A template gives you a layout and lets you change the colours. That is why template sites look like template sites: the bones are identical and the paint is different, and people can feel the bones.
We build the other way round. A direction does not own the layout. It owns the decisions that make a layout feel like it came from somewhere: which typeface carries the headline and at what weight, how far the small capitals are tracked, whether corners exist, how a photograph is graded, and what the single accent is allowed to touch.
An example, three ways
Take a page for a small hotel. Same sections in the same order, same photographs, three directions:
- Riviera sets the headline in a high-contrast didone on a plaster ground, grades the photographs warm, and lets a terracotta accent touch exactly two things.
- Nocturne keeps the structure and moves it to near-black, swaps the accent for brass, and multiplies the photographs down so they read as evening.
- Modernist drops the serif entirely for a light geometric sans with wide tracking, removes the corner radius, leaves the photographs ungraded, and uses a muted olive once.
None of those is the same page with a new hex code. Each is a different set of decisions about the same material, which is what art direction means.
How three get chosen out of twenty-six
The model reads the brief for category, register and audience, then scores the presets against them. A private hotel and a payroll product do not get the same shortlist, and a waitlist page for a tasting room does not get the same shortlist as either.
You see three because three is the number people can compare. Twenty-six is a menu, and a menu is a way of making someone else do your job.
Switching without redrawing
Because a direction is a set of tokens rather than a layout, changing it costs nothing. The markup does not move. Your edits survive. Your copy survives. The page you spent twenty minutes on does not have to be regenerated to be seen in another register, which means trying one is cheap enough to actually do.
That is the whole argument for keeping presentation and structure apart, and it is worth the discipline it costs us on every new section we build.