Design Templates: Between Empowerment and Control of Amateur Graphic Designers

This article proposes to study graphic design templates, a singular digital material object that underpins a large part of our contemporary visual environment. Based on interviews with original template creators for Aldus PageMaker, this article traces the main steps of their evolution from their creation in the desktop publishing industry to how templates on the web came to differ from how they were originally envisioned. Building on this historical inquiry, this article shows how templates have transformed the practice, aesthetic, and even the role of graphic designers. By inverting the role of the graphic designer, who now must invent shapes for content that does not yet exist, templates may be understood as an extension of the design grid or visual identity guidelines which are also key yet invisible graphic design intermediary tools. However, templates’ digital and deterministic nature transforms their effects and brings into play a constant tension between the emancipation and control of amateur graphic designers. While originally intended as an educational tool, they have instead progressively embodied a rigidification of graphic design layout on the web.