Annual Report Designers

Do you want to make your Annual Report better than last year? Please contact Annual Report Designers.

To achieve great annual report design always requires a combination of clear financial reporting, concise content structure and interesting info graphics. We do offer all of this.

We bring together effective communication, strong content structures and outstanding design to produce engaging and inspiring reporting.

One of the main issues you can face when considering your next Annual Report is the design. As these annual report projects come around every year, it can sometimes be difficult to produce something that’s an improvement on the previous year.

Our creative team have years of designing experience and we can design a wide range of Annual Reports, across different sectors.

Our design process will deliver you lots of different design options and potential creative directions for your report design, making us an Annual Report design agency that’s worth talking to.

As experienced annual report designers, we can use our expertise to provide a cost effective solution to your corporate reporting challenge. Creating an effective and engaging annual report does not have to cost the earth, which many of our clients fear before speaking to our team at Webz Solutions. The key is to understand the process and work together to break down the project in stages and get the right foundations.

This complete annual report design service gives our clients peace of mind, so they don’t have to worry about technical details, but can concentrate on the already big challenge of gathering content. One of the keys to achieving this is to follow a process, something we have developed over many years working in partnership with our clients.

Below is a breakdown of most of the stages we go through, or at least suggest our clients work through even if some stages are on their own. This makes the challenge less daunting and ensures things are not missed or considered which could be difficult to overcome later down the line.

Our annual report design process

We’ll work with you during every stage of the design process. Our annual report projects always start out on paper and follow this process:

Research

An annual report is more than just a brochure or marketing collateral; as the name suggests it is all about the company’s historical data over the last 12 months. You need to take time to consult with your team, to build the picture of the last year. Research everything and don’t dismiss anything at this stage. Also look at what things have actually been recorded both in terms of the facts and ideally imagery.

Aims and Objectives

Decide what the annual report needs to achieve. This is beyond the simple task of reporting, but is it to highlight a major change in company, to build brand recognition or confidence, to become a marketing and reporting tool for the company? Without a clear direction you may create something amazing but useless as a tool.

Planning the annual report pages

It is not just as easy as starting in January and work towards December. Develop major themes, divide that into sections, may be sub sections and special areas of focus. Plan when and how to include financial content. Go back and make sure your plan delivers against your objectives. Define and present a clear story throughout your report. This gives us something to ‘hang the creative on’ and ensures your readers will engage with the report.

Create content

With a plan for your content you can now focus on writing and possibly pulling in content from different departments and sources in your company. If that is the case you will need to ensure this all sounds like it is coming from the same brand. In this process you may need help copywriting to ensure tone of content is consistent. Try to tell a story and always think about the end user. Try to be engaging and not just historically correct.

Source imagery

Photography, info graphics and illustration can bring your content to life and this is very important in dense blocks of copy that can be hard work to absorb. Infographics have become a buzz word, but they are a genuine design opportunity in annual reporting. Ideally the images will be real and believable not just generic images from online libraries. Using clip art images in annual report can look false and make the whole content untrusted.

Initial design process

We always design different concepts of cover and inside page before we go in to the full design. We make sure we have a clear brief from the previous stages, and offer different options so our clients are engaged in the design process. The design must bring the content to life not overpower it.

Concept development & review

Sometimes while consulting with our clients we discover ideas for combing elements from different concepts, and develop them further. We are so experienced, and make sure we understand the brief, very often our client approves one of our concepts immediately. Even if that is the case seeing multiple design concepts can help clarify why the chosen option is the best from others.

First full design

Taking the approved concept, the annual report starts to come to life as the content is flowed and designed page by page. This may involve lots of consulting with the content writer to make sure the message is still clear. Typography is very important to ensure the right emphasis is created. Plus the full image requirements are established, which may mean more photos are needed or shows opportunities for graphics that add impact perhaps taking over a whole spread creating a wow factor.

Corrections and Changes

We work with our clients to minimise changes to final design, ensuring we keep on schedule and manage the budget of project. At the start of the project we will have discussed early content approval by client, but in reality some changes can only be seen once the content is at the design stage.

Although we don’t operate a one-size-fits-all approach to any of our projects, we’ve found that most will broadly follow the above.