What makes a template work

Template Trainer studies your design: where each element sits, how big it is, how the photo is cropped, which fonts and colours it uses and how the people were drawn. The clearer all of that is in the starting design, the better the template reproduces it.

Step by step

1. Start from a finished design, the one you would print, not a sketch.
2. Describe the fields well in "Input Schema". Name each one by its role: portrait image, name below, year above. If you want several photos in a single field, ask for "up to 8 photos".
3. Ask for few fields, and only for what really changes. One to four is usually ideal: every extra field is another chance for the design to slip out of place. If the slogan is always the same, don't turn it into a field.
4. Choose "Target Semblance". "Closest" reproduces the design faithfully: it's what you want to clone a bestseller. "Allow Wiggle" gives it room to adapt the layout to the fields you asked for; pick it if your customers' text may be much longer or shorter than the original's.
5. Choose "Photo Style". "Blended" adapts your customers' photos to the artwork's style; "Photographic" keeps them as photos.
6. Turn on "BG-Removal Friendly" if the design will be printed without a background on a garment: it uses flat backgrounds and clean edges so the cut-out comes out without halos.
7. Use "Design Notes" for anything that can't be read from the image, for example: "the central illustration is replaced by the portrait".

When it's ready

Try the template with several different photos (different faces, ages, hairstyles and skin tones) and with short and long text. If something fails repeatedly, adjust the options or the notes and train it again.

More in training a template and My templates.