AstraRad - Client Proposal Design Picker

The decision

One proposal, three ways to set it on paper

What this feature is. After a discovery call, AstraRad sends the prospective clinic a written proposal as a PDF. It is the document that has to win the business when nobody from AstraRad is in the room. Every direction below carries the same content: what we understood from the call, what is in and out of scope, how the work runs, turnaround commitments, the price, how to read competing quotes, compliance positions, the go live schedule, terms, and a signature block. Nothing about the offer changes between them. What changes is how the page is built: the width of the text column, whether there is a margin rail and what it carries, how big the price is, where the signature sits, and whether the document looks like a professional firm, an instrument, or a chartered report.

Three designers each built one from the same source material and three judges scored every one on brand fidelity, print and PDF craft, and buyer persuasion. A, Ledger is the best typography and the best cover, with a broken star. B, Monograph is the safest print job and the weakest brand and skim. C, Chartered wins two lenses out of three and carries one hard printing defect. A and C tie on 20 out of 30, B is on 17.

How it applies in the real world

Tara Villanueva reads it at her kitchen table, three weeks before she opens

It is 6:50 pm on Tuesday 4 August 2026. Tara Villanueva is at the kitchen table in Seguin, Texas, with a laptop and a cold coffee. She opens Quinn Functional Health on 31 August 2026, which is 27 days away. She expects 40 to 50 ultrasound studies a month. AstraRad has quoted her $44 per signed report with the first 5 free. She is waiting on a number from DocPanel, and a friend from her old practice has texted her a $25 a read figure. She has one evening for this.

6:50 pm. She opens the AstraRad PDF and gives page 1 about five seconds before deciding whether this is a serious firm or a template.
6:51 pm. She hunts for the price. At 45 studies a month, $44 a report is $1,980 in month one with the first 5 free, then $1,760 to $2,200 a month after that. If the number is not findable in one glance, she reads the document in a worse mood.
6:54 pm. She goes looking for whatever explains why $44 beats the $25 her friend quoted, because that is the objection she cannot answer herself.
6:58 pm. She checks licensure, the BAA, malpractice cover and credentialing, because a patient's oncologist will eventually read a report signed by someone Tara has never met.
7:04 pm. She forwards the PDF to her husband, who is her business partner and was not on the call. He has to navigate it cold.
7:20 pm. She either signs, or she parks it until DocPanel replies. If she signs, she needs to know what happens next.

Quantified outcome. A signature that evening is worth about $23,760 in the first twelve months at 45 studies a month, and it removes AstraRad from a three way comparison it might not survive. The document has to hold up under a five second skim, a cold forward, and a $25 anchor, in that order.

One finding shared by all three: every direction recoloured the mark's accent to the same print safe teal, which is about 20 degrees of hue drift toward blue and a third of the chroma gone. Whichever direction wins should pull the accent back toward the Rad hue at higher chroma while keeping the lightness. That is a fix, not a reason to pick differently.

astrarad-proposal-quinn-functional-health.pdf · 7 pages · US Letter

Ledger proposal, page 1 — COVER · TITLE, FIGURE STRIP, PREPARED FORPage 01 of 07

Ledger proposal, page 2 — 01 THE CALL · 02 SCOPEPage 02 of 07

Ledger proposal, page 3 — 03 WORKFLOW · WHAT WE NEED FROM THE SONOGRAPHERPage 03 of 07

Ledger proposal, page 4 — 04 TURNAROUND · SLA LEDGER AND PULL QUOTEPage 04 of 07

Ledger proposal, page 5 — 05 PRICING · THE $44 HERO METRICPage 05 of 07

Ledger proposal, page 6 — 06 COMPLIANCE · DEFINITIONS AND GO LIVE SCHEDULEPage 06 of 07

Variant A

Ledger

Asymmetric instrument page. A 97 mm text column beside a mono rail of figures.

