The Problem With Per Document Branding
The first document you build in Quaterio (or any document tool) takes a while because you have to apply your brand to it. Fonts for headings, fonts for body, brand color for headers, logo in the right corner, footer with the website and page numbers. Twenty minutes of work to get the first document looking right.
The second document, you do it again. The third, you do it again. By the fifth document you start copying and pasting the styled blocks from earlier documents, which mostly works but introduces drift: this document uses a slightly different shade of blue, that one has an older logo, the third one has a font weight set to 600 instead of 500.
The brand kit fixes this. Set up your fonts, colors, headers, footers and print settings once at the organization level, and every new document inherits them automatically. Edit the brand kit later and the change applies to anything that uses the org defaults, not just new documents.
This post walks through the setup.
Where the Brand Kit Lives
In the app, navigate to Settings → Defaults. The brand kit lives in four tabs:
- Page, page size, language, default margins
- Fonts, font family per heading level (H1 through H6) and body text
- Colors, text colors per heading level, body text color, up to five brand colors
- Header & Footer, default header/footer configuration including logo, alignment and content
Additional configuration outside those tabs:
- Print, CMYK conversion, outlined fonts, trim marks and bleed defaults for the Business plan's print ready export
- Default columns, how many columns new content blocks use
All settings save automatically. New documents and templates created after the change inherit the new defaults.
Setting Up Fonts
The fonts tab maps a font family to each level of typography:
- H1, the largest heading, usually used for document titles
- H2, section headings (most reports and proposals use H2 heavily)
- H3, subsection headings
- H4-H6, sub subsections (most documents don't use these often)
- Body, the default font for paragraph text
You don't have to set all of them. If you only set Body and leave H1-H6 empty, all your headings inherit a sensible default. If you set H1 and Body but leave H2 alone, your H2 falls back to a sensible default.
The picker offers 26 Google Fonts spanning sans serif (Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Montserrat), serif (Playfair Display, Merriweather, Lora, EB Garamond), monospace (JetBrains Mono, Fira Code), and display fonts (Oswald, Bebas Neue, Anton, Dancing Script). If the Google Font you want is not in the picker yet, email us at hello@quaterio.com and we add it; any font available on Google Fonts is fair game. Uploading a proprietary non Google Fonts file is on the roadmap.
Two pattern recommendations:
Pattern 1: Sans serif everywhere. Pick one sans serif font for everything (Inter or DM Sans work well). Sets a clean, modern, slightly understated tone. Use this if your brand is software, B2B, fintech.
Pattern 2: Serif headings, sans serif body. Pair a serif heading font (Playfair Display, Lora, EB Garamond) with a sans serif body font (Inter, Open Sans). Reads as more editorial, more traditional. Use this if your brand is consulting, professional services, legal.
A mistake to avoid: do not pair two different serifs or two different sans serifs. The visual difference is too subtle and the result looks like a mistake. Either one type of font everywhere, or a single contrast between heading and body.
Setting Up Colors
The colors tab has three sections:
Heading colors. A color per heading level (H1 through H6) and a color for body text. Most brands set the H1 and H2 to a brand color and leave the rest at default near black. Setting all headings to a strong brand color is visually heavy and harder to scan, restraint is usually right.
Brand colors. Up to five colors registered as brand colors. These appear in every color picker in the editor as a quick access row, so anyone editing a document can apply them without remembering hex codes. Use this for your primary brand color, secondary brand color, any accent colors and a "tag" color or two for status indicators.
Picking the brand colors. The five slot limit is intentional. If you have eight colors in your brand guidelines, pick the five most used. The remaining three can still be applied by typing the hex code in the color picker; they just don't get a quick access slot.
Setting Up Headers and Footers
Header and footer defaults live in the fourth tab. For each one:
- Visibility. Show or hide by default. Most teams enable both.
- Content. The actual HTML that renders in the header or footer. Supports text, brand colors, page numbers, document title variables and inline images.
- Logo. A logo image with position controls (9-point grid: left/center/right × top/center/bottom).
- Padding. Inner spacing around the content.
The header is typically the company name, brand logo and a thin colored bar. The footer is typically the company website, page number ("Page X of Y") and a confidentiality marker if relevant.
When you create a new document, the org defaults apply automatically. Documents can still override the header/footer per document, useful for one off layouts that need different framing. The override doesn't change the defaults; it just decouples that specific document.
A subtle but useful feature: headerSource and footerSource on each document track whether the header/footer is the org default or a custom override. This means later editing the org defaults updates every document still using the default but leaves custom overrides alone.
Setting Up Print Defaults
If your team produces documents that get printed (annual reports, marketing collateral, contracts that go to a print shop), the print tab is worth configuring.
The settings are:
- CMYK conversion on or off (default: off, since most documents are digital)
- Outlined fonts on or off (default: off, see print ready PDF explained)
- Trim marks on or off (default: off)
- Bleed in mm (default: 3mm)
For a marketing team that occasionally prints brochures, the safe defaults are: trim marks on, bleed 3mm, CMYK on, outlined fonts on. For a finance team producing only digital reports, leave them all off.
These are defaults; any document can override its own print settings at export time. Setting them at the org level means a team member who's never thought about print production doesn't have to remember the right combination, the defaults are already correct.
Setting Default Columns
The "default columns" setting controls how many columns a new content block uses when you add it. Default is one. For document types that are usually two column (newsletters, brochures), changing this to two saves a click per block.
This is a tiny optimization but it adds up over hundreds of blocks. Set it to whatever matches the most common case for your team.
When the Brand Kit Doesn't Apply
A few cases where the brand kit settings don't automatically apply:
Existing documents. When you change the brand kit, only documents that explicitly reference org defaults get updated. Documents created before the change with their own per document styles keep those styles. To force a document onto the new defaults, open it and remove the per document overrides.
Templates with their own font choices. System starter templates (the free invoice template, project proposal template, business report template etc.) have their own per block font choices. When you create a document from one of these templates, those font choices come along with the template. To use the org default fonts instead, open the document and clear the per block font.
Documents imported from Word or PDF. Imports try to preserve the source document's styling. If the source had a specific font, the imported document keeps that font. Apply the brand kit afterward if you want the imported document to match.
When to Reapply the Brand Kit
Two practical moments to refresh the brand kit:
After a rebrand. Update fonts, colors, header, footer, logo. Documents using org defaults pick up the change automatically. Documents with per document overrides stay on the old branding until you touch them individually.
When onboarding a new team member who isn't a designer. The brand kit is what makes "anyone in the org can produce on brand documents" work. If a non designer is going to be editing documents, take ten minutes to verify the brand kit is correct. They will trust the defaults and the defaults need to be right.
Try It
Sign up free and the brand kit is available on every tier. The setup takes about fifteen minutes if you have your brand guidelines handy. From that point on, every document and template uses your branding automatically.
For comparisons of how Quaterio's brand kit compares against per document styling in other tools, the Canva and InDesign pages cover the trade offs.