Typeface is a brand-led creative agency. This means that the approach at Typeface aims to keep focus on the overall feel, message and tone of the client offering. Each piece of creative, whether it’s a logo, website or a brochure should feel on brand.
Typeface will guide you through a creative process that combines classic techniques with digital perfection. Typeface involves clients in the creative process because it doesn’t have to be dressed up, it’s already exciting.
Editable in PowerPoint, Photoshop, InDesign or Canva for LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram
Social media should reflect your brand, not dilute it. If your team is building posts from scratch, relying on off-the-shelf Canva templates, or waiting on design help every time, it’s time to take control.
Branded templates give your team the structure, flexibility and clarity to create consistent content across platforms without compromising quality.
Typeface designs custom social media templates that work for your brand, your content, and the way your team actually operates. Here’s how.
Why Branded Templates Matter
A strong brand is built on consistency. But once content starts going out on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, even the best brand guidelines can fall apart without the right tools in place.
Templates help solve this by:
Keeping every post visually consistent
Saving your team time and reducing bottlenecks
Empowering non-designers to create with confidence
Protecting the integrity of your brand identity
If your brand is active on social, templates aren’t optional; they’re essential.
Each Platform Has a Job to Do
Templates should support the kind of content your audience expects to see in each channel.
LinkedIn
For company news, professional insights and thought leadership
Templates for quotes, stats, updates and announcements
Design tone: clear, minimal and professional
Facebook
For community, campaigns and content with a local feel
Templates for events, promotions, staff news
Design tone: warm, accessible and bold
Instagram
For visual storytelling and everyday brand moments
Templates for carousels, testimonials, features and behind-the-scenes
Design tone: high contrast, clean layouts, expressive typography
Choose a Format That Matches Your Workflow
Typeface creates templates in formats that suit your internal setup, from professional design tools to easy browser-based platforms.
PowerPoint
Great for internal comms or marketing teams without access to design software.
Photoshop
Best for in-house designers who need layered, high-quality control.
InDesign
Ideal for multi-panel carousels or structured, layout-driven posts.
Canva
Fast and accessible. Typeface builds locked templates so your team can edit content without drifting off-brand.
What Typeface Delivers
Every template pack is created specifically for your brand. Typeface works with your fonts, colours, tone and content strategy to build a suite of editable assets that are easy to use and visually consistent.
Each pack includes:
Platform-specific templates for LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram
Files in PowerPoint, Photoshop, InDesign and/or Canva
Built-in brand styling: colour, typography, spacing and layout
Content prompts and notes on best use
Optional extras like Reels layouts, story posts or animated frames
This Is a Brand Asset, Not a Canva Shortcut
Typeface doesn’t build generic kits. These templates are structured tools that make your brand easier to work with, not more restrictive. The goal is to give your team the freedom to post regularly, without guesswork or off-brand design.
Whether you’re launching a campaign or just trying to post consistently, branded templates are a smart way to tighten up your content.
Ready to Make Your Social Content Stand Out?
Typeface designs custom template packs that match your brand and make your team faster, sharper and more consistent online.
I don’t feel that I’m giving anything away for free here, there is a lot of information but as mentioned in the first part of this article; they’re not universal truths. See what’s easy to replicate for your business and start there. Once you have a process and it’s quick and easy to duplicate, move on to another set of assets and establish a new process. These things take time, so if you focus on what you’re good at then at some point your company will outgrow your skillset and that’s where a creative agency can step in.
Talking about the methods and practices behind building thoughtful and repeatable creative frameworks for business helps to demystify the creative process. It also highlights the amount of work needed and the expertise involved in crafting a coherent creative product while nurturing a human-focused, naturally creative business that’s built to adapt and communicate with its users.
Creating Branded Assets for the web
The types of assets we should create depend on the audience that we want to connect with. To make things easy for your users you need to consider their expectations and the ways they choose to interact with your content.
If you have a lot of mobile traffic and your main traffic sources are Facebook and Instagram then you should probably think about creating short, concise video content for your users. If your user base is coming from LinkedIn and has a healthy mix of desktop and mobile users then you can start to create pdf downloads and evergreen assets to encourage long term traffic.
There’s no instant way of building a set of branded assets. When done with consideration they can become an arsenal of ideas, templates and tools that your company will naturally build over time as you gain experiences and seek out new ways to connect with clients.
Time is time.
