Zerocool

CASE STUDY

Visual systemDocument templatesKeynote · Pages · Sheets

The documents nobody designs

The artefacts a client actually holds.

Proposals, estimates, production schedules, call sheets, invoices. Every project generated a stack of them, and each one had been built by a different person, in a different tool, at a different moment of deadline pressure. These documents are not marketing collateral, so nobody had ever written a design brief for them. But they are the artefacts a client actually holds, and a company this attentive to craft deserved paperwork that carried the same signal.

We were asked to unify the whole set without making it precious or slow to use.

Zerocool · Case study

Auditing what already existed

Six document types, six visual languages.

We started by collecting everything currently in circulation and putting it on a single board. The estimate had a dark header band. The schedule had none. The invoice used the full-colour logo at one size, the call sheet used no logo at all. Individually, none of these files was a problem. It was only seeing all six together, which nobody had ever had reason to do, that showed how much they varied.

The audit told us something more useful: the opportunity was structural rather than aesthetic. Each document has a job (persuade, schedule, bill), and each job wants a different layout. A schedule needs scanability. A proposal needs narrative. An invoice needs unambiguous numbers.

everything in circulation, one board

Zerocool · The audit

Building the foundation

the brand, assembled in one place

One rule governed everything after.

We pulled together the colour set (Midnight Blue, Neon Turquoise, Digital Mint), the logo lockups at three scales, and the typefaces, Nexa for display and Avenir for text. Alongside that we captured the things that usually go undocumented: the company's values, its keywords, its actual vocabulary. "Always Be Producing." "Process is as important as story."

Dark backgrounds for presenting, light backgrounds for documenting. Keynote gets the atmosphere. Pages gets the clarity.

Zerocool · The foundation

Presentation · Designing for the room

Midnight Blue throughout. Brackets everywhere.

The Keynote template runs on Midnight Blue, with turquoise and mint carrying hierarchy. The recurring device is a bracket: corner marks that frame images, statistics and pull quotes. It lets a statistic sit on the slide as an object rather than floating text, and it scales from a 4M+ impression figure down to a footnote without changing character.

We built layouts around the presentations Zerocool actually gives, including a full-bleed statement slide for the mission line, because every pitch has a moment where you stop showing and start saying, and it deserved a layout rather than an improvised text box.

keynote · designed for the room

Zerocool · Presentation

Documents · Designing for the desk

pages · designed for the desk

A cover, not page one of a letter.

The proposal cover uses a three-part grid that breaks the page deliberately: sender block top, title in the optical centre with the gradient wordmark and its arrow motif, recipient and dates anchored bottom.

Inside, we solved the wall-of-bullets problem by giving statistics their own column. The 2M+ figure and the visual placeholder sit in a right-hand rail while the argument runs down the left. The reader can take either path and arrive at the same place.

Zerocool · Documents

Documents · The strictest treatment

Where a flourish becomes an obstacle.

Alternating row tints instead of gridlines. Column headers in mint italic caps. The delivery date in turquoise at the bottom of the schedule, isolated, because that is the one line anybody is looking for.

On the invoice, the total sits in its own tinted block, and every other number gets out of its way.

schedules & invoices

Zerocool · Documents

Writing it down

the guide

Principles, not rules.

Four of them for the light-background templates: the three-part grid structure that creates hierarchy; document titles set in the branded gradient and framed by the arrow motif; no vertical lines in spreadsheets, since the grid already implies vertical division while horizontal lines support the narrative; and a fixed colour logic where Midnight Blue carries titles and black carries body.

A rule that has to be looked up will not be followed. A rule that can be remembered after one reading will be.

Zerocool · The guide

Outcome

Decisions made once, in daylight, and written down.

Zerocool came away with a documentation toolkit spanning Keynote, Pages and Google Sheets: proposals, estimates, schedules, call sheets, invoices, plus a capability statement for pitching. All of it recognisably one company, all of it faster to produce than what came before.

The more valuable result: nobody has to make layout decisions at 11pm the night before a proposal goes out anymore.

Zerocool · Outcome

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What we took from it

The unglamorous documents were the highest-leverage part of the project.

A client interacts with the invoice, the schedule and the call sheet far more often than they interact with anything on the homepage, and those documents are where a company's actual habits show. They were the ones nobody had touched, so they were the ones with the most room to improve.

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