Design Proposals: You win some, you lose some…

We love it when clients come to us for design or strategy, but there are times when we get excited about a project and put together a design proposal to pitch it ourselves. We always hope that these pitches will win us the work, but you can’t win them all. Sometimes we’re not the best fit, sometimes the client isn’t ready, sometimes (rarely) the client doesn’t like our work, and sometimes the client simply doesn’t value design.

Advertising and graphic design is a unique field in that practitioners are often expected to provide their services “on spec” (i.e. for free). This can lead to a lot of time and energy with little to no yield. But not all is lost – it’s prompted some clever and creative parodies of the practice like this one.

Regardless, it seems a waste to simply bin all of the work that goes into these pitches, so we’ve decided to share. Here is a deck we built for a mixed-use development project in Athens. We still love some of the ideas for the look and feel of the project; the environment studies, the historical logo inspiration, and the color palettes are particularly nice. So without further adieu, click through the gallery below. (Names and some pages have been redacted to protect the innocent.)

The owners of this project, unfortunately, went in another direction. We wish them the best of luck. Maybe you, dear reader, have a design project and you love the direction of this design proposal? If so, get in touch via the form below and let’s talk. We’ll discount some of the discovery and style-tiling. 😉

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