Your time has value, so it’s important to be economical with the branded assets you do create at the beginning. Time spent on a pitch deck template that can be repurposed in to an ebook template for example, is time well spent. Not considering how you’d like your future eBooks and content to look and feel without first setting up a nice template as a foundation is a good way to turn something enjoyable in to a chore.
And it should be enjoyable.
Writing about your company, and what you do should be an enjoyable process. Removing friction as best you can and allowing yourself to get ideas out quickly will reflect in your writing and your tone.
‘Published’ doesn’t mean final.
We aren’t printing anything here. The great benefit of digital over physical media lies in the cost associated with adjusting and tweaking the message.
Adjusting your digital message allows you to refine and target. The knock-on effect is that as you refine, Google will take notice.
Keep your onlineresources relevant and evergreen.
This article is an example of Evergreen content, once I’ve set it live I’ll work on it for a week; I’ll probably come back and tidy it up along with the first article once the third one in the series has been posted.
The overall, functional, goal of these articles is to gain as much search traffic as possible while staying relevant and on brand but the reality of a blog format means that I’m speaking to one person at a time. Having a robust articles template that’s geared to that type of presentation is helpful for me to get my ideas out quickly, and then come back to tweak at a later date.
I’ve done the same with the case studies that appear thruought the Typeface website. I have a set of Photoshop templates ready to drop screenshots in to and a custom post type in WordPress that uses its own template with image upload fields and the option to add in extra modules below the content, so rolling out a new case study is a painless 15 minute process.
So what’s next?
In the next article, I’ll explain best practices for asset creation, as well as what to focus on creating and the tools you’ll need – both free and paid – to get started.
I think I’ve worked with Stuart for the best part of a decade now.
I gave his website a bit of a tidy-up just after setting up Typeface and he asked why he wasn’t a case study. Sorry Stu, I did talk about the work here though.
I’d originally built his website while employed at my previous studio so although I was proud of the work; it didn’t feel like it was Typeface’ work to show.
Over the last month I’ve been working with Stu on the design and build for his new project Endurance Mind Coaching, a specialist performance psychology consultancy that develops athlete mental fitness for athletes of all levels. Now we have some Typeface work to share.
I have always tried to continue to support clients from my previous agency, It’s not the quickest way of building a business being honest but I enjoy the client journey. I appreciate being involved in the various growth stages of business and it has lead to some rewarding relationships.
Creative Business
When a company or business needs to recalibrate and re-communicate they come to the graphic designer, so that we can apply our creative frameworks and processes. Stu applies Sports Psychology methods to improve mindset and focus, so when a person needs to recalibrate or rediscover they come to Stu.
He applies his frameworks to individuals and teams training for a sporting goal, as well as institutions like Asics, Team GB and Typeface client the Milestone Pursuit. What I really enjoy is that he also takes these frameworks and applies them to business.
People are naturally creative and we all use that creative focus differently. Businesses are creative endeavours, so it’s no surprise that successful businesses are constantly readjusting and looking for creative ways of engagement via their audience and their employees.
Building Success
Instead of waiting for the ideal client to come through the door or chasing prospects, Typeface as a business relies on growing Typeface clients by elevating them to the level of the ideal client. Working with a good graphic designer will never be a one-off transaction, if a client is successful then there will be more to do in the future. Winning new business, landing a big web project or a large rebrand is always great; but nurturing and creating a brand is its own thing and from a creative’s perspective, the longer that client relationship continues the more rewarding it can become. From a business perspective, it just makes sense.
This article is currently undergoing editing. This article talks about the four main systems and frameworks that Typeface uses to create client websites and why.
Typeface uses four main frameworks to deploy client websites; WordPress, Hubspot, WordPress & WooCommerce and Shopify. Each system has its pros and cons, which is something Typeface weighs up when suggesting technologies to clients.
From a production perspective, the wireframe, design and front end build stages of a project stay the same regardless of CMS. Once we have a working HTML version of the design, files are split up and built in to a template for use with the client’s CMS of choice and any dynamic functionality is added.
The basic coniderations:
How hands on does the client want to be?
How much time does the client have to invest?
Does the client work with a third party for content creation, social or SEO?
Are we creating an online shop or a digital storefront? i.e. does the website need to integrate with a physical space and track physical stock?
Bricks and mortar stores looking to move online have their own hurdles and challenges: Does the client have existing picking and packing systems to integrate? Do we need to limit target areas for online search because of existing delivery networks? Are your products sanctioned or restricted in certain countries, do any of your products violate the Ts and Cs of your platform of choice or payment gateway?
