The devil is in the details
We take the designs we are given and work out what the key pages or slides are. We print those out and sit and markup the details. The margins, columns, gutters, headers, footers, fonts, table designs, rule thicknesses, colours and everything that dictates the style and layout.
We then sit, with a new empty document and recreate the design, in all it's glory, based on the details we've taken.Of course, on that journey, we have some issues to consider to make it work in whatever software we are tasked with. Given the experience we have in doing this work, we can see things before we get to this stage, but in some cases, we have to work out the best, and least complicated way to make something work as naturally as possible. After all, we regularly get asked to produce 'easy-to-use' templates.