure. The judgment can’t.
A template can give you a proven layout, a licensed illustration can give you a mood, and a proposal format can give you a professional shell. None of that is the actual design. The actual design is everything you layer on top: the art direction, the curation, the brand-specific decisions, the taste, the editing, the no, not that; this! that only you can bring to it. That’s the only part that ever needed to be original in the first place, and what your clients are ultimately hiring you for.
If you want the actual system I use to kick off new projects with real speed, the template starter kit is coming soon for paid subscribers.
Class Dismissed.
