Template Design – Parks Canada Signage

Of all the templates I’ve created, the Parks Canada signage template would have to be the crown jewel. Not because the template itself is a thing a beauty, but because what it can do has arguably saved 100’s of people-hours* in producing sign drawings for Parks Canada’s nation-wide system of exterior signs.

The template was created in Adobe Illustrator and takes advantage of the application’s graphic- and typographic-style functions, and libraries.

For almost every possible sign type^†, precision, to-scale custom styles were built to address all possible colour options, border widths, corner radii, vinyl separations, and typographic size, colour, spacing, alignment and language dictionaries.

*“saved 100’s of people-hours” is purely speculative based on my own experience creating sign drawings, but I dare say it’s still an accurate estimate. Within a handful of clicks you are able to accomplish what used to take upwards of an hour to complete, and the results are consistently more accurate with the template.

^†A primary template was able to accommodate 99% of required signage; however, a small number of specialty signs required their own templates which were built off the primary file, affording similar time savings.