This. Is. How. We. Work

ProposalsWe’ve seen a lot of self-proclaimed “creative digital agencies” over the years. Their designs might be good, ideas might be creative, but we always wondered, why are they restricting themselves to being creative only on the end product? Our creative juices start flowing from the minute we hear of a new client. And what’s the first thing our client sees? The proposal. We spent hours and hours, debating, contradicting, brainstorming, to get the most perfect proposal document ever.

And here are a few things we learnt,

Make the client happy

When you open a Skcript proposal, we want you to smile. There’s a lot of thought process that goes into the content that’s on our proposal. We add a lot of weird stuff in there, a lot of “jokes”. (Yes, that’s in quotes because that’s what our co-founders think jokes are

We try making the proposal as personal as possible. There’s a lot of oho-on-one communication going on there. It might be adding “Agree that we gave matchsticks to Adam and Eve” in the requirements section, or something even more crazier. Our entire team gets into the action of creating the proposal and it just makes it so much more fun! We love throwing around crazy ideas, not-so-funny jokes just to put a smile on our clients faces.

Be anal about the detailing

Everything from the font, to the spacing, to the margins, to the color choices is customized on all Skcript documents. We love doing it. But one thing we keep in mind is, minimalism.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

- Leonardo Da Vinci

Choose fonts that are symmetric and neat. You might be thinking of “Ariel” or “Times New Roman”, but no. Those fonts are old, and boring. They’re used in reports. Not in something as pristine as the proposal. You want your client to save your proposal. It just might be the thing that makes them comeback. Because if you’re detailing your proposal to this level, there’s definitely something magical going on. We love fonts like “Helvetica Neue Thin” and “Open Sans Light”. Choose something that is easy on the eyes and looks classy.

The templates we create are literally an identity to us. There’s a certain uniformity right from the documents to the posters to the promotions.

Research. Analyze. Think.

The proposal is the first document you hand over to the client. It’s ridiculously important. Do adequate research into your clients requirements, as well as the client. Is he giving a lot of importance to color schemes that match his requirements or does he want to try something? Do you need to set a smaller or larger timeframe? You’d do well to research his competitors as well. All of this adds value to yourself. Your proposals don’t have to be a set of tables and boxes. Make it fun.

What not to include in a proposal

Please don’t give me your portfolio in a proposal. I’ve come to you knowing what you do, I don’t need a remainder.

You don’t have to include lengthy court-material promises. No more “I hereby declare to serve you with all the highest level of purple footed ugliness.” No. You’d have not read it, don’t think I’m going to either.

Tools we use

We love Pages for Mac. It’s perfect. Everything is aligned, and everything snaps into place. It’s the easiest text editor to prototype and manipulate content. And it’s so easy to export any document as a PDF from Pages.

The smartest tool on there is the ability to save different types of text styles. We use a certain one for Header, Body, Caption. And Pages does all of this and saves it for us.

“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”

- Jony Ive

Originally published at blog.skcript.com on March 30, 2014.