Corporate annual reports are great tools for shining a spotlight on your brand and business. This piece of communication allows you to highlight your accomplishments, reinforce your brand identity, amplify your visions, goals, objectives, and mission, as well as strengthen trust with stakeholders and investors. Creative annual report designs make fore effective branding tools. While most companies and marketers make it a point to create on-brand content for marketing, annual reports rarely if ever, get the same treatment—which is doing your brand a huge disservice because these reports ought to reflect your brand’s voice and your business’ image and identity. They play a huge role in the way that your brand is perceived not only by clients, but also by your stakeholders, investors, and potential business partners.
An important consideration when it comes to creative annual report designs is ensuring that your brand is well represented and communicated not only through design, but also importantly through the report’s content and copy. A good annual report must follow a well-designed and structured narrative, leading the reader through the entire report intuitively. Make sure to reflect a consistent brand voice that caters to your audience on a personal level. Use a tone that is relatable and engaging, and make sure that readers can draw a lot of information from your copy.
Creative annual report designs are true to your brand’s unique visual language. Having a set of detailed guidelines on applying various design elements relating to your brand is important so they can be applied and interpreted correctly in your annual report design and other corporate communications. Design best practices should be designated for logo use, typography and fonts, brand colours, illustration and photography, graphics, iconography, interactive elements, as well as data visualizations. It also pays to have an intuitive and logical flow or hierarchy of elements for page design.