The four main systems
WordPress
The Grandaddy of blogging systems, WordPress is one of the most powerful and easy to use CMS available. The most versatile off-the-shelf content management system and one of the most developer friendly, it has a passionate community driving development and it’s the platform that I’ve chosen to build the Typeface website on.
WordPress is an example of how open source communities can create powerful easy to use tools that adapt with their user base. WordPress powers 43% of the internet including corporations and companies such as Disney, Sony, Vogue, Rolling stone, UNICEF and literally thousands more enterprise level websites. I’ve worked on projects in the past with clients who were adamant that they weren’t going to use WordPress because they wanted something completely bespoke. Using this system doesn’t mean you can’t have a bespoke website, it means you’re not spending thousands reinventing the wheel on a CMS that’s going to do less, will need more maintenance, will be more expensive to expand and will tie you in to a developer. For 90% of client projects, WordPress is an ideal framework to build on.
I’ve been developing with WordPress for over a decade now at various studios because the number of features out of the box, scalability and sheer value that we could offer to clients was hard to ignore.
Pros
WordPress websites can be self hosted, allowing the client to retain control of their data.
With such a huge community of developers and supporters, the platform is kept up-to-date and secure.
WordPress is PHP based which means the client isn’t tied in to one developer.
A simple template structure means that new page designs and styles can easily be added in to any well-built theme.
Scalability. A simple, standardised database structure means that entirely new website templates and designs can be built using existing content and new functions can be added by simply building a new theme, this is hugely beneficial for companies with large amounts of legacy content who need to upgrade their website and for companies going through rebrands who need to freshen up their look. It means that the current website can still be used and updated while the design and development phases of a project take place.
Cons
WordPress works best with a supportive developer. Security updates and core updates are as simple as pressing a button, sometimes these things can be overlooked or ignored.
The ability for clients to add in plugins for increased functionality can be too tempting for some. When possible Typeface will build extra functionality in to the website theme itself, this keeps things secure and fast.
WordPress can feel daunting at first. Clients usually only interact with posts and pages so there’s an argument for locking down installs and restricting access to areas of the back end, but we can do this using user profile levels. It’s always good for the client to have at least one account with full administrator access allowing them to add new users in to the system and so this is what Typeface provides by default.
Hubspot
First and foremost Hubspot is a CRM tool. It’s built around a set of powerful automation features and analytics tools and offers out of the box functions such as live web chat, email automation, user persona profiling, download management, form tracking and meeting scheduling. The list of features is already exhaustive and it continues to grow as Hubspot refine their systems.
If you have a dedicated marketing team or you work with a PR Agency or content creation company, then Hubspot should be a serious consideration for your business.
Hubspot treats landing pages, website pages and blogs as their own marketing areas with their own sets of tools and analytics. Websites are built with stackable, modular sections in mind. This isn’t as limiting as it sounds; most websites will contain anything from 12-18 individual layout sections, most of which will be combined to create enjoyable, engaging experiences. A well-built Hubspot theme can allow clients to quickly build and assemble pages by dragging and dropping components. It’s a great system to use if your goal is to measure user statistics and interactions and tweak content and calls to action to fine-tune your engagement and conversions.
Pros
Hubspot is the most complete CRM tool on the market.
Content focused, making it a great tool for content teams to collaborate with.
In-depth tracking and analytics for each website page, blog and landing page.
Easy to create user groups and delegate notifications and access to sales, marketing and website teams.
Suite of marketing and remarking tools, including email automation, live chat, mailing lists and document sharing.
Ability to take payments.
Ability to create separate landing pages for marketing campaigns.
Cons
Things can get expensive the more features you need.
Website files and data are stored on Hubspot’s servers.
Hubspot uses a proprietary templating langage called Hubl. Although based on Java, this does limit the number of Hubspot developers.
Ecommerce
WooCommerce and Shopify are two of the most popular eCommerce platforms. WooCommerce is the best solution if you want to integrate a shopping cart and products system directly in to your website. If you’re more interested in a focused eCommerce experience, have a large number of products or need something to integrate with your POS and stock system; Shopify is the answer.
WooCommerce
Because its so versatile there are various cost effective ways of building an online store using WordPress. We could create a custom post type and add in products, integrating a Stripe checkout directly, or adding in PayPal buttons. However, if you’re running a WordPress website and you are looking to set up an online store then WooCommerce should be your first consideration.
