Most tools in this category treat your branding as the thing they take away from the free plan. The invoice is free; the removal of their logo from it costs money. It is an effective lever, which is exactly why it feels the way it does when you are a designer and the document going to your client says somebody else's name at the bottom.
North does not have that lever. Your name leads every document on every plan.
The kit
You set it once, in Settings: your logo, your brand colour as a hex value, and your display type. From then on every proposal, contract and invoice you draft starts as yours, and the client's deal room takes the same colour, down to the browser tab icon.
The colour is anchored to the exact value you type. A great many tools take your hex and derive a "brighter" version for buttons and rules, so the document carries a colour you did not choose. The one North paints with is the one you entered; if you typed a deep navy, the rules and bands on the page are that deep navy.
The document
There are three proposal layouts, and you choose one as your house style with a per-proposal override when a particular client wants a different feel. Each layout is designed so that the brand colour does structural work (the rules, the option columns, the tint bands) rather than sitting in a corner as decoration.
The image frames are yours to fill. Upload your own photography, your own illustration, a frame from the last project, and the document becomes a piece of your portfolio that happens to have a price in it. If you leave a frame empty, a curated image in a mood that suits the project fills it, and you can swap it or take it out.
The contract and the invoice follow the proposal's presentation, so the three documents a client receives over the life of a project read as one studio's stationery rather than as three exports from three tools.
The room
The client's deal room is one colour per deal, carried from the proposal through to the invoice and the tab icon. Your name is in the masthead. A link to the room pasted into Slack, iMessage or an email previews with your name and the document's title, never with North's.
Every document in the room has a download that produces a print PDF with your branding intact, for the client who files things.
Where North appears
Once, in small type, at the bottom of client-facing pages: an attribution line, the equivalent of a printer's mark. It is the only place. There is no North logo in your header, no "Powered by" banner, and no watermark on the free plan. This is not an act of generosity; it is the deal. The surfaces your client touches are free because they are the surfaces where your work, carrying your name, is what a client sees, and that was never going to be gated.
Where it stops
Three layouts, not a page builder. You cannot rearrange sections, change the grid, or add a fourth column. That is deliberate: the layouts exist so a proposal can be sent in an hour and still look like yours, and a page builder is the opposite of that promise. If your studio needs a fully bespoke document for a particular pitch, make it in your own tools; North is for the ninety per cent of proposals that should look like your studio without being a design project themselves.
Common questions
- Is branding on documents a paid feature?
- No, and it never will be. Your logo, your colour and your name are on every proposal, contract, invoice and deal room on the free plan and the paid plan alike. The pricing page lists this as one of ten written commitments, because the free tiers in this category tend to keep their own branding on your document as the lever to upgrade.
- Does North's name appear anywhere on my documents?
- Once, in small type at the bottom, as an attribution line. Your name and mark lead everything the client reads; ours is the equivalent of a printer's mark. The client-facing pages never carry North's logo in the header, the tab icon is yours, and a link shared in Slack or a text message previews with your name.
- Can I use my own photography or imagery in the proposal?
- Yes. The proposal layouts have image frames, and you can upload your own work into them, which for a photographer or illustrator is the whole point. If you do not, a curated set fills the frames in a mood that suits the project, and you can swap or remove any of them before sending.