Proposal Design
Infrastructure Proposals
Client
Various (via Hatch / Hatch Mott MacDonald)
Industry
Engineering Consultancy
My Role
Lead Proposal Designer
Location
Canada and USA
The Project
During my time at Hatch, I led the design and production of proposals for major infrastructure pursuits, including submissions for Metrolinx, Infrastructure Ontario, and the City of Toronto.
These high-stakes RFP submissions required translating dense engineering, construction, and project management content into documents that were visually clear, strategically coherent, and fully compliant with strict procurement requirements.
The work took place under the fixed deadline pressure that defines proposal environments, where design decisions had to support both the pursuit strategy and the practical realities of complex technical submissions.
The Thinking
Proposal design at Hatch meant managing a constantly shifting production load: multiple pursuits running simultaneously, each at a different stage, with different technical leads, timelines, content requirements, and submission constraints.
As the only designer in the proposal department dedicated to this work, I managed my own schedule, priorities, and production workflow. I coordinated directly with technical leads across departments, attended project meetings to understand the content I needed to design for, and made day-to-day decisions about how to balance competing deadlines without a creative director assigning or triaging that work.
The design process often began with rough technical drafts, verbal explanations, meeting notes, or incomplete source material. My role was to turn that input into clear, compliant proposal graphics that supported the submission strategy while meeting the specific requirements of each RFP.
The range of pursuits varied from smaller municipal submissions to major multi-billion-dollar infrastructure bids. Moving between them required fast context-switching, strong production discipline, and the ability to maintain quality and consistency across very different technical subjects, brands, and deadlines.
What This Demonstrates
