A project description, from the client's Principal Investigator:
From the time NASA released the AO, we had just four months to produce and submit a complex, detailed, and professional proposal. More than 150 pages long, the proposal had to successfully convey our science, our management approach, the technical readiness of our instruments, and the justification of our projected budget of about $67M over 16 years. It also had to adhere to strict requirements on types of information, formatting, structure, and section lengths. In all, NASA listed a matrix of 180 separate requirements for the document. Failure to comply with any of the requirements could result in rejection of the entire proposal.
Tom worked for me full time for about three months as we assembled the proposal. His main responsibility was to serve as the single point for integration of all the raw proposal material (text, images, tables) into a single layout that was compliant with the NASA requirements but also professional looking and easy to read and review. Tom devised a system wherein we would provide the raw material in Word documents and he would import it into InDesign. He developed the overall layout and organization of the proposal, from details such as the formatting of tables, section headings, color schemes, and fonts to big picture organizational work including organizing table of contents, tracking the most recent versions of each section, and providing updates on compliance with the NASA requirements. Tom far exceeded our expectations in this. The final document was beautiful but also very easy to read and process, adhering to Tom's suggestions for how to keep the material clean and streamlined. Both the overall process he developed and the detailed document design have been adopted by my research group for subsequent proposal activities which Tom has also participated in.
From the time NASA released the AO, we had just four months to produce and submit a complex, detailed, and professional proposal. More than 150 pages long, the proposal had to successfully convey our science, our management approach, the technical readiness of our instruments, and the justification of our projected budget of about $67M over 16 years. It also had to adhere to strict requirements on types of information, formatting, structure, and section lengths. In all, NASA listed a matrix of 180 separate requirements for the document. Failure to comply with any of the requirements could result in rejection of the entire proposal.
Tom worked for me full time for about three months as we assembled the proposal. His main responsibility was to serve as the single point for integration of all the raw proposal material (text, images, tables) into a single layout that was compliant with the NASA requirements but also professional looking and easy to read and review. Tom devised a system wherein we would provide the raw material in Word documents and he would import it into InDesign. He developed the overall layout and organization of the proposal, from details such as the formatting of tables, section headings, color schemes, and fonts to big picture organizational work including organizing table of contents, tracking the most recent versions of each section, and providing updates on compliance with the NASA requirements. Tom far exceeded our expectations in this. The final document was beautiful but also very easy to read and process, adhering to Tom's suggestions for how to keep the material clean and streamlined. Both the overall process he developed and the detailed document design have been adopted by my research group for subsequent proposal activities which Tom has also participated in.
