Newspaper and Editorial Layout Templates - Google Docs, InDesign, Canva

Resources & Downloads
1

Editorial and newspaper layout has a specific logic that’s often invisible to designers coming from digital backgrounds. The constraints that shaped it - column grids, ink economy, reader eye movement, printing limitations - still produce the best solutions even when those constraints no longer apply.

Templates that hold up well across different tools:

InDesign: still the professional standard for editorial work. The paragraph styles system, master pages, and text frame linking capabilities have no equivalent in other tools. If you’re doing any serious print editorial work, this is where you build.

Canva: surprisingly capable for light editorial work, social editorial, and quick-turnaround content. The constraints are limiting for complex layouts but most of the templates in this category are legitimately well-designed.

Google Docs: better than designers usually give it credit for for structured long-form documents. The styling system is underused. Not for production layouts but good for editorial content structure.

The most useful layout principle I keep returning to: the column grid is a cage you can fight against productively. The best editorial pages have tension between the grid and the content. Pure compliance to the grid looks mechanical.

What tools are you using for editorial layout work and what do you wish they did better?

2

InDesign paragraph styles are one of the most powerful tools in design that most designers don’t fully utilise. Setting up a complete style sheet before touching layout saves significant time on long documents.

3

The “cage to fight against productively” framing is excellent. The best editorial pages I’ve seen break the grid in exactly one place and it creates a focal point that a pure grid layout never achieves.

4

Canva’s editorial templates are better than the design community admits. For non-designers producing regular content, some of those templates are genuinely well-considered layouts.

5

@pascal.lens Google Docs style system point is valid. Running styles properly means editors can make structural changes without breaking formatting. Most editorial workflows where Docs is used don’t take advantage of this.