Haldane & Co — Visual System and Collateral
A restrained visual system for a 60-person consultancy whose decks were undoing the credibility of their work.
The client challenge
Haldane's partners were winning work on reputation and losing it on presentation. Nine competing deck templates circulated internally, charts were rebuilt from scratch for every engagement, and a typical proposal took two days of designer-free formatting.
Research
We audited two years of outgoing material and interviewed the people actually assembling it at 11pm before a pitch.
- Audit of 180 client-facing documents across four practice areas
- Competitive review of the six firms Haldane loses pitches to
- Interviews with 8 consultants and 2 EAs on real production constraints
- Pain points: no chart standard, no image direction, fonts absent on half the laptops
Strategy & Brand Direction
The direction was deliberately quiet: ink-on-paper typography, generous margins and a single accent used with discipline.
- Positioning line — evidence over theatre — carried through every layout decision
- One typeface family, four weights, a strict 12-column editorial grid
- Accent colour reserved exclusively for data and calls to action
- Photography direction: real people, real rooms, no stock handshakes
Design Process
We designed the hardest artefact first — a 40-page diagnostic report — so every rule was pressure-tested before it became a guideline.
- Three art-direction routes presented, one refined over two rounds
- Master pages for cover, section break, data spread, appendix and case page
- 18-chart library with locked colour ramps and annotation styles
- Fonts and templates deployed centrally so nothing depends on local installs
Rollout
A system nobody uses is decoration, so we shipped the training with the files.
- Templates delivered natively for InDesign, PowerPoint and Google Slides
- Two live enablement sessions plus a 20-minute recorded walkthrough
- Asset library hosted internally with a naming and versioning convention
- Quarterly review retained for the first year
Final Showcase
Stationery, reports, proposals, event collateral and a social kit — all from one grid and one type scale.
- Print: reports, folders, business cards, conference boards
- Digital: proposal decks, one-pagers, LinkedIn and newsletter templates
- Data: a chart library that survives being edited by non-designers
What we shipped.
Everything handed over at the end of the engagement.
Measured outcomes.
Reported by the client after launch.
3×
Inbound qualified leads
-64%
Time to produce a proposal
+41%
Proposal-to-meeting rate
1 system
Replacing 9 rogue templates
“The work finally looks like the thinking behind it. Partners stopped rebuilding decks and started sending them the same day.”
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