Understand the psychology behind proposal evaluation and stand out from the competition.
Learn how to leverage pre-attentive design channels to highlight win themes effectively.
Embrace restraint as a design tool
What You'll Learn
A proposal is not an art portfolio or a magazine. It is a document that will be judged — often on the skim alone. In Design Psychology for Proposals, Julie Shaffer, FSMPS, CPSM, draws on visual perception research and decades of proposal design experience to show you how evaluators actually process a page: in under 250 milliseconds, upstream of conscious thought. You will leave with a working model of the brain budget, the six pre-attentive channels that carry signals before a single word is read, and the principle of redundancy gain — how layering channels on the elements that matter makes them survive the skim. Restraint, as Julie puts it, can be a competitive advantage.
About Julie
With 25 years of experience in professional services marketing, Julie Shaffer is a proposal strategist and design educator with extensive experience in developing a practical, psychology-informed approach to document design that combines communication, clarity, and visual strategy. Julie’s work spans the globe, focusing on helping teams build repeatable design systems, elevate proposal quality, and create reviewer-friendly documents within real-world constraints. With a background in graphic design, training, proposal development, creative direction, and process improvement, she brings a grounded perspective to teaching design principles that are effective across various industries and platforms.
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Learn to put put win themes, differentiators, and client-centric content in front of the skim.
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