Design of 2009 Annual Report
It's interesting designing something that, in truth, very few people actually bother to look at. Nevertheless, we took up the challenge of creating an annual report that, we feel, is well laid out and visually appealing. We put some real effort into laying out all the tables elegantly with good use of typography for a clean, clear, fresh layout.
The full PDF of the report can be downloaded from Widespread Portfolios' website: http://widespread.co.nz/widespread-energy/annual-reports
“I have done the annual report design for Air Products for the past 3 years. I can appreciate the detailed work that goes into carefully selecting fonts and images and then of course.... pleasing the customer who wants more on a page and bigger fonts. Nice job on your annual. I noticed you pointed out that you put "real effort into laying out all the tables...." Does your production designer manually set-up the tables in the layout program (such as InDesign) or are they linked excel tables into the layout program. Inquiring minds want to know. Currently I format the entire report in InDesign and make numerous manual text edits every time figures change. I am always looking to work more productive. Any experience in linking excel tables into the InDesign file?”
“Jamie, thanks for your comments. Sadly, yes, I laid