New to Mural? Get started quickly with these 10 templates

Whether you’re new to Mural or a visual collaboration expert, sometimes you need a good framework — a guided method — to help you nail that big project (or even know where to start). Mural has more than 285 templates to provide you with the framework, instructions, and direction you need to plan, collaborate, ideate, reflect, or engage.

What are Mural templates?

Templates in Mural are guided visual methods. Teams can create murals from existing templates to provide structure to working sessions.

Templates exist for everything from OKR planning to customer journey mapping and kanban boards to creating a virtual bookshelf to share with your team. Using these visual methods can eliminate guesswork, make a team faster and smarter, and make it easy for an organization to scale and deploy best practices. Templates range from the simple to the complex, so getting started with templates is easy for newcomers and seasoned visual collaborators alike.

Getting started with a Mural template

If you have an account (Get your free workspace if you don’t!), you can access templates directly within your workspace (app.mural.co) by clicking on the ‘Templates’ icon in the upper lefthand corner of your workspace toolbar. 

Once you have made a mural from an existing template, you’ll find instructions for how to use it along with helpful tooltips in the left hand corner of the mural. In some murals, you’ll also have a detailed outline on the right side of the mural with step-by-step instructions and time allotment suggestions to follow as a facilitator. 

🚀 For a library of on-demand resources to level-up your facilitation skills visit Mural Learning or click on the rocket icon in your workspace toolbar. 

To quickly orient yourself to a template, use the ‘zoom bar’ in the bottom right corner to zoom in and out (You can also toggle between “Mouse mode” and “Trackpad mode” to control zooming).

To edit the contents of the template, hold down ‘Shift +Drag +Select’ and grab any items you’d like to unlock and delete. Consider doing this to remove any content you don’t want or need. As you float your cursor over different areas of the mural you’ll also find keyboard shortcuts to help streamline your collaboration.   

💡 Collaboration is more fun when it's free. Sign up for Mural's free plan today to unlock your team's imagination.

Visual collaboration using Mural is useful for remote, in-person, or hybrid teams because it allows you to have a single source of truth without the boundaries of a physical time or place. When you run a meeting using Mural, you’ll discover that people are more likely to share their ideas, and with a template (a.k.a. a guided visual method) you’ll have a roadmap for how to accomplish your meeting or project goals right from the beginning. 

Our top 10 favorite templates

These top 10 templates are great for users of varying skill levels and for different use cases

1. One-on-one meeting

Purpose: Keep your 1-on-1s on track.

If you’ve ever struggled to remember what things you need to go over with your manager, or how to effectively keep track of important issues, goals, and objectives with your direct reports, then this is the template for you! 

Using this template you can manage projects as they evolve, or raise issues to your team or manager as they arise so you are ready to discuss them head on in your one-on-one meeting. 

2. Pre-work 

Purpose: Prepare yourself or your team for an upcoming meeting.

Ask any seasoned leader or facilitator and they will tell you that being prepared for a meeting is the key to efficient collaboration. With this template you can get introduced and quickly identify the roles of each stakeholder. This Pre-work template also allows you to get specific documents, insights, and research in one place before you tackle your problem or project as a group.

3. Sketch your neighbor 

Purpose: A fun way for teammates to interact with one another at the beginning of a meeting or workshop. 

In this template you’ll be using our draw tools to sketch one of your teammates before sharing your artistic (or not so artistic) work with one another as a group. 

Why would you do this? Fun and play make teamwork better, which is why every meeting or workshop is better when it begins with an online ice breakers, warm-ups, and energizers. These activities can be used to introduce teammates to one another, to get new visitors comfortable with collaborating visually on a mural, or simply to get everyone’s creative mojo flowing before you buckle down to solve hard problems. 

4. Meeting notes

Purpose: A visual, collaborative way to keep your meetings focused, document agendas, track decisions, and detail action items.

