Are you throwing words together for your design proposal, at the deadline, even if you want to win? Are you missing out on projects you thought you’d nail? I rescue project narratives even if the deadline is tight. (My first career was as an international journalist meeting tight daily deadlines.) Or I create text, collaborating to relay your vision, and intention. Can you count on smooth, error-free presentations for your clients and the judges? Are words afterthoughts on your storyboards? I can work with you from RFPs through to finished storyboards and books for submission.
What I can help with. But first, what I can’t help with. I can’t help with the financials of your project. I can check the small print to make sure you haven’t left blanks or said something silly. I do spot and kill jargon. There is a difference between semantics and jargon. I can’t help it if the client chose their brother-in-law’s mate’s design over yours. Not even if their proposal was a xeroxed pile of steaming cut and paste shambles. It happens. We reset the schmuck client radar and go on to more great work. We take the best of those concepts on to later and better projects.
I research your client and the project criteria. I listen to everything you say about the concept, about your vision. I go away and scribble some ideas. I send you a draft, maybe two. You wonder for a moment if I’ve understood a thing. Then you tell me what you want. It’s the process.
Have you told this story as only you can as best as you can? Most of all, it’s security that your proposal is the complete package. Text should enhance your visual. I bring the focus to your design concept. Would you like the client or competition judge to scratch their head as they try to understand the text? Or you would you prefer them to be saying, ‘Ahah!’ as they spot yet another clever and thoughtful aspect of your design
Proposals and RFPs: Are your designs fabulous but you can’t spell or write well? Is pulling together text, the painful afterthought when you have an urgent proposal deadline?
Forward planning of the text would be nice but this is the real world!
In the final days and hours, adrenalin soars and concept and vision can change quickly and move to a higher level.
Design clients count on my help on deadline when it’s most needed. Many proposals I’ve written have won or been highly placed.
Guarantee your proposal text is free of distracting typos. Display your narrative and demonstrate your design vision with pride and imagination at every stage of the proposal process.
Drawing on my experience of meeting deadlines and writing as an international journalist, I bring out the best of your ideas in those crucial last days (or hours) before submitting your proposal.
If you are preparing a stunning proposal for a book or storyboard, the words must equal the vision. Better yet, the text should enhance the vision and the story will in reality when the project is built.
White papers: Transform your research and ideas into profile-raising publications your clients and potential clients will value, keep and read and re-read. As a former writer and editor of special reports at the Financial Times and the Australian Financial Review, I gather and write accurate and engaging reports and features.
Preparing and publishing a white paper has elevated conversations with clients and among the team at Carr Design in Australia,
Dan Cox, Director of Commercial Interiors, interviewed in DQ magazine.
Web content: Clear and guiding web content for your clients with calls to action, and engaging project narratives, services pages, team pages, and stories to inform and assist your clients. Bring together your vision and information meaningfully to assist potential clients and attract the interest in your professional circles and attract media attention.
Marian managed our web project efficiently, conducting interviews with our design chiefs in the US, Asia and Europe.