Templates...why?

[cre8]

i personally think it doens't help starters to design, becausse if you learn to design you have to learn to make you're own style, copying other styles doesn't help.

What do you learn if everything is already there and you just have to change some things. I think it is better to start from zero and make some faults in the beginning, you will learn from that.

And you are saying it yourselve, you can use it to learn! if you are still learning, are you a proffesional designer then?

What you say about the time, you are rigght, as i said so, you are winning time on a website templates, becausse you don't have to program it. But for a design of a poster logo or flyer?
be honest, how muc time you need for this.

[tommylogic]

Do you see a problem using something like this?
40 CSS layouts based on the same markup

[Mack]

Lets start off with this:
1.) You cannot learn design. its completely subjective.
2.) You can learn code. Templates can help facilitate that, every book you will ever purchase these days include examples and templates to practice from.
3.) a "professional designer" (assuming we are just bucketing this title into all aspects of website / print design and development) should NEVER stop learning. There is always a new way or better way to do things. the job is ever evolving.
4.) You cannot forget "Production Designers / Developers" Who work from templates and processes to be more effective.

[jamesgoss]

Personally, I think templates are great.

They're an easy way out for those who are too cheap to hire a designer. One less person to try to "lowball" me out of my time.

They're great to learn from, both to see which elements work visually, and to see the code which facilitates them. A majority of templates are extremely cookie cutter, and those who use them as a replacement for a custom design only serve to make my work look that much better.

I don't know. It's not something I really worry about. If you do it, great. If you don't, great. I haven't personally seen the effects from people using templates, but I don't deal much with web clients yet.

[tommylogic]

Originally Posted by Mack

4.) You cannot forget "Production Designers / Developers" Who work from templates and processes to be more effective.

BINGO !!!

And I don't know many who don't keep a stock of their own designs to reuse elements in another project.
Then we're not even going to get into the JS libraries such as jQuery or MooTools... aren't those templates?