Core Competencies:
- Accessibility
- Brand Design
- Data Visualization
- Editorial Design
- Information Design
- Print Layout
- Print Production
- Publication Design
- Typography
Multi-Year Comprehensive Annual Financial Report
Client:
Problem:
A Comprehensive Annual Financial Report is a legally mandated document that runs hundreds of pages, dense with investment holdings and actuarial valuations, and follows a fixed structure that leaves little room to move. Its audience is genuinely mixed: board members and auditors who need authoritative numbers, and members and retirees who need to understand what is happening to their pension.
Designed poorly, a CAFR satisfies the compliance requirement and reaches almost nobody. The design problem is turning a document people are required to publish into one people are willing to read, without undermining the authority the numbers need to carry.
Approach:
I designed eleven consecutive years of SJCERA’s CAFR, developing a distinct visual theme for each year built around a narrative concept: a voyage, illuminating the future, arrival at a destination. Each theme carried through the cover, section dividers, and interior, giving a reader a way through the document that the table of contents alone does not provide.
The work spanned full report layout, section divider systems, and the presentation of dense investment and actuarial data tables, where the constraint is legibility at length rather than visual interest. Across eleven years, the structural system stayed consistent while the visual concept changed, so the reports read as a series rather than as eleven unrelated documents.
SJCERA renewed the work for eleven consecutive reporting years.
Design Examples
