The Shortlist Episode 92: MacGyver Proposal Hacks

Proposal deadlines have a way of testing even the most seasoned AEC marketers. No matter how carefully a pursuit is planned, you never know when you'll have to defuse a ticking time bomb, minutes before the deadline. In this episode of The Shortlist, Wendy Simmons is joined by designers Becky Ellison and Lauren Jane Peterson to discuss the “MacGyver moments” that happen when proposal teams are racing against the clock.

From InDesign crashes and corrupt exports to oversized PDFs, emergency printer fixes, and hand-assembled printed proposals, Becky and Lauren Jane share stories from the trenches along with practical troubleshooting tips that can save a submission in the final hour. They also explore strategies for making impossible amounts of content fit on the page, compressing files under strict upload limits, and knowing when to make a sacrifice to the "proposal gods" rather than missing the deadline entirely.

If you’re a proposal manager, designer, or marketer who’s ever submitted with seconds to spare, this episode offers equal parts practical advice, camaraderie, and comic relief for surviving the chaos of pursuit work.

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist, we're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.

I'm Wendy Simmons, and today we're talking with Becky Ellison and Lauren Jane Peterson to talk about some tips and tricks and stories from the adrenaline-fueled world of last-minute proposal emergencies and some sneaky ways to save the day.

Hi, Becky. Hi, Lauren Jane.

Hey, hey, hi.

I am sure you too qualify as our biggest MacGyver-y type people on the team, although everyone's got some skills. I'm glad you're joining us today.

Before we get into the big topic, the big MacGyver topic, are you working on anything right now that's requiring some MacGyver-ing?

Yes.

Of course. Here comes Becky with the stories.

I have been working on a couple of proposals just recently that are very strictly limited in pages. For example, the most recent one has a limit of a page limit of eight pages, folks.

Oh, yeah.

Eight pages. Did they ask a very small amount of questions? No.

What my main MacGyver-ing responsibility has been for this, we haven't even started inputting the content. This is just like setting up the file.

I've had to squeeze the tables onto a page where just with a lot of rows and a lot of columns, and the adrenaline really gets going because you have to make so many tiny little incremental adjustments, and you have to move this and squish that, and I

don't know, I find that exciting. And yes, spoiler alert, I was able to fit all of these tables onto the correct amount of pages, and I believe we're going to get this in under the limit.

That is not a spoiler alert because you always get all of the tables to fit in. Magically, somehow, that is your...

Failure is not an option. It's going to be an intense episode. I'm excited.

And I wanted to ask you, Becky, for this eight-page proposal, how long is the RFP?

Is it like more than 20 pages? Probably.

I think so. I believe it is, yeah.

Because that's how it works.

Yep. It is a public agency, and that is all I will say.

See episode, I'm guessing like 84, where we just talked about RFP pet peeves. Anyways, we won't go back into that. Lauren Jane, what are you MacGyvering?

Yeah.

I haven't had the pleasure of having a proposal thrill much lately, but I did finally get put on one last week, and wow, I kind of missed it. I was MacGyvering some graphics.

There's a little bit of proposal work and a little bit of interview work, and it felt good to be back in there.

The love-hate relationship with proposals. I think we've said before here, and we say it certainly internally, that we love the proposal for the deadline itself. That's really nice.

Some projects feel like they could go on and on. If there wasn't a deadline, of course, the deadline brings... The proposal deadline brings the MacGyver component out, right?

It's that friction that we're up against.

So over the seasons, we've talked so much about our best practices in InDesign, how to share files, the tips that make our work easier. That's all lovely. Cue the rainbows and thirds singing.

That's the happy time. But today we're gonna go a little bit different in a different direction here and talk about the tools that we use when we have to get out the hammer, break the glass in case of an emergency. Nobody freak out.

Nobody's freaking out. Actually, we're all freaking out when this happens, right? And how do we pull a rabbit out of a hat when we were down to the wire?

Again, we need a compilation of all of my metaphors I use on this podcast. Got them all. I squished them together.

It's a signature thing I've been doing since forever. So it's nothing new. But it's true, right?

You're like you've got the shaky hands. Everyone's stressed out. You're waiting for whatever.

And you really do need to pull out your MacGyver tricks to get the proposal submitted. And as I was thinking about this, I was realizing that when we created the marketers, I say we, but Becky is the creative visual genius behind the marketers.

We've got stickers that are really fun. And one of those characters, we named them MacGyver. But we also had to do this like quick poll across our group.

I don't think we took it outside of Middle of Six. We're like, does everyone know who MacGyver is?

That was a hard day.

Yeah. It's a good thing to remember to do. Know your audience and make sure you're looking beyond just yourself here.

Good news, everybody knew who MacGyver was.

That was great.

But because we don't know the age of every person who's listening to this episode, maybe we should just mention that MacGyver was this character in the 80s and 90s television character, who was capable of solving and getting out of the trickiest

situations with basically a Swiss army knife and duct tape. And so, and those two things, I think, were even if maybe that wasn't in every episode, it's kind of what he became known for, was pulling out the Swiss army knife and some duct tape and

All right, MacGyver, think.

