One Word Master Template and a colour theme for every discipline's brand

The challenge

This national sporting organisation oversees a number of individual disciplines, all operating under a single parent brand. Each discipline has its own brand identity, with a distinct colour palette and visual style that needed to be respected in every document it produced.

Staff were applying these discipline brands to documents manually, adjusting colours, covers and styles by hand each time. The results varied from one document to the next, and the organisation's overall identity was hard to keep consistent across the different disciplines.

Building an unrelated template for every discipline wasn't a practical answer either. Each brand change would need to be repeated across multiple files, with no shared foundation keeping the structure and design language consistent.

On top of this, Word's standard colour theme only holds a small set of colours, well short of the range the organisation used across all of its disciplines. Staff had no easy way to reach the approved colours for a given brand from within Word itself.

Our approach

1. 01

   Agreeing a practical scope

   The original scope included a button to swap colour themes, front and back cover logos, headers and footers in one step. We worked with the client to shape a solution that suited their budget and preferences, focusing on a strong template foundation and colour theme suite, with logos added manually by the client's team.

2. 02

   Designing a multi-brand framework

   We designed a single Word Master Template that holds one consistent document structure and design language for the whole organisation, with each discipline's visual identity layered on top through colour, rather than a separate template designed from scratch for each discipline.

3. 03

   Building a suite of colour themes

   We built a suite of colour themes, one for each discipline, that the client can use to create discipline-specific sub-templates from the Master Template. Applying a theme updates the colours used across the cover pages, heading styles, numbering, bullet styles and table styles, so staff don't have to recolour each element by hand.

4. 04

   Extending Word's colour theme

   Word's standard colour theme couldn't hold the full range of colours the organisation used, so we extended it by building more than 30 additional brand colours directly into the template, grouped and organised by discipline so staff can find the approved options quickly.

5. 05

   Training the client's team

   We provided training so the client's team can manage the templates themselves, including creating discipline sub-templates and adding logos, without needing to come back to us for routine changes.

The outcome

The organisation now has one consistent foundation for documents across every discipline. Discipline-specific sub-templates are created from the Master Template, and applying a discipline's colour theme carries the right brand colours through covers, styles, numbering and tables.

Because approved brand colours sit directly inside Word, staff can reach the right options quickly rather than working from a small standard theme or applying colours by hand. Logos are added by the client's team when a sub-template is set up, a simple manual step that kept the solution aligned with their budget.

With every discipline built from a single Master Template and one set of colour themes, brand colours are managed in one place, and the client's trained team can maintain and extend the templates as their needs change, with room to add further automation later if they choose.