University Annual Reports
A written and photographic summary of the annual activities and accomplishments of students, faculty, and staff at the university.
My Roles
- Art Direction
- Brand Direction
- Editing
- Planning
- Visual Design
Challenge
Annually present a number of unrelated topics, events, and accomplishments in a single publication with various audiences and stakeholders.
Solution
As the art director, I partnered with editors on my team to write and design a thoughtful report with infographics and original photography.
Process
Content Creation
Multiple contributors, each with different goals, are asked to share information each year. This request is made in the form of a single questionnaire, which is shared with each department to ensure equal representation throughout the university.
Planning
The content team and I create an outline using the annual vision and questionnaire responses as a guide. The outline instructs the content and with this information, I begin collecting imagery and styling callouts, captions, and infographics.
Collaboration
The team is challenged to make each report—containing similar content, people, and events—feel fresh and new. In my role as the designer, I guide content creation by using infographics, photo captions, paragraphs, and more, rather than designing to fit existing text.
Conclusion
Despite the headache that each report causes, the result is consistently something to be proud of. After seeing a glimpse of its potential, contributors are more and more willing participate in the process each year and seem to provide more useful content, resulting in a report that gets better each year.
