When working in the aerospace industry, it is difficult to harness ones creativity. Sometimes it feels like the artist is choked by the company’s strict brand identity policy as well as government regulations.

These restrictions can prove challenging, especially when working proposals. The proposal is an extremely technical document, with the objective of selling an idea to what is usually a government agency. The document is usually a few thousand pages of text which includes objectives, performance, talent and cost and contains several hundred images. These images are a mix of charts, technical art, org charts and exciting flow-charts (sarcasm).

Believe it or not, I have grown to love proposals and all the restrictions within them. They provide to me, a challenge in which I can focus all of my expertise in graphic design, marketing and communication. It is common to receive an idea on scratch paper the size of a business card, intended to explain the workings of a turbine engine! It is up to the artist to communicate what the engineer intended on the scratch paper.

In addition to the technical aspect of the work, proposal art and management requires the ability to manage talents which range from artists, drafters, desktop publishers to technical writers. The proposal time-frame ranges from several weeks, to several months or even years! When it is all said and done, an effective proposal should be a symphony of colors, shapes and ideas that work harmoniously to transform a drag and mundane anthology of black and white text, into a compelling and fascinating work of art.