One of the benefits of using a system like WooCommerce on a self hosted WordPress website is the vast assortment of payment gateways that can be integrated. Shopify has restrictions on the types of products that can be sold using their integrated checkout and while many payment gateways boast Shopify integration, some systems can be incomplete or rely on extra developer input to properly install. The costs of subscribing to a third party payment gateway can often offset profits for low margin products, which is why considering the costs of your payment system and the way it integrates with your platform early on is a good idea.
While it lacks some of the stock management and POS options that Shopify has, WooCommerce benefits from integrating directly with WordPress and its theme/templating system. This gives the developer much more control over how and where the shop and products can be integrated in to a bespoke website design.
Overloading a website with plugins is never recommended. That said WooCommerce is supported by a variety of extensions that can add flexibility and features if needed. Another benefit of running a WooCommerce store is easy integration with well-known WordPress SEO and optimisation plugins like Yoast.
Shopify
Shopify works best as a stand alone eCommerce solution.
Can I run a full website via Shopify?
Yes but it’s not something Typeface would recommend. Shopify excels in simplifying stock management, POS integration and product management with physical products, physical storage and the online space. It is not a publishing tool and as a full website CMS it falls short; but that isn’t the space that Shopify occupies. Shopify works best alongside a well built, well optimised website and offers a lot of tools as standard that would otherwise be costly or time consuming to implement.
Running Shopify via a subdomain
Maybe you already have a website and you’re weighing up the benefits of setting up a separate online store using Shopify’s system. Setting your shop up using a subdomain is a viable option which allows you to use the Shopify systems without sacrificing creativity when it comes to the look and feel of your main website.
From a user perspective shop.websitename.com keeps things on brand and as expected, however optimising for a subdomain will have less impact on the main website’s URL as it may be considered a separate website. Its something to think about if SEO is a consideration, especially if you’re focusing on the main branded URL in your Optimisation and Search campaigns. Because profit margins from online sales rely on scale, SEO is an important factor in whether an online store succeeds or fails. On projects where SEO is important from day one, Typeface works with Manchester based SEO expert Matt Davies so that clients can be sure any Search considerations will be baked in to development from day one, giving fresh websites a much needed jumpstart
The pitfalls of selling via a walled garden
Like Hubspot, Shopify offer a walled garden approach. This comes with it’s own set of pros and cons. In Hubspot’s case, all that user data is sat on their servers; the pro being that they handle everything GDPR related. In Shopify’s case, you have an easy to use, easy to integrate storefront but the products that they allow you to sell using their payment gateways are tied in to their Ts and Cs, which are country specific.
Tempting plug-ins and add-ons
Like WooCommerce, Shopify offers paid and free plugins to increase functionality. Many of these plugins and features come with $2-4 per month subscriptions which can easily stack up, eating in to profits. Sometimes you might want to add what would otherwise feel like a standard shopping cart feature or something that would be two-three lines of PHP for a WooComerce website only to find it as a paid plugin with a subscription. It is important to remember that Shopify has two client bases; plugin developers and store owners so the subscription model is much more prevalent with Shopify than with a WordPress system. This translates to ease-of-use by scarifying a granular level of customisation, making Shopify a powerful tool for the client but less so for the developer.
Typeface has been working with restaurant upstart Billy’s Burgers and Shakes since February. With a diner in Manchester and a larger restaurant opening in Bradford, there’s been lots of room for creative projects which have come together to create a solid, fun brand.
The new retro
Fashion moves in circles, so instead of looking directly to the 50s/60s for influence; Typeface has taken its inspiration from the 90s interpretation of 60s retro. After all, we’re as far away from the 90s as the 90s was from the 60s.
Developing the brand
Once the flow and shape of the letters was decided, they were redrawn in Illustrator and built in to a coherent icon. Because the logo is such a complex shape, Typeface created four variants ranging in simplicity.
Beyond the logo
Typeface created two custom 8x3ft wallpapers to dress a dividing wall in the new Bradford restaurant. The brief was to use modern, recognisable comic book characters, and to create something a little fun.
To emulate that 90s comic book style, pannels were drawn in pen and ink, scanned in and then vectorised and coloured. Very little work was done to clean up the images themselves to keep the hand drawn look.
