Five Best Practices for Creating an SOQ Template in InDesign

Consistency and efficiency are two keys to a successful RFQ document workflow, and a well-built template can help you achieve both of these things and build long documents with less time and effort. By spending a little bit of time now, you’ll save a lot of time down the line. So, here are some best practices to follow when you’re preparing your InDesign template:

1. Paragraph and Character Styles

Having robust, cleanly applied paragraph and character styles in your template is one of the keys to having a great template. Keep in mind, a character style should only be applied to a subsection of a paragraph, like the instances when you want to emphasize a phrase by making the text bold and green, for example. If you are applying a character style to an entire paragraph, you’re doing it wrong. Those text attributes should be set up in the paragraph styles panel.

2. Master Pages

I think, second only to paragraph and character styles, the key to a hard-working template are master pages. I see too many documents that pass my way that, when I look at the master pages, there’s only one and it’s empty – that’s a heck of a lot of work that somebody’s doing to add footers to the bottom of every page! Make sure your template has all the master pages needed to produce the various page types you’ll have to build, such as a resume, project page and letterhead.

3. Swatches

Every color used in a template should come from a swatch because that’s how you ensure consistency and the ability to efficiently make large-scale changes. You can use the panel options to quickly add your custom swatches by adding unnamed colors used in the document as new swatches or by loading swatches from any InDesign file, like your brand guidelines or a company brochure. Don’t forget to also remove swatches you aren’t using with the “Select Unused Swatches” function.

4. Guides

One of the most fundamental aspects of a long document template are its margin guides. These guides are like the glue that holds everything in place. It’s important to line up your objects to the margin or column guides, so take the time and be exact when setting your margins and use them consistently. If you have to adjust the margin or column guides after you’ve placed dozens of objects across scores of pages, turn on the “Adjust Layout” feature and watch the magic happen!

5. Library

Arguably, one of the most flexible and efficient ways to quickly fill a page with pre-formatted objects is to use InDesign libraries. You can think of library items as mini templates for your layout – such as sidebars, images with captions, even text frames that are already setup with the number of columns you want. Libraries, in combination with a great template, will make laying out your document a joy. Well, maybe not a joy, but, you know, it’ll be less excruciating than copying and pasting from that “one RFQ you did that one time that had that one thing everyone liked.”

By going through the process of building a clean and comprehensive template, you’ll be doing yourself and anyone else who uses it a big favor. In one file, you’ll have nearly everything you need to build an RFQ submittal and nothing causing you problems or slowing you down.