Proposal Development: Graphic Guidelines & Business Development Tools for IBI Group

Process – Proposal Templates and Guidelines Package

These guidelines were developed for IBI Group to help streamline their proposal production process and create graphically engaging, consistent proposals that adhered to the corporate brand and new proposal templates. I acted as a team lead of a group peers from offices in Canada and the US, and co-designed and co-authored of these guidelines and related materials.

The peer group revealed common practices and production needs, also that designers were less likely to use guidelines to train-up on the new proposal templates due to time constraints and instead expected to use these guidelines while preparing a proposal. With this in mind, each master page of the new templates was presented with all relevant guidelines and specifications on a single all-encompassing spread. To aid navigation, easily recognized call outs were designed to prioritize information and categorize specifications. 

The guidelines were strategically developed alongside supplements and resources including coordination and production forms, a master typographic matrix, a library of vector-based illustrations, and a range of stylized supporting graphics.

Also went through similar process with IBI Visual Language Guidelines and IBI Group Brochure Guidelines.

Process – Proposal Submissions

When working on proposal submissions, a thorough review of the Request For Proposal (RFP) and its evaluation criteria reveal the scale of a project. This particular proposal would demand a large cross functional team, who would need clear representation of their expertise and a large portfolio of representative projects.

As lead designer, I was responsible for ensuring that internal teams and external firms provided compulsory content that could be incorporated into the submission in a consistent way. This often required me to assist in identifying holes in the key compulsory information and be in continual communication with outside firms to collect copy and project data/graphics.

To create an impactful and memorable submission, I translated key aspects of the project, such as the site’s scenic location and the external client’s objective to support healthy living, into an overarching design. My solution featured meaningful illustrated vignettes of the site’s local flora and a unifying a calm colour scheme that gave sense of movement throughout data driven and illustrative pages.