So, you know, that's who MacGyver is.

And in our AEC marketing world, I feel like all of us marketers end up being a little bit of MacGyver's, right?

Absolutely.

Figuring out how to. Well, Becky has shared things in past podcasts, and I won't steal all of her stories, but sometimes we just make a miracle happen. And it is something that comes with some experience and a steady hand under pressure.

So that's, that's who the MacGyver dude is. Also in my deep dive research, I watched a great YouTube video that said 15 things you didn't know about MacGyver. I only got through three because I was kind of bored.

But number one, number one was that they had a no gun rule on the show. They, they, they said if he has a gun, then that's going to be the only solution he pulls, you know, goes to, right?

He need to have to not have that as an option to be able to like save the day. And the other thing that I thought was really cool about that no gun rule is that they wanted him to solve his problems with science. I don't know.

Come on, are you engineering friends? Doesn't that make you happy? Or even like, you know, the carpenters trying to, you know, build something, make something happen.

So I like that. He wanted to use science. So anyways, good thing we got all the art people on the podcast today.

Love it.

Steam.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we're going to, we're going to share some war stories, some of our last minute nixes, you know, the things that we do that could make the difference between meeting the deadline or heaven forbid, getting disqualified, blowing up the

These are not like necessarily best practice tips, everybody.

Like, this is not when everything's fine. The rainbows, as previously mentioned, like that is a different episode. These are like, clock is ticking.

Everybody's panicking. Oh my God, make a miracle happen type scenarios. So, you know, like tell no one.

Oh, right.

I know.

Listener discretion advised.

Yes, this is not going to heading up. Here's our best practices. Becky, can you, I failed to share this part, but I think you do such a good job of it.

Can you tell us about the MacGyver Marketer character that we created, especially her tagline? Cause I just think you say it so well. Sorry to put you on the spot, but I love it.

Absolutely.

I'm, I always have the, I'm holding up the sticker sheet of the Marketers right now. I have it right in front of me at all times. MacGyver is our character.

My best description of what MacGyver looks like is she's, she's got a leather jacket and like the aviator sunglasses, which is Sherri MacGyver. She's got her Swiss army knife with everything out, ready to go.

And of course our tagline from MacGyver is, the file crashed and the proposal's due in five minutes. Wake me up in four. And I feel like that's just, that's all of us at times, but I really relate to that.

And yeah, I don't know. Alyssa was our MacGyver for Halloween, and I feel like that was a really good match. Did she inspire this character's physicality in some way?

Maybe. I don't know.

I don't know.

But.

If you need a sticker sheet, we have some. You can email us.

They're fun.

At theshortlist.middleofsix.com. We hardly ever say that email, but it does exist and you can email us if you want to send us any messages.

I'm going to email it. Please do.

All right, enough fooling around here.

Let's get into some of the stories that we promised we'd share. Becky, what are some of your best last-minute MacGyver successes?

Oh, man. So as listeners may know, I worked in-house at a large general contractor for 11 years. We did all of our proposal stuff in-house, start to finish.

A lot of printed copies were going out at that time, so we were printing, we were finding, we were doing the whole process. I remember one proposal that we got submitted.

This one was via e-mail, but it was submitted at the exact second that it was due.

I know that because the project manager was sitting in the marketing office with the laptop and we were all working furiously and trying to get it done and sending it over to him.

The reason it was so late is because, well, several things that weren't my fault, but also the InDesign file kept crashing. There was just not enough time to try anything legitimate, so I was just screenshotting pages and exporting those.

Those would be JPEGs that I would pull into a PDF, and I had to assemble those together, and then I had to compress it down to get it emailable.

The project manager was sitting there sweating and shaking, and he's just like, why did I get that look that they get? Everybody's like, we're all crowding around and like, come on.

But I was able to get all of those screenshotted pages folded into the PDF, had the PDF smashed down for emailing, sent it over to him, and he was like, hands shaking. Already had the email typed out, which is a good practice to do.

Already have that email saved and ready to go, and attached it and sent it.

And we all looked at the screen, and it was literally, I think it was like three o'clock deadline, and the email was sent at literally three o'clock, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, right on the dot. That was very exciting.

Whew, yes. Good tip on that, having that email ready. Dear Linda, we're pleased to present our proposal.

Linda, you're the best.

Call back to The Shortlist.

That's a good tip, and you're already making my hand sweaty.

I know, I'm like, my face feels hot. I was thinking about it.

Heart palpitations.

That was a good electronic one, but I feel like the real excitement came with the printed copies, to be honest, because something would always go wrong with the printer.

Or one time, we didn't have the tab that we needed in the thing, and tabs were required. So I had to hand make tabs out of old tabs and file folders and cut them down and hand write the name of the tabs on there and stuff.

