Design grumblings

What is the idea of creating a corporate design and making a communication guide and design manual available to all the employees in a company?

1. To ensure that all communication going out has consistent looks?


2. To make it easy in that common templates are available so that you don't have to remember where you saved the "good" one?


3. To put an end to all the discussions about how material is supposed to look?


4. All of the above?

In my opinion, the right answer to this small multiple-choice test is 4. And there could well be several other good reasons listed.

Why then is it that upon making a presentation, using corporate templates - even checking with Communications (the head of that particular department, no less) that the version used is the right one for alliance-partner presentations - a higher-level manager comes along and says: "Would you please change to this presentation template - it's the one we usually use for this kind of presentation?"

And that template obviously has to be non-standard. With the involved company logos in a different and less visually appealing position. Which then makes the space to text placeholders smaller and situated differently on each slide. Which means that all the slides have to be manually re-aligned. And, if that wasn't enough, why does that template have to have a lot of direct character formatting so that changes to slide masters do not automatically appear on the relevant slides - meaning that, once again, all slides have to have the slide master reapplied, manually...?

*sigh*

The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind...

[Listening to: Police - Message In A Bottle (4:52)]