Rufous & Co: A 47-Page Proposal Cut to a 12-Page Pitch

Snapshot

• 47 to 12 — pages, one document cut down to a pitch

• 5 — researched blockers mapped one to one onto five builds

• 7 — reusable components behind every page

The challenge

The research and the proposal were two separate documents on two unrelated design systems. The customer avatar study explained who the client was selling to. The redesign proposal explained what to build. Nothing connected them, so the research never visibly justified the work it was paying for, and the proposal read as a list of deliverables rather than an argument.

What I did

Merge both into one document on the research deck's design system, re-sequence the research so it argues toward the build, then cut a 12-page pitch out of the result for the room where nobody reads 47 pages.

The work

One system, not two. Every proposal page was rebuilt by cloning the research deck's own layouts rather than approximating them, so the type scale, colour roles, margins, running headers and footers are structurally identical instead of visually close. One typeface across six sizes and two weights. Warm off-black ink, one body grey, warm paper, a sand panel, and a single accent in two values. No pure black, no pure white anywhere.

The page that does the work. One spread maps the five researched blockers onto the five builds that remove them, one row each. The solution stops being asserted and starts being derived. Everything after it reads as consequence rather than scope.

The cut. Twelve pages following a standard pitch arc: problem, customer, why now, solution, why it works, three product pages, the plan, the ask. Every page in the short version reuses a component from the long one, so the two documents read as the same object rather than a summary of one.

Stack: PowerPoint, Figma, Montserrat, Python