And I remember we had a response where the RFP required that it was binder clips, so not bound, but they specified exactly what kind of binder clip it needed to be and all that. And we didn't have that exact binder clip as we realized way too late.

So we sent the project engineer to the store to get a binder clip. And he put me on FaceTime to be like, is this one okay? Is that one?

And we like, it was just such an exciting rush. And then you get everybody, you start pulling people in to help assemble the books.

I mean, I've drafted the receptionist, I've drafted people from IT who know nothing about marketing, but everybody get in here, we're forming an assembly line, let's go. They always knew it was like, if marketing had a request, you had to get on it.

I almost miss it, almost. Oh.

Okay, first of all, buy all the binder clips. That's the answer. Also same answer when you go to the Home Depot plumbing department, buy all the parts, because you're gonna need them all.

And you can return them. But then, Becky, do you feel like, or I guess any, Lauren Jane, you could answer this too, but do you feel like those days are gone? Is this like relics of printed proposal time?

I know there still are some printed, but we sent so many of them out. I'm just like, is this even happening? Or are there still?

It seems pretty regional.

We talked to some clients in different regions who are printing proposals still.

But I wonder if maybe because we're doing a lot of work in states that are, states and municipalities are a little bit more eco-conscious, so they're wanting to save the paper. I'm wondering if maybe that's why.

But I hear whispers of printed proposals still.

Sure. I would say no judgment meant, but we do have some clients in Montana. It feels like there's always hard copies needed.

It's not eight or 10 or 12 like it used to be, but they want three or four and they've got their system. And so you're right, there's a regionality to it.

But the needing to produce that copy, definitely increases the level of stress or the chances that you're going to have to MacGyver something, especially if you're out of practice and your systems are like, oh, we really haven't had to do this

production mode in the same way. IT is not used to doing their whole punching job. They're like, and they've gotten into other things, so.

There's nothing like going to punch your holes in the spiral bind and having the wrong prongs down and punching off, and then having to reprint the internet.

Oh, my God.

I lost a lot of sleep over that.

I feel like when I was printing in house, I am so embarrassed to say it, but there were times when I would go to the printer and it's printing out something, and I would take practically a whole ream of paper and be like, well, you're going into the

recycle bin. Whatever happened, I don't know what happened. We're not keeping that. It felt so wasteful.

Yeah.

All right. Well, Lauren Jane, then what are your MacGyver last-minute stress stories?

Yeah. Gosh. Well, I mentioned the printing and spiral binding issue, and I wasn't even going to bring that up, but since I did, gosh, there were one too many times where with the spiral bound hand, I'm like, what is that machine even called?

Like the wire binding machine.

Wire-O was the brand name?

I know. Yeah. Where you punch the holes, you punch the holes in the paper, and then you put your little wire clip in, and you pull the lever, and it crimps the wire in the paper.

Anyway, there are different wires that fit in the machine that have essentially different cadences for how often they... how far apart the holes are that they go into. Anyway, it's a whole entire thing.

We have certainly cut the wires because they were too long. We've done that. We've cut every other wire because they didn't fit.

I mean, there's, oh my gosh, so many things there, but nothing more stressful, again, like I said, than getting all the way to the very last step of binding and making a mistake or having some crazy thing happen.

But the real kicker that I was actually thinking about for today's story time was, I worked in a in-house and an architecture firm that had several offices in different regions and it was proposal due date for a different office.

And their marketing team, like someone on the marketing team was out sick. I believe it was the coordinator and the proposal manager, the marketing manager was extremely busy and she needed support.

So she passed the file back to us to make very last-minute edits. And there was the Adobe InDesign lock file on their proposal itself. And every system has some kind of quirk at Middle of Six.

Sometimes the lock file doesn't work. But in this case, often the lock file would be there even if nobody had the file open, like it would stick inappropriately.

So I don't think it was the fault of the person who was sick or anything leaving it open, the lock file was just blocking it. And in theory, we maybe could have had IT help us remove the lock file.

But of course, there's no time, you know, the proposals do in two hours or whatever it was. And so we had to get really, really creative and we edited, made all the last minute edits in the Adobe Acrobat. Yes, Adobe Acrobat.

Yep.

And that was real stressful because we knew that we had to write down all the edits that needed to be made somewhere else also in order to go back and make those edits in the original source file when we were able to get in there later, in case

anybody needed to pull that data for something else. But that was a wild, that was a wild, wild time. Yeah, that's my big one.

Could be worse. It could have been Bluebeam. Mm-hmm.

Shots fired.

You can do some pretty good editing in Acrobat, but then I feel like for me, I'll run into something where I'm like, oh, I cannot make this do what I want it to do.

And when you're using that trick, when you're super stressed out, probably not thinking very clearly, and you just need a solution. So you're like, why isn't that keeping the same font like it was doing on the other text block?

Or why are you making that big space? I need that to be over. It's like an exercise in deciding what is most important.

And you just have to let it go and move forward. At least that's how I end up getting through that moment.

My old colleague used to say, there's always one sacrifice to the proposal, God. There's always one little thing that needs to go. And that helped me move on.