Brand

6/10

7/10

Buyer

7/10

Total

20/30

7 pages · 8 design iterations · measure median 63, p90 78, gate passed

Rationale

The document is set as an instrument rather than a letter. A 97 mm text column sits beside a generous outer zone carrying a mono rail of section numerals, labels and figures, everything fenced by hairlines. Brand is carried entirely by typography and structure: Bricolage at negative tracking for display and the oversized section numerals, Spline Sans Mono for every label, figure and status, and a single print safe teal on a light document palette written from scratch. The narrow column produces the measure naturally: median 63 characters, p90 78, gate passed. Judges called it the best typographic practice in the set and the best cover object in the comparison, and it took eight iterations to land.

What to look at

Page 1 in three deliberate zones: title block, a full width hairline fenced figure strip carrying $44, under 24 h, 5 free reports and 31 AUG 2026, and a prepared for ledger anchored above the folio. The 8 point star is bled with its centre exactly on the right trim.
The rail read top to bottom is a data column, not a second text column: 01 THE CALL, 04 SPEED / 99.4% / IN SLA, 05 PRICING / NO MIN. NO FEES NO SEATS NO TERM, 06 COST / $199 / 600K, 07 LICENSE / $1M/$3M, 08 GO-LIVE.
Page furniture on all seven sheets: running head, confidential line and a CSS counter folio in 02/07 form, all kept to three words so pdftotext drops them instead of counting them.
The tightest vertical rhythm in the set. Last body line varies only 29.2 pt across six content pages, against 48.7 for Chartered and 52.0 for Monograph, and trailing slack is 0.4 to 8.3 mm on every sheet.
Page 5 carries the $44 as a mono 500 negative tracking hero metric, the house treatment lifted straight off the live site, followed by two tables and a mono numbered checklist.

Trade-offs

The mark is broken. Four of the eight rays are deleted in the page header SVG, so pages 2 to 7 are signed with a teal plus sign, not a radiant star, and an inherited text transform uppercases the wordmark on the cover.
The close is mishandled. Page 7 opens with the corporate practice of medicine warning box, then a nine row terms table, and only then the signature. Nothing tells Tara what happens after she signs.
Seven pages, not six. Holding six at a 97 mm measure would have cost the carotid caution, the five comparison questions, or half the compliance detail.
p90 measure is 78, two characters of headroom. Any edit that lengthens a rail label or widens a table past 90 mm fails the gate. The geometry is tuned, not robust.
Body at 8.9 pt over a 6.4 pt label layer carrying 1,111 characters, plus ten hyphenated line breaks including corporate-practice-of-medicine and by e-signature.
The text block is not optically centred. It sits 0.18 in left of centre, which reads as an error on pages 6 and 7 where the rail empties out below the halfway mark.
Pages are fixed height sections with overflow hidden, so any copy edit clips silently. This is a designed document, not a template.

Fix the star: restore all 8 rays and the mixed case wordmark Rework page 7 so the signature is not buried under fine print Raise the body above 8.9 pt and kill the 6.4 pt label layer Keep the figure rail exactly as it is Add a contents page so a forwarded copy navigates

astrarad-proposal-quinn-functional-health.pdf · 7 pages · US Letter

Monograph proposal, page 1 — TITLE PAGE · MASTHEAD, TITLE BLOCK, COLOPHONPage 01 of 07

Monograph proposal, page 2 — I UNDERSTANDING · II SCOPEPage 02 of 07

Monograph proposal, page 3 — III HOW THE WORK RUNSPage 03 of 07

Monograph proposal, page 4 — IV TURNAROUNDPage 04 of 07

Monograph proposal, page 5 — V PRICING · THE TINTED $44 ROWPage 05 of 07

Monograph proposal, page 6 — VI COMPLIANCE · $1M / $3MPage 06 of 07

Variant B

Monograph

Classical single column. 43 mm symmetric margins, 11 pt body, roman numeral sections.

Brand

4/10

8/10

Buyer

5/10

Total

17/30

7 pages · 6 design iterations · measure median 68, p90 74, gate passed