Proposals

Proposals: Turning Product Images Into On-Brand Pitches, Automatically

Company: InkSoft | Role: Lead designer, partnering with a PM | Timeline: 2018

Impact summary

Led design of Proposals, a new tool letting print shop owners create visually persuasive quotes and pitch decks for potential clients. Adoption was strong enough that InkSoft's older, outdated invoicing and quoting tool was eventually deprecated in its favor.

The problem

InkSoft had an outdated tool for quoting and invoicing existing work, but nothing for the earlier, higher-stakes moment: pitching a new client, whether a school, business, or team, on why to choose them in the first place. That gap existed for everyone from solo shop owners handling everything themselves to larger teams with dedicated staff for it, and closing it was an internal priority.

My role & the constraint that made it hard

I led design as part of a team, partnering closely with a PM. The real challenge was balancing genuine visual flexibility, since these documents needed to actually look persuasive and professional, against ease of use for shop owners who weren't designers themselves. The tool also had to handle two very different kinds of content in one experience: structured quote and invoice data alongside visual, pitch-deck-style content.

Process

Discovery: Print shop owners needed to produce something that looked genuinely branded and persuasive, without design skill or extra tools, using content they already had on hand: their own product images.

Key decision: I designed the proposal builder to auto-style each document using backend logic that pulled the prominent colors directly from the product images a user uploaded. Rather than asking non-designers to make styling choices, the tool did it for them, automatically, so every proposal looked cohesively branded around the actual products being pitched, without the user needing any design judgment at all.

The solution

Proposals let print shop owners build visually branded quotes and pitch decks in one place, automatically styled around the colors in their own product images, combining structured quote data with persuasive visual content in a single tool.

Outcome

• Adoption was strong enough that InkSoft's older, outdated quoting and invoicing tool was eventually deprecated in favor of Proposals.

• Solved a real gap in the new-client pitching process for shop owners ranging from solo operators to larger dedicated teams.