That supports the thing that I've said so many times, which is like, there's no such thing as a perfect proposal.

Cannot happen, it's impossible, so stop trying for that. That's going to be my next keynote speech somewhere in the world. I won't even talk about that.

All right, well, talking about InDesign files not working very well. What are some of the things that you see commonly go wrong with your InDesign files?

I feel like we could just call this whole section what to do when InDesign crashes at the last minute, because it does. What is happening?

If you export six PDFs in a row without substantial changes, does it trigger it and says, no, no, no, no, now we have to crash? Do you want to send an error report?

It knows when the deadline is, and it only crashes at the worst possible time in my experience.

This is universal.

Yeah, it's like my mouse is flying around too fast and it smucks everything up.

Yeah, it picks up on the energy. Yeah. Well, I just get frustrated with that.

Have either of you figured out why that happens or what do you do? Lauren Jane, are there actual things you can do to stop that from happening or is it more of just like when Adobe crashes in the last couple of times you're exporting? What do you do?

Yeah.

So yes, there are ways to mitigate that during the process.

One is if you have, so let's say you're submitting a proposal that has very large files that are linked, not even directly imbedded in the document, but really large file sizes for project photos, let's say.

If you have access to medium sized photos, like if there are already resized photos for you to use, go ahead and use those medium photos. You might want a large photo for a cover page, maybe a tab.

But if you have access to slightly smaller quality photos, that will help your document breathe a little bit, not be so overloaded with data.

You can also always turn your, like what is it called, your preview mode, or like the fast, like what is it, fast viewing.

Like the display settings, like live drawing and all that.

Yes, exactly. That's what I, your display mode, there's like fast and regular and high quality.

It's not best practice in my book to always have it on high quality display because it's really trying to render those photos really nicely every time I'm flipping through pages.

I do that.

I know, but then it gets bogged down. I'm usually on like a medium, but you got to check because then things could look blurry and actually be blurry. So you got to check yourself there.

For you wreck yourself. Yes, correct. But that's my biggest tip for when you're actually working through the document.

In terms of when your file is actually kind of corrupt and something's happening, there are a couple tips. The first second I get some whiff of the file being funky, I save a copy to my desktop.

This can be a little annoying because maybe you pick up a few changes after you've saved it to your desktop that you need to go and reconcile later. But you will thank yourself if the file gets corrupt and something happens. So that's my first tip.

Something's funky, saving this to my desktop. I also have saved things to the IDML file type. If you save something to an IDML and then open it back up and save it again as an INDD, it can also drop that file size.

I don't exactly understand, but I think it gets rid of a lot of the metadata or extra stuff floating around in the file. Sometimes when you're getting a corrupt error, that can help. There's also the thought of a missing link.

If you have a missing link on a teeny, teeny, tiny headshot in an org chart, sometimes you can leave it.

You totally can.

It's okay and nobody's going to see that it's really blurry because it's really tiny. So those are some things, right?

If you're coming down to the wire and that person on the consultant side still hasn't sent an updated or high-quality version of their headshot and the link is missing, it actually might be fine.

So that's another thought too is can you get away with the low-quality quote-unquote missing link because you have actually enough metadata there to render okay.

Something for the proposal guides. When I was at a conference and someone came up to me and they said, you gave me a tip a long time ago that I still tell people, I tell my new marketers this tip.

When you're InDesign files getting a little bit funky or it's having these issues looking like it's going to crash or just as general cleanup, at some point when you have a breathing room in the proposal, like look at those links, how many tips are

in there that happened to be 35 megabytes or something are just ridiculous, that you put in there quickly as a placeholder and you meant to go and resave down so it wasn't bogging the file. But yeah, he was like, that's super helpful.

I look through my links and look at those sizes before I export just to make sure all that part is cleaned up.

That is a nice level of housekeeping that you can do, maybe in the moment, or maybe your files are all ready to always plug in just fine, but if they're not, you might have a culprit giant file.

Wendy, I thought you were gonna say clean up your pasteboard because that's another thing that can really make your file lag.

Yeah.

True.

Expand. Is there expanding to be done?

Yeah. On one of our InDesign rumbles, I think we were talking about, do you keep things on your pasteboard or not? And I'm like, get it out of there.

I'm like a delete it, take it out. I don't need it type of gal. I think it's because it really makes the files lag.

I mean, it's also visual clutter, but what you are exporting in your file is not just what's on the page itself, it's anything on the pasteboard. So all of that data, all of those potential missing links that the file is checking on export, right?

All those things slow down your file export and potentially make something buggy. Also when you're getting some kind of error, it could be something on your pasteboard, right? It might not even be what you are submitting in your actual document.

So totally.

Yeah.

Get it out of there, delete it. Likely it's from some old thing that's carried over that you're not going to need anyway.

That's such a good point because like I find that usually the culprit when a file is crashing on export, which is very common. It's usually a PDF linked in my experience.

