You can't.

Those templates were used the first year of the competition, were deemed a failure and were never used again. There are no submission templates for the TDC Type design competition.

James, it would be interesting to see them, from an historical perspective, if they still exist in some form. I must have seen them at the time, but don't recall them. I do recall the complaints, which seemed to be mostly about the lack of creative freedom they imposed, rather than about the actual design of the templates.

John, I'll try to find them, but I don't hold out much hope. That was many computers ago, and I don't know if those files made it forward.

Why, specifically, were they viewed as failures?

Might they be floating around the tdc.org website somewhere? I can still find many previous "call for entry"s there.

(BTW, I'm not planning on entering the competition any time soon, or using these templates when/if I do so.)

Why, specifically, were they viewed as failures?

None of the entrants liked them, the judges hated them, and we quickly realized allowing submissions to be fine-tuned by those entering would provide a better result.

Might they be floating around the tdc.org website somewhere?
The first competition was held before the TDC had a web site. The templates may be floating around, but not on the web site.

Essentially the templates were made up of different sizes of text blocks on a 11 x 17 portrait page. For text submissions I think it went from 6 point up to 24 or so. For display entries it might have had a range of 14 to 96. With a character showing at the bottom. And a pangram headline at the top.

John,

I found a printed version of the template for text design submissions. There was another for display that I cannot find. This one was printed on the back of the original Call for entries poster...

This was the front of the poster if you are interested...