Mario Garcia, the newspaper designer said in a recent blog, “Let’s not make 2012 the year of the template.”

It may be too late to stop it, since virtually all content web sites are made from templates of one kind or another. And is that such a bad thing?

But Mario was writing about print.

After having worked in more than a hundred newspaper design projects I can say one thing: the concept of templates –or a “carefully-crafted design system” for that matter– is not a novel idea.

Art Directors and designers are always looking for new ways of increasing the time spent in their creative process by coming up with tools that help them speed up the production process. The brawnier the tools, the richer the crafting and faster the execution will be.

That’s exactly the idea behind Ready-Media newspaper templates.