But like if you have something on the pasteboard, it's almost impossible to find it during the export process because my, my probably best tip to save yourself in a crash when you are trying to export and it keeps crashing is export a portion of the

document at a time so that you can identify what is the bad thing that's causing the crash. So for me, like I'll export pages one through 10 or whatever, you know, and if that doesn't crash, then it's not on pages one through 10 and on and on and on.

But if you, if you have something on the pasteboard that's causing the crash, like you're never going to know, because I don't know what order, you know, it exports in. I mean, it might, it might very well go along with the page. Maybe not.

So like step one, get everything off the pasteboard, throw it away. Step two, export in chunks of pages. And then wherever you get the crash, then you know, okay, it's in this page range and then go through, suspect the PDFs first.

And then probably just grab that PDF, go turn it into a JPEG or whatever. If it's multi-pages, God help you. But for some reason, I think linked images tend to be less problematic than, than PDFs in the long run.

So that's just another like desperate, you know, street MacGyver tip.

I totally agree with you on as a, it's a great tip, handy tip to like look for the PDFs first. I found that I think it's like the bonding letter is the culprit for me most of the time, right?

So that's going to be that PDF that we placed or that it's looking for a font inside that PDF. And I can't find it. And I don't know if that's causing the issue.

But I mean, I start with it, just the bonding letter placed in there, no problem. But if it gives me any, any crap, you know, the first thing to get fixed.

Anything else related to like the InDesign crash or just, you know, what do you scream out into the air when it does that?

I don't know.

Any other stories?

You can always have, you can always have someone else try to open it or export it. That's another tip. Sometimes it's your machine for whatever reasons, too bogged down.

It's a good thing to try. Or restart your machine. Have you tried turning your machine off and back on again?

You know, it's the last thing you want to do in the last minute deadline, but it's worth a shot. Yeah.

If you don't have a friend to call and help, you know, get them to open up the file or if there's not that backup, then you might have to restart. And that's why, as a best practice, we do like to be done a day before.

And certainly, you know, in the days when we were printing so many proposals, you had to be done a day before.

Just, you know, I know last-minute things would happen, but we're trying to push it back, and that is helpful, too, even in the digital world.

Okay, well then, let's go back, let's zoom back into the InDesign document. Let's hit on what Becky was sharing earlier that she's really good at making, or she had to this week, make a lot of content fit into a very small space.

That feels like a common issue that requires some MacGyvering. So, you know, Becky, what are your tips? How do you make, as you say, 10 pounds of potatoes fit into a five pound sack?

Sometimes you have to.

Obviously, you can try your best to say, like, we can't fit any more text in here.

And sometimes they will just say, ha ha, we don't care. Put it in there. So if you have no choice, often this happens to me a lot in like A3 proposals, the like 11 by 17 and the whole proposals on one sheet.

You know, the ones listeners, you sometimes you just have to make it work. And this is where we really get like I love this. The adrenaline gets coursing and just I like it because no one can argue with me.

I have the final say because I'm the only one who can make this stuff fit. So like I don't have to like check everything with everyone. If I'm cutting something, it's getting cut maybe.

And I'm just drunk with power. I love it. There's a few little tricks that you can use that just generally font limits are real.

We all have them. Sometimes it has to be 12 point font or whatever. That's ridiculously huge.

What are we doing with our lives? Futura is a very small font that is kind of not weird looking. I don't know how else to describe it.

Futura at 12 points is going to be way smaller than another font. Sometimes you have to sacrifice your beautiful brand font to get everything to fit. That's a good way to do it.

You can work with the leading and tracking and do some sneaky things. Optical is great for the font when you have the text and you can choose optical or metrics. The default is metrics.

Optical looks better. Metrics is a tighter squeeze. If you're desperate and fractions of a millimeter count, go for metrics.

Just track the life out of it. Bring the tracking down to negative 25 if you have to. Negative 30, I think is a little too much usually, but crank it down as much as you can.

Also, you can adjust the tracking in some parts of the paragraph and not others, so that it's not as noticeable.

Sometimes you can just grab the whole paragraph and ratchet the tracking down, which the keyboard shortcut is alt plus the left alligator arrow, that will just crunch it down by, I think, 10 points maybe in increments.

Also, you can cut text, I think, in a way that just, I don't know.

I know we don't always have the authority to cut everything we want, but I would say a good rule of thumb is if you don't know what it means, the reader is not going to know what it means either, and they're probably not going to care.

So you can trim the fat as you go through, cut as much text as you can. Balancing ragged lines can help sometimes at least visually to cram more text onto a page. Bullets take up a lot of space.

You can adjust them so that they're not indenting. You can bring the bullet character a lot closer to the text. That will help, but if you cannot bullet, it'll save you a little bit of space.

Margins can be cheated. You can sometimes extend the text box just a hair beyond your margins and you'll be surprised how many lines you can save. Gutters can be made smaller.

Columns tend to fit more content than having things going wide across the page if you're looking at that sort of thing. God, what else is there? Lauren Jane, I know you got stuff too.

