Shorthand offers a wide variety of story templates to help you get started on a new story or learn some creative techniques. Each is a pre-made story with text and media that you can easily replace or build on from within the story Editor.
Depending on your plan, your workspace may also allow for personal story templates and workspace story templates: enabling you to save your own re-usuable story layouts, and create or use templates created by your workspace team leaders.
Story templates differ from section templates, which can also be created by you, other members of your workspace, and Shorthand)
Using story templates
Click the "NEW STORY" button on the dashboard and choose a team if prompted. A window opens, from which you may choose to start your new story completely blank, from a template, guided by our AI Creative Companion, or by importing content.
When Story templates is selected, depending on your plan, you may see a wide selection of templates created by Shorthand, or a secondary toggle with which to select to see templates by Shorthand, your workspace, and you:
Mouse-over a thumbnail image and you'll see a Preview button that launches a full-screen preview of the story in a new tab so that you can see its full content:
Shorthand's own story templates are also categorised into groups that may help you quickly find one suitable to your current mission: whether that's a particular editorial style or to learn some creative tips and tricks:
To use any template, click its image or description and the editor opens loaded with the chosen template, ready for you to replace its content. Any story you start from a template will be added to your dashboard as a new story and can be edited at any time. A story doesn't retain a link to the template it was created from, so updates to a template will not affect any aspect of a story made from it.
Story templates may have been created with a theme other than one used by your team or workspace. As a result, the colours and fonts used in a template may not always render as intended, with potential for some colour and font mis-matches.
Custom story templates
Available on some plans, custom story templates are those created by you or other members of your workspace. These provide starting points for the types of stories you make regularly.
As with the Shorthand story templates, custom story templates include multiple story sections, their content, and design. This enables you and your team to start new stories with an established structure and adapt it with new content.
Create a template from an existing story
Find the story on your dashboard.
Open its three-dot menu and select Copy as template:
3. Choose a destination team if prompted, then choose if the template will be available only to you or to all members of the team (this choice will only be shown to team leaders and workspace administrators). Provide some descriptive detail of the template so that you (and your team) know its purpose, then save:
Your template can now be seen and managed from the Story templates menu on the dashboard (if you wish to change the template's description or update the template itself), and from the Templates option every time you start a new story.
Story template view of the dashboard
This can be seen by clicking the Story templates link on the left-side of the dashboard (A in the image below). Here you can manage individual templates by clicking their three-dot menu (B) and choosing to edit the template details, add collaborators, tags, copy/duplicate the template, and more. You can also create a new template from this view (C):
Deleting or modifying a template in any way does not change any story created from it.
Tips for useful templates
Name templates by their purpose, such as “Customer case study”.
Use the text within the template itself to describe what belongs in each section using clear placeholder information.