How to brief a Microsoft Office template project: a guide for Australian businesses
How to brief a Microsoft Office template project: a guide for Australian businesses
To brief a Microsoft Office template project effectively, you need to provide your brand guidelines, logo files in vector format, examples of existing documents and presentations, a list of the template types you need, a clear description of who will use them and in what contexts, and your technical environment details including Microsoft 365 version, IT deployment approach and font installation situation. A brief that covers these areas gives a specialist studio everything needed to scope, price and deliver the project correctly.
What is different about briefing an Office template project versus a graphic design project?
A graphic design brief focuses primarily on visual direction — what the design should look and feel like. An Office template brief needs to cover that ground and also address the operational and technical context in which the templates will be used. A beautifully designed PowerPoint template that is not deployed correctly, uses a font that most staff machines do not have installed, or lacks the layouts for the content types the team produces is a design success and an operational failure.
The brief is where the operational context gets captured. Who are the users — confident PowerPoint operators or occasional users? What devices do they use — Mac, Windows or both? What is the range of content types they produce? How many people will be using the templates, and will IT be involved in deployment? These questions shape the technical decisions made during the build.
What brand assets should be included?
At minimum: the current brand guidelines document, the approved colour palette with hex, RGB and CMYK values, the approved font family with confirmation of licensing and installation status, and logo files in EPS, SVG or high-resolution PNG format in all required colour variants — primary, reversed (white on dark), and any vertical or horizontal layout variants. If the organisation uses secondary logos, sub-brand marks or division-specific identifiers, include all of these.
Do not send logos extracted from existing documents or saved from a website. These are typically low-resolution raster images that will print poorly. The brief should include master vector logo files from the organisation’s brand or marketing team.
What existing documents should be shared?
Sharing three to five of the most commonly used current documents — even if they are off-brand, inconsistent or in need of fixing — is more useful to a template designer than any written description. Existing documents reveal the real range of content types the organisation produces, where the current template is failing, and what the average content density looks like. The messier the existing documents, the more insight they provide.
If certain document types are known to be problematic — a proposal template that always requires reformatting before it goes out, a board paper format that takes hours to get right — flag these specifically. These are the highest-priority problems for the new template to solve.
What technical information is needed?
The technical brief should cover: which Microsoft 365 plan the organisation is on (this affects which deployment options are available), whether staff use Mac, Windows or both, what version of Office is in use, whether IT can deploy custom fonts organisation-wide, where templates will be stored (SharePoint, network drive, local machine), and whether there are any IT security restrictions that might affect template functionality such as macro permissions.
Australian enterprise and government organisations often have specific IT governance requirements that affect template projects — including data sovereignty considerations for cloud-stored files, IT change control processes for software deployment, and accessibility standards for document output. Capturing these requirements in the brief prevents them becoming surprises during delivery.
How detailed does the brief need to be?
Detailed enough to answer the questions above, but not so detailed that it becomes a specification document before the project has started. A good brief opens a conversation — it gives the specialist enough information to ask informed questions and propose a well-scoped project. Ideaseed’s free template questionnaire is designed specifically to gather the right information for Australian businesses commissioning their first or next template project.
Complete Ideaseed’s free template questionnaire to start your Office template project
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