What do you got?

Yeah, so I know that... Oh, can you guys hear me?

We can. You sound good.

I hear you. You froze, but I hear you.

Yeah, and I got a whole big warning.

You chose the wrong microphone.

I know.

We should leave this in, Kyle. This is exciting. This is a MacGyver moment.

What are we going to do? Kyle, you're on your MacGyver now. Save the day, man.

So, Vicki, give me the-

oh my God, they all look like they could help. I can't do this. No, I can.

I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

Oh, she's back.

Never mind.

Weird. That was very weird. I've never had that specific thing happen.

Classic MacGyver situation. We're good though. Yeah.

So I was going to say, unfortunately, many people are anaphylactically allergic to hyphenation, but I think that in some cases, it makes sense. So many of our clients turn off hyphenation absolutely completely.

However, there are some words that are very long that, to be honest, deserve to be hyphenated because they're so long. So you can change in InDesign your hyphenation rules. So you could say only hyphenate words longer than X amount of characters.

So that's something to consider. It seems silly, but it can really help bump up multiple lines of text. You get multiple lines of text back potentially from doing that.

If you already have a hyphenation rule that applies to words of a certain length, consider shortening that rule. So let's say it's hyphen words over 10 characters or 15. Maybe you go back down to 10.

Again, this is worst case scenario. Really got to pull out all the stops situation, but hyphenation can be your friend as much as Becky hates it. Hate it.

Never turn it on ever, ever, ever.

I know, I know.

And then the other thing that I'm always thinking of is how can I make something a graphic? How can these four sentences become one infographic that can take up a quarter of the space?

Sometimes you might not have enough information to turn that into an infographic, but as Becky was saying, you're drunk with power, the thing has to go out the doors. Turn something into a chart. I'm like, could there be a measles chart?

Could you, if there is a whole list of projects and they are all in the same state, can you just have a city on it and then you make a clause that are like all, you know, star? All of these are in Washington state.

Ooh, that's good.

If they're all performed for education, you know, in the same sector or something, again, can you put an asterisk, make a footnote? Can you put elementary school? Can you turn it into ES or E-L-E-M, right?

Like, any kind of shortening or can you make a symbol? It has a little schoolhouse on it. That's an elementary school, whatever.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm always looking to see how I can turn things into some kind of graphic. A key is going to save, or it's going to take up a lot less space than applying some kind of annotation to every single object in many cases.

So I'm looking for those things too, which they take a little bit of time. So those aren't necessarily extremely last-minute options, but they are cramming stuff onto a page options.

Also make your headers smaller. A lot of times I find the easiest way to save space is to just make the headers smaller and bolder that will take up less space on the page for you.

Also, I know I've said this before, but you don't need a header and a footer.

I would recommend just go with a footer, put all of the running information in that footer, and then the sky's the limit from the top of the page because things just looked less crammed if you crunch them closer to the top of the page than closer to

Yeah, I think that does make sense.

I just want to say, I want to emphasize here for the proposal writers or the novelists out there, like write less to start. Easier for you in the beginning, easier for us at the end. So that's for sure.

Because when Becky was describing all of these gymnastics that she has to perform to get things to fit, and she is cutting things, I would say also, everyone is allowed to cut on the project. Those three words almost never need to be in.

Nice.

And you might find that it is in 150 times in the proposal. Yep, don't need to say on the project. But you know what I'm saying is like, you're going through all of these things, creative ways to squish text, that should not be that precious.

And what was going through my mind as you were talking through, and I know I've been there too, we were trying to squeeze so much in there. But it does not make the proposal easier to be read and scored. So I think we're like fighting ourselves.

Yes, we won the battle internally. We got it all on there and nobody had to make the last cut of a paragraph that they probably should have in content.

We probably are, well, this bold statement, but you might be losing points on the review side when they're like, I don't understand what that means.

They should have cut that whole section or piece where it's just unclear or it feels so tight that their eyes are just tired of reviewing it. We know that the reviewers are looking at at least six proposals, probably closer to 10 or a dozen.

So don't make any enemies in that part of the process. And make your marketing people happy by having space for graphics. White space matters.

Yes.

Seriously.

I don't know that any of that was really last minute stuff. It's things that you're dealing with throughout, but I like the MacGyvery aspect of adjusting the font, the hyphenation, the space between the bullet points.

I mean, seriously, this is what we're down to in times of desperation to make it fit. All right, well, then, you know, you've got it all sitting on the page. It's looking good.

You've checked your PDFs and your links. You export it. You've got a little bit of time before the deadline, and the file is way too big.

What are your tips for making this something that we can actually email?

I have a few. So there are a couple ways to compress a file, and I typically start by trying to do that in InDesign first.

So when you go to export, there are a couple Adobe PDF presets, and there's one that's high quality print, which I think is maybe a default, and we use a lot, or there's also smallest file size, and then many in between, right?

