This article is about how to set up your Template Library. If you want to know how to set up your templates in the Template Library, please see the article on "Setting up Templates".

The Template Library is an irreplaceable companion to the Digital and Print Templates product, with a connection to other tools in your Frontify environment. The Template Library will allow you to store design templates and give them a dedicated space from which you can simply pick them up and create new customizable publications.

Start by creating the Library in your Libraries tab by selecting it from the ‘New’ drop-down menu at the right-hand corner of the screen.

A popup will ask you to add a name to your new Template Library, add it and select the Create Template Library button. This will direct you to the newly created Template Library.

Once you’re in your library, the next step is to add your Sketch files or InDesign packages. Bear in mind that only owners of a Template Library can upload new templates.

Please consider that when creating Sketch files or InDesign packages, you need to follow some prerequisites to make them work properly. Please check our help articles on Prepare InDesign Documents for Templates and Prepare Sketch Documents for Templates.

If you want to allow your users to create publications directly from projects, it may be useful to create categories to which the templates can then be assigned when being published.

You can do this by clicking the 'Settings' on the Power Bar, then selecting the Template Library Settings side panel will allow you to create categories and sub-categories.

To create a sub-category, simply create it as a category and drag the lines on the left side of the category and move them to the right. You can have multiple levels of categories.

Leave the side panel to go back to your main library screen.

From this point, you can select your files using the button ‘Upload Your First Template’ or using the drop-down menu on the top right-hand corner of your screen, where you can upload your Sketch and Indesign package.

All the templates have a status depending on where they are in the process.

When you upload a template to the Library, it’s set as ‘Not Published’, and you can open the template and start setting parameters for each part of the design.

You can set parameters to the template and limit the use of specific components that you might want to leave static and some that could be editable by other users. Please find more about those settings in the help article on Setting up Templates.

If you don’t set any preset download options, your end-users will be able to choose what format/size they want to download (for InDesign files that are PDF, PNG, and JPG, for Sketch files that are PNG and JPG). You can restrict those options to allow only specific formats/sizes. You can choose one quality setting per predefined download format, which means you can define one quality setting for PDF, one for PNG and one for JPG.

You can set these download options by going to “edit” mode in a template and then adapt the Download Options to the correct size. If you define only one download option, your users won’t be presented with different options, but will directly be able to download in the specified format.

PDF download options let you specify whether a PDF file should have separate pages in PDF format, crop marks, and how much bleed the output file should contain. These values defined here override possible values defined directly in InDesign or in a custom PDF download preset.

If you need additional specific PDF download presets, we can import them for you. To do so, you need to export the "joboptions" file with the settings you want to use from InDesign. We can then make them usable for your templates.

When you have set all desired parameters and you’re ready to create this design as a template, simply click on 'Publish' on the upper right-hand corner of the screen, name the file and place it in one of the categories made.

The name you add here will appear when you use the template in your guidelines or when you create publications from a project.

If you have set up any categories in the Template Library settings, you can apply them now to the template. If you take a sub category, the template is automatically also part of the higher category/categories.

The template is automatically published, but you can also set it back to unpublished if you don't want it to be accessible to your users any more. Simply click ‘Unpublish’ on the right-hand corner and the template will have an Unpublished status.

If you decide to change something within the template, the new status will be set to ‘Unpublished Changes’, allowing you to publish changes, discard the changes, or unpublish the template itself.

With our templates, you don’t need people with designing skills to do the day-to-day publication work. But there might be cases where you - as a member of a Template Library - want to work on adapted templates or publications in their original format (InDesign or Sketch).

For those cases, we created the possibility to download publications (created by your end-users) or adapted templates (adapted by owners/editors of Template Libraries) with all the changes applied within Frontify in their original format - as InDesign packages or as Sketch files.

You also have the option to download the originally uploaded InDesign package or Sketch file.

You can find these download options under the “Download” section for templates and "Export - Download" for publications.. This option is only available to people that have access to a Template Library but not to regular end-users. It also works in combination with a preset download format and from the Approval Overview.

We hope this article was helpful. If you have any questions regarding the Template Library, don’t hesitate to contact us.