Over the last 6 months, Typeface has created signage, posters, bags, window graphics and wallpapers. If you want to see the progress on the Bradford store, follow Billys Burgers and Shakes on Instagram.
There are a few common, measurable costs associated with starting a new business. A logo, as a banner to gather under. Business cards and letterheads to make the company tangible. Livery. Signage. Elements that make your vision physical and inspire confidence in you and your clients. Things are starting to go well, until somebody mentions that maybe you need to think about getting your business online.
And now you need a website. And you’re about to hear a certain question repeated ad nauseam.
When you contact a competent agency for a rough quote, the conversation will probably go something like this:
I’ve been told I need a website, how much does a website cost?
Well firstly, what’s your budget?
Not that question again...
It sounds like a loaded question, and it kind of is.
Knowing where the client wants to be and how much they have to invest to get themselves there helps the studio to tailor their offering. Initially, the studio should be focused on the clients goals. The exciting stuff, the how do you get there; that all comes later.
Design isn’t one-size-fits-all and there are ideas, techniques and technologies that can be adapted to suit a business’ needs.
Different industries are, well, different. They have different sets of client expectations, different cultures. Different ways of interacting with their clients and different routes to market.
So why do you keep hearing that question? ‘What is your budget?’
It boils down to the nature of creative work. The bleeding-edge studios and trendsetting agencies are forced to constantly grow with and adapt to an always changing landscape that in some cases is still finding out what it is. Often there can be multiple ways to answer a question. Some are more cost effective, others may provide more value in the long term. It’s not often that the quick fix, get everything done at once approach will give confident results. A project made up of parts that are just good enough will always be mediocre.
A great studio wants to marry your goals, needs and expectations with your budgets limitations. To do that, the studio needs to know how much time, energy and money you have to spend.
Most quotes will be towards the top end of your budget. If available, Typeface will always try to offer the client a couple of quote options. But in a sea of pitches, you’ll often find yourself reading through multiple similarly worded, similarly priced quotes. Take a look at the proposed deliverables, the suggested focus points, the project goals. Has the studio suggested alternative ideas not in the brief but dismissed ideas that are, and have those ideas bumped the quote up to the top end of your budget? Chances are they’ve found a way to give you more value with fewer steps. If the proposition is unexpected, ask them to elaborate.
So then. What’s your budget?
Even those of us who communicate ideas for a living can fall in to the trap of assuming that the people we’re talking to understand what we mean. Somewhere along the way, the answer to the very reasonable question ‘can you tell me how much this is going to cost me‘ has been distilled in to a three word answer that feels like a trap. But it’s not all about money. We’re asking you:
What do you want? How do we make that happen?
What can you afford to spend? But what do you need?
How much time, money and effort do you have to invest in the future?
What are your expectations? How do we exceed them?
Where do you need to be next month and again in five years, and how much do you have to commit to get yourself there?
Contact Typeface with a rough estimate of your budget. And Typeface will tell you what we can do with it.
The wireframe process is something that can seem quite innocuous and throwaway in the grand scheme of a website. It’s not exciting, if anything, it sits there gatekeeping the design process. I’ve played around with ways to make the wireframe process interesting and engaging over the years. All introducing colour does is to introduce unwanted hierarchy. Using text instead of content blocks confuses the purpose of the phase. Over the years I reluctantly accepted that wireframes, by nature, should probably be grey and boring.
One thing a wireframe does, is to give the client immediate say over the flow and structure of the website. The more touch points there are along the project timeline, the more say a client has, this ultimately leads to a confident final product and, a confident client.
Breaking projects up in to understandable stages is a staple in any design process. Research, planning, design and development fit nicely in their own space during the creative web process. It’s easy to understand where one phase ends and another begins.
The wireframe phase sits nicely between planning and design but it has an important role because it lays out many of the rules used in design and development. It incorporates research and it lets the client feed back on the structure and flow of the website before design and development even begin.
A well planned wireframe accomplishes the following:
It presents a working version of the websites thematic sitemap.
It allows the client to view the user flow and the most effective way to guide the user around the websites content.
The client can see how blocks of content sit within the browser.
It provides context and allows for quick changes that later in the process could end up being time consuming or costly.
The wireframe process streamlines, frameworks and focuses the entire project.
It’s easy to overlook the the importance of a wireframe; they’re not sexy to look at and they seemingly sit there just before the good stuff. However the knock on effect of a solid wireframe, with solid client feedback and input can not be understated.