PDF, X3, blah, blah, blah. Lots of ones in between. We can always, or I always like to start with the high quality print and turn the dials down, because we want to play the game, right?

Of what's the highest quality output we can get that's still within the file size. So in that regard, I look at the compression tab on the left-hand side under general.

So I start with high quality print, and I look at the compression, and I'm looking at the downsampling and how many pixels per inch.

Again, it depends on if it's a print document or if it's a digital submission, but 300 is pretty high for pixels per inch.

Typically, we can take that down to like 150, especially if it's a digital submission, and I could even start by doing 150 pixels per inch for images above, and it'll typically give you above 250. It'll give you a higher number.

No, for anything above 150, I want it to be 150, so I actually put it in 150 per inch for images above 150. So I do that for color, grayscale, and monochrome images.

And then there's also the option on the bottom to say compress line and text, or text and line art, and crop image data to frames, and I select both of those options.

If you don't compress those nor crop the image data to the frame, it essentially preserves data in the file to be edited a little bit differently in Adobe Acrobat, but that's not the name of the game here, right?

We are trying to make the file as small as possible, particularly when we have those really big photos. So that's option one. So I start there.

If you're still getting a little bit too big, you can also try to use the compression feature in Adobe Acrobat. It's under the Tools, I believe, and that will also give you some compression.

Sometimes you start getting a little lossy or pixelated, and that's the line that you have to write is, oh, that was a little bit too much and photos are a little bit too blurry.

Then if all else fails, you can manually go export smaller file sizes to drop into your document. That is something that takes time. This is not necessarily a super last-minute option, but if you have two hours, four hours, right?

If you have a decent amount of time, which is also still pretty close to the deadline, but if you have a little chunk of time, there is a process in which you can start in InDesign and have files still relinked.

So if you open your links panel, you can sort by image size and you can identify the biggest ones, right? Kind of your giant, giant, huge culprits, and those might be bloating the document, right?

So if you right-click and choose Edit Original, you can open the photo in Photoshop and re-save a down sampled version of the photo, and then it will automatically relink that photo in your document at a smaller file size.

So that's kind of the, if you have time and if you're desperate and the document is still really large option, when you export out of Photoshop for a smaller file size, you will be able to say what quality, quote unquote, what quality photo you want

to save. In this scenario, you're looking at medium or less. Word. Those are my hot tips.

Those are good.

It's making me think of, another thing you can do is if you have some photos that are huge and need to be compressed, but you have others that are tiny and you can't sacrifice their quality, what you can do is go through and compress only that page.

You've exported your PDF, then go back to the InDesign and export. Let's say the cover photo is just massive.

Export the cover only as a PDF with super compression, knock that sucker way down, 72 ppi, I don't know, whatever you can get away with, and then slip that into your PDF in place of your cover page.

That way, you're not sacrificing quality on the rest of the document, but you're compressing the images that are taking up the space.

The easy option that I do most often is just to go in Acrobat and hit save as reduced size file or whatever it's called. That works 99 percent of the time.

If it doesn't, then you can get in there and start tweaking the settings, like Lauren Jane was talking about, where you can knock it down to 150, it's 72, you can get more individual with it.

You can save a preset in InDesign, as Lauren Jane mentioned, when you export, like high-quality print is often the default, but I always save my own thing that I called compressed good quality or something, where you can go in and set those image

settings to be whatever they are. I am not as aggressive of an image compressor as Lauren Jane. I was shocked to hear that you're 150 only.

Listen, I worked at an architecture firm with a million photos on every page.

That's what I was going to say.

I'm so shocked. I'll go down to 220, I think, unless I know for sure. You know, like exporting a JPEG, I'll always go 150.

But for some reason, I get so scared. But even 300 and high quality, but not maximum quality, that will make a difference. You'd be amazed at the increments.

And then if you save as the InDesign document, that will save on file size, because the InDesign document itself saves all kinds of stuff. Your previous things that you did, it keeps its whole history for some reason.

If you literally just save as the file, it will knock the file size down quite a bit. That will help. And then if all else fails, and it shouldn't because we're very good at this and we can make it happen.

But if you don't have time to call me or Lauren Jane to help you, you can always try to just like save a kind of garbage compressed copy that's maybe not as beautiful as it could be, just so you can get it to the client, attach it, and then put in

the email like, hey, if you'd like to download the full res, you know, beautiful copy of the proposal, click here and you can download it here from our SharePoint or whatever. That sometimes works.

I don't think that's against the law unless they specifically say you can't do that, which would be weird in my experience. But that's just like just to make sure that like, you know, they'll get it before the deadline.

But also if they want to see the beautiful one, they can.

Yeah, that seems like that would be very handy. We work a lot on public work where the procurement submittal process is so scripted, but a lot of other proposals are, it's not like that at all. I mean, you could absolutely share.

I mean, I'm sure that I've written an email where like, here's the proposal size for email. And if you want to download the full document, you can get it here.

I think there's lots of cases where being clever and adding the link will allow them to have all the options.

