Published in Notion HQ

A brand new home for Notion templates & community creations

By Molly Mielke

Design, Notion

3 min read

If you think of Notion blocks as LEGO blocks, then Notion templates are like LEGO sets — the ones that help you build a castle or a spaceship (or a baby Yoda), complete with instructions and all the right parts.

Since the beginning, our community has put these blocks to use, building and sharing thousands of templates, and giving everyone access to the solutions they need to solve their problems and take on any challenge. Even more folks have remixed those templates and re-shared them, unlocking all kinds of possibilities with Notion.

So, today, we're launching our new and improved template gallery, and we invite you to take a look around.

Some of these templates are built by amazing individuals, like Youtuber Thomas Frank, who offers up a unique note-taking system. Others are built by companies like Match Group and Headspace to run their product and design teams. Notion Ambassadors Easlo and Marie Poulin have even built entire businesses selling their Notion templates.

We've always been a community-first company. And our global community of users has shown us just how important templates are to be successful with Notion. Over the last 2 years, the templates we've made available in our very scrappy gallery have been downloaded over 1 million times. It was time to build a new, much more robust home for these inspiring creations — especially those being built around the world by our users. A home where it'd be even easier to discover their work and find new ways to get value out of the tool.

The first thing we did was set up conversations with community members to learn how they found and used templates. With all the LEGO boxes out there, from our community and created ourselves, how could we help users better solve their problems as both users and makers, as well as build their own followings and businesses at the same time?

From there, we looked at the major use cases people use Notion for. That helped us identify categories in which to organize templates, and led us to improve searchability so that people can browse templates as easily as books in a library.

We also learned that users find pre-built packages of templates very handy, like a starter pack that can be customized to suit your needs. So we created Template Collections — multiple templates that, together, give you an entire workspace-in-a-box to serve whole teams or companies.

Template Collections, and templates in general, follow a rich tradition in software. Take Apple’s HyperCard, a software development kit for Apple Macintosh in the 1980s, where users could modify existing files provided by Apple.

This idea from early computer pioneers — that these machines could augment human problem-solving — is our inspiration. Most of us aren’t developers who can modify software to help solve our problems. That's the status quo we want to change by giving everyone on the planet the power to tackle tasks and challenges exactly the way they want. Templates just get the ball rolling.

We hope that the template gallery is now a place where it's remarkably easy for you to find what you're looking for and become serendipitously inspired. In here, you'll find hundreds of jumping off points to continue customizing Notion — so it works the way you work. But there's more ground to cover here.

Lego bricks

Looking forward, we want to provide you with both the LEGO blocks and LEGO boxes to make Notion just what you need. Beyond that, though, we want to make it easy for all Notion users to build with one another — to create and share what matters to them with millions of others around the world. So keep your eyes peeled for even more functionality to support creators and showcase creations, and to make the work of our community findable and immediately helpful for even more people.

I'll leave you with a couple templates as places to get started for teams.

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