Annual reports are a comprehensive look back over an organization's past year, with the aim of providing disclosure of the organization's activities and financial situation. In the case of publicly-held corporations, the reports are issued to the Securities & Exchange Commission, shareholders and other stakeholoders, who use it primarily to evaluate the firm's financial performance. In the case of non-profits, the annual report provides donors and other stakeholders the scope of the non-profit's work as well as its expenses and revenues.

Designing annual reports has changed over the years. Twenty years ago, corporations spent billions on design and production of annual reports, and designers typically commanded big fees for doing them, often with an eye toward winning awards. Besides being designers, they had to be managers, art directors, politicians, negotiators, and even psychologists, and they had to understand and hew to federally-mandated requirements. Design, copywriting, photography, illustration and painstaking typography were key to producing a beautiful, readable, effective annual report. To some degree, these factors are still true, but fewer and fewer annual reports are being printed; instead, they are done digitally, with less emphasis on illustration, photography, and beautifully printed, expensively-produced pieces. Still important are graphic representations of numbers: graphs, charts, tables.

Below are a few representative annual reports we've done. One of these, the third one from the left, is a digital annual report. Click on the images to view an enlarged images; in the case of the digital annual report, clicking will take you to the online report. Scroll through the report to see some of our novel approaches to graphs and information/numerical graphic representation.


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