Or actually it's been a long time since I've done it, but where we had more interactive proposals with like video or things that like we've talked about Sway before, presentations that you fly through.

So I mean, sometimes you're actually creating something not in a normal InDesign document, and you might want to lead them to another version.

Wendy, do you have any MacGyver stories? I'm dying to know.

Well, when you made the MacGyver character, I really like associated myself with it. I thought, oh, I'm such a MacGyver, but then I was like, actually, I don't really need to, I haven't had to pull out those tricks very often.

Maybe I'm just like a retired MacGyver. I used to have those tricks. Let's see, is there anything that sticks out in my mind?

Honestly, when I was printing proposals, what a production. We had these beautiful, professionally printed tabs, like the cover systems, the binding. I mean, it was so complicated.

And actually, one of the things that we used to have to do a lot is create a CD-ROM of the proposal.

Ooh, now we're talking.

Children, Google that. I did. CD-ROM is a read-only optical memory device.

Oh.

Yeah, that's right.

I didn't know that.

CDs were something that we used to listen to music in the 90s.

And you can get them for free. From Colombia and have a giant deck of CDs. All the Nirvana and Pearl Jam you could listen to.

And then when we go to work, we'd have to create CD-ROMs of our proposals, which just adds this other step. There's no MacGyvering to this, just me complaining that you would print 12 copies of a proposal, bound all of this to do, boxed up.

I mean, first of all, think of the box for 12 proposals, right? All of that stuff, that's what we're doing. And then we're putting that final PDF on a CD-ROM and making a sticker for the CD-ROM and making a cover for the case of the CD-ROM.

I mean, I was doing those things in advance, but give me a break. So, hmm, there's no hack except for you just do everything that you could do in advance, in advance.

Do that a week ahead and then just burn that disk, but then you have to run over to your coworker's desk, have them put it in their disk drive, test that the PDF opens, doesn't give them an error message. I don't even have a CD drive anymore.

That's not even possible. So, sorry, not a good MacGyver story, but count your blessings, people, that we don't have to do that.

I enjoyed that. I'm so glad. Yeah, I do not miss those days.

I know, right?

Technology. Well, I don't know. I mean, I've done, I've done so many other things, Becky, you've told stories in the past, but it's just like, yes, I know, hand punching things, finding binders out of the basement, they could clean off and use.

I don't know. A million things. Two people going in the car, one to drive and not park because parking at wherever they were going to go is impossible.

So then a runner, I mean, I just think that's fun. Even the pep talk of, okay, you're going to go and take this proposal. What happens if the taxi cab breaks down?

You run. I mean, it was like those kind of weird things, like a wild time that I'm really glad I don't live in anymore. So, thanks for asking, though.

Thanks for sharing.

I feel like this was such a fun conversation.

Can we come back another time? I don't know, it might have to be season six because we keep saying, we keep saying, oh, this gives me a good idea for another episode, but can we do one of these about interviews?

We need to.

MacGyver's for interviews. Oh my gosh, okay. I won't share any stories right now, but boy, do I have some wild ones in that.

Give us a hint.

Is there a hint? Does MacGyver do a hint like next week on MacGyver to be continued?

Okay, here's a little teaser. This is when I was working for a GC, right? And we needed to, I can't even remember why we needed to bring our own television to the interview.

I think it's because they're like, you can present with a projector, you know, and remember the days of bringing a projector and pressing your fingers that it would actually connect to the computer and all that stuff.

And we had a very cool presentation that we thought, it's not going to look good presented, it's going to be soft and just not as vibrant as a screen. So we're like, let's buy a TV and a rack and we'll bring it in.

And the interview team came back from the interview. I didn't go to it. I was like, how did it go?

And they're like, great, except for the superintendent broke the TV. And I was like, what? This is of course, after I told IT, we don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on the hard case.

We can move a TV. Well, he grabbed it with his muscly hands and smashed the top of it and broke the top. So then we still had to present on it.

And I guess one third of the presentation was not very visible. There's no book-iver story there either.

Oh my God. Did you get the job?

I don't think so. Sorry. I don't recall if we got that job.

I know we pulled out all the punches. It was definitely an underdog story. It falls into that category.

We have other things we did at that interview too. But anyways, I've got more of those. I've got lots of superintendents crushing things with their hands, not being able to present.

So I can't wait.

We'll come back for that another time.

But thank you both for sharing all of your tips. I know who to call. I already do call you when I'm getting a little stressed out.

And thanks for sharing things that are actually useful. People can do, check your images, check your pasteboard, do all those things. And hopefully you will also get to be the awesome MacGyver person in your office.

Yeah. All right. Thanks for being here.

We'll see you next time.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us.

Come on. MacGyver, this door is well-to-chut. That's not our only problem, MacGyver.

From the looks of that detonator, this whole place is going to blow in 20 seconds. The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six. Our producer is Kyle Davis with digital marketing support by the team at Middle of Six.

If you're looking for past episodes or more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist. You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Until next time, keep on hustling.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.