There’s no doubting that annual reports can be a dense, dry read. The yearly task then, is how to inject a bit of pizzazz into the document, if only to ensure that people will actually look at it. It’s easy to get lost amongst the slog of financial statements that are, nonetheless, completely necessary. While the highlights of the current year’s performance might not be as exciting as the latest thriller, you can make sure that your latest annual report is digestible, and nice to look at!
The main ways you can achieve this, is by breaking up the information, and carrying out a consistent look. How, you ask? Well, we’ve got a couple of suggestions below.
Infographics
With infographics, you can easily navigate and make sense of heavy data and information. They provide visual interest and break up vast swathes of text. Furthermore, infographics allow you to emphasise your brand, which helps you maintain consistency and appeal.
There’s many types and styles of infographics, picking the best ones for your brand and content is important. Do you need graphs and numbers layed out in an elegant way? Maybe you want fun illustrations to help outline future goals. Need ideas? Check out some examples of infographics created by us below!
Iconography
Using icons is a great way to give your audience instant understanding at a glance. You can use icons to create consistency throughout the document as well as to highlight key information. For example, if in all the places yearly objectives were discussed, an icon of a calendar could be used on those pages. Perhaps if you wanted to highlight social media engagement somewhere, the info could be inside a speech bubble icon!
There are endless ways to use iconography in a report. We’ve put some examples below.
Brand marks
Lots of people have the idea that a logo is all a brand is. In reality, there’s many ways to make a design feel like it belongs to a certain brand. One of those ways is by using brand marks.
Brand marks are a great way to add appeal to a long report. They can be added along footers, bleeding off a page edge, or shaded behind text in a way that is unobtrusive, yet adds a significant amount of identity. The best brand marks in these scenarios are usually simple shapes, patterns or abstract illustrations.
If you have more complex brand marks however, they can be used in more prominent ways. Imagine as an example, if you have a bird as your brand mark. The bird could be placed in any number of positions as a way to highlight text. Perched on a box, peering down from a branch in the corner of the page, or flying over type. Check out some examples below of how we’ve used client brand marks in annual reports.
These examples combined will result in a clear, readable and inviting annual report. Now hopefully, your audience will read further than the contents page!
For more examples of annual reports we’ve designed, check out our work here.