Crochet and Knit Pattern Template: Design a Fresh Minimalist Template to Boost Sales

Ready Your Crochet or Knit Pattern for Selling Online Using the Minimalist Template

Designing a professionally clean and minimalistic crochet or knit pattern template is easily done in a few minutes with Microsoft Word or a similar word processor.

The marketplace for selling online patterns that you have created is growing rapidly with the popularity of sites like Etsy.com. 

What holds most people back from either trying to sell or from having success selling their crochet and knit patterns? A professional layout.

If you sell crochet or knit patterns, this guide to a professional pattern layout is precisely what you need to get the most out of your online sales. We'll cover the complete design of the pattern using Microsoft Word (or any similar word processing program).

Seriously, if you are a crochet or knit pattern seller, this guide will help no matter how experienced or inexperienced you are in the design of layouts that will sell. In this guide, we'll focus on a minimalist template that puts the focus on photography and instructions, leaving the details subtle so they don't detract from the beauty of your crochet or knit pattern.

Why the Minimalist Pattern Template?

The Minimalist Pattern Template puts a strong focus on photography and instructions. What happens using this layout is that the viewer is immediately drawn in by the finished product, and then eager to read the clearly available instructions.

Pros: The minimalist structure makes the pattern extremely easy to read, and the finished product is put on display in a way that will keep the user of your crochet or knit pattern eager to keep going. Because of the layout, it is also very easy to keep instruction pages to a minimum. Psychologically, this affects your pattern user; because the instructions are all on one page, for example, the project doesn't feel nearly as daunting. Major brownie points that will pay off in return customers.

Cons: You absolutely must have professional looking photos that will draw the viewer in. You can't get away with poor lighting or a display that isn't right for the product you're showing off. The crochet or knit pattern viewer should be stuck on the photograph, and then they will be eager to purchase your pattern and dive into the instructions.

Design the Minimalist Crochet or Knit Pattern Template

To create the template, you will need a good word processor. The example illustrations attached to this article use Microsoft Word 2007. This version of Microsoft Word incorporates a PDF generator. If you don't have this option in your word processor, you will definitely need to consider grabbing PDF writing software that is compatible with the word processor you use. Selling your finished pattern in a PDF format will also boost sales because it is accessible to the most people and offers security options.

Instructions are written for Word 2007; you may need to adjust some instructions to find the right tools.

The coolest thing about the Minimalist Pattern Template is that it really only takes a few steps to design, and using it is easy because you just need to drop things into their proper place. So, let's dig into this baby and get to designing.

The Cover Page

Our cover page will be kept extremely clean, placing full focus on photography and subtly entering details that are necessary.

1. Fire up your word processor. Go ahead and play it safe by hitting 'Enter' a few times, creating new paragraphs so you can move around easily if something goes wonky.

2. First, create a single-cell table. Don't worry about the borders or anything else at this point. Go ahead and click inside the cell, and insert the photograph of the finished product you're selling the pattern of. Then, right-click the photograph and hover over 'Text Wrapping'. Choose the 'Behind Text' option.

At this point, your tables and cells should be set and your photograph (the highlight!) set behind text.

3. Now, we're going to create cells to fit our subtle content in. Click once beside the photograph and insert a new table that is one cell wide and four cells tall. Again, don't worry about the borders yet. Click in the top cell and type 'sample title text'. You may need to change the color of the text in order to really see it at this point, depending on the color of your photograph. Reference the second illustration attached to this article.

4. Before we play with text, let's set a border to the top so that our title is a little less subtle. To do this, highlight (select) the top cell that you just typed in, right-click it, and choose 'Borders and Shading'. Use the Shading option to choose a color that is complimentary (for the minimalist design, a complimentary or even matching color works best) to fill the cell. DO NOT remove any borders yet - they make things much easier to adjust. Once your cell's background color is set, you may need to adjust the width of your inside cells to fit your photograph. Do this now.

The completed cover page, with cell lines highlighted so that you can easily see how it is laid out.

5. It's time to enter all our text and play around with fonts. For the minimalist pattern template, clean fonts without a lot of swirls or extra lines tend to work best. The only place, if any, that you have fancy looking text should be in your logo. Text to enter: In the first cell, replace 'sample title text' with the actual title. The second cell should contain a short 1-2 sentence description that 'sells' the pattern. In the third cell, just keep hitting the 'Enter' key until your final cell is near the bottom of your photograph. The fourth cell contains your logo and/or name and copyright info. As you go through the text entering, you may need to adjust your photo by dragging it back up to the top of the outside cell. Reference the third illustration attached to this article (cell lines have been colored to make them easier to see).

6. When you're happy with the overall look, highlight all the cells and copy-paste them on to the next page in your document. Then, go back to the cover page and highlight the cells again. Right-click, choose 'Borders and Shading', and remove all borders. Reference the fourth illustration attached to this article. Voila! Cover page is done. Don't forget to save your pattern template at this point.

The finished cover page with all cell lines removed, ready to go!

The Instruction Page

Typically, you won't want to use the minimalist pattern template if it will take much more than one page for the instructions. Due to the layout of the instructions, you can fit a ton of info on a single page - but if it's going to take more than one page, you might seriously consider using a different pattern template.

With your template practically designed and your photo in place, this will take seconds to complete.

1. First, select your photograph and delete it by hitting the backspace key on your keyboard. If any text has 'disappeared' because it's white, change the color to black. The top cell will remain exactly as it is - don't edit it. In the second cell, replace the description with the pertinent pattern information: skill level, measurements, materials needed and exact brands and types used in the photograph, hook size(s), and gauge. In the third cell, insert a new table that is two cells wide and once cell tall. Copyright information should stay the same in the footer, but if you included a logo on the cover page you'll want to remove it from this page.

2. It's time to enter your pattern. Start in the left cell in your center table, carrying text over to the right cell when the left cell has pushed your bottom text to the end of the page. Don't have a pattern to enter right now but want to see what it looks like with text? No problem! Use the lorem ipsum generator freely available here.

3. Remove all the borders from your tables the same way you did in step 6 of the cover page. Reference the last illustration attached to this article. 

The complete instruction page, filled in temporarily with lorum ipsum text to give a feel for the completed look of how the pattern will appear once the template is used 'for real'.

You're all done! Save your work, and you have a Minimalist Pattern Template that you can use repeatedly for selling your crochet or knit patterns. The clean look and emphasis on lovely cover photos will make a huge difference in the success of your sales, too!