Remember the days when one person was assigned to furiously scribble notes onto a whiteboard during a meeting only to discover it was erased a few hours later so nothing ever came of it? Do you still have camera photos of complex whiteboard creations taking up valuable space on their phone? With the Meeting Notes template, not only can you more effectively take notes — as a group — while you discuss items, you can also stick to a visible agenda and keep the finished product of your brainstorming in one place! 

💡 Pro Tip: Add gifs, flowcharts, images, and more to better explain complex ideas, create workflows, or display emotions around a specific topic. 

5. Brainstorm and idea prioritization

Purpose: Brainstorm, group, and prioritize ideas as a team.

There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. But there are inefficient ways of capturing ideas in an inclusive way — not to mention acting on those ideas tactfully. Use this template to create a clear space to identify your problem, gather a large number of ideas in a short amount of time, and (then) prioritize your solutions against whatever constraints you may have. 

💡 Pro Tip:  Different brainstorms require different setups. Check out our Conducting a Brainstorm template for a more traditional place to capture and vote on ideas or our Mind Map Brainstorm for a cool way to find the interconnections and hidden complexities between ideas in a lightning-fast way.

6. Team warm ups and energizers

Purpose: Use this warmup to introduce people who are new to working together or to build connections among your team.

Depending on your particular work environment, onboarding a new team member or building team connections isn’t always as simple (or feasible) as a happy hour or group dinner. With Mural, you can connect and interact as a team — no matter your locations. And, when you are bringing new people onto the team, warmups like the ones in this template serve two purposes: helping your team connect and helping you subtly show your new members how to navigate a mural. From generating a funny gif to showcasing some fun facts about their innermost wishes, this template is a great way to break the ice, have some laughs, and dive into the world of visual collaboration. (See also this warm-up and ice breaker archive template for more of these you can grab and add to your next meeting.) 

7. Team charter

Purpose: Define a set of skills, concepts, and values that will align your team. 

The best way to create a shared understanding of how your team should work together involves more than just a one-sided conversation between the manager and the team. They key is to not just define it once but work as a team to create a roadmap showcasing the essential elements of communication and collaboration you can commit to as a group. Team charters can be done once at the beginning of a new project, annually as a department, or just whenever the need arises to get a group of colleagues better aligned.

8. Facebook Think Kit 

Purpose: A toolkit for rapid collaboration, ideation, and problem-solving across teams. 

The Facebook Think Kit includes five templates centered on design thinking that help teams collaborate, brainstorm, and move ideas forward together more effectively. Coupled with the Facebook Exercise Guide, the Think Kit covers a variety of common meeting needs like brainstorming, prioritization, planning, and retrospectives. 

💡 Learn more about each template and how they can be used together in our guide to the Facebook Think Kit. 

9. Mind map

Purpose: Organize ideas into a structured diagram. 

Yes, mind maps look really cool — with MURAL they are also really easy and fun to do! This template offers a few different types of mind maps, and with our Facilitation Superpowers™ features and connector points you can quickly create a mind mapping session with your team working together live or working asynchronously. 

10. Retrospective

Purpose: After a project, reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and how you can improve for next time. 

Easily capture everyone’s input and ideas in one place in our Product School-certified Retrospective template. If you’ve ever finished a project and felt like there were some important learnings for the team (who hasn’t?), then you’ll appreciate what running regular retrospectives can accomplish. By going over the positives, the negatives, and what actions to take to move forward with your work as a team, you’ll gain valuable insight that will shape future projects for the better. 

Putting it all together

Once you’ve found your go-to templates, you’ll be amazed at how much time you can save in meetings, the benefits of bringing imagination into your work, and how much you can get done as a team asynchronously. Soon, you’ll be creating your own templates so you can scale your favorite visual methods across your team and organization, too.

Guided visual collaboration in Mural brings newfound productivity, freedom, and inclusivity to any work environment, and chances are no matter what your specific use case might be, Mural has a template to start you on your path to success.