This project was a proposal for the Bowmanville GO Extension, a Metrolinx initiative to expand GO Rail service along the Lakeshore East corridor from Oshawa to Bowmanville.

I was responsible for turning a large volume of technical content into clear, compelling visuals that would help evaluators quickly understand Kiewit’s proposed plan: the sequencing, the risks, and how the different parts of the project fit together across the geography.

Working within Kiewit’s established brand palette, I developed a full suite of custom infographics and icons. The icon system was designed to make key information immediately recognizable, helping evaluators find the details they were looking for without having to work for it.

The most significant design decision was the approach to the project area maps. The original concept used satellite imagery from Google Maps, which is common in proposal work, but those maps can quickly become visually busy. That makes it harder to layer project-specific information clearly.

Instead, I exported the base map from ArcGIS into Illustrator, removed anything that did not support the proposal, and rebuilt the maps as clean illustrated graphics. That gave me much better control over the information hierarchy and allowed the project phases, key context, and site details to come through much more clearly.

This proposal was also produced in InDesign rather than Word, which gave the document a higher level of design control. It took some convincing at first, especially with senior business development team members who were used to working directly in Word, but once they saw the difference, they were fully on board.

The proposal was well received internally. The district manager specifically highlighted the maps and the sequencing infographics as standout elements of the submission, which was a strong confirmation that the visual approach was doing real strategic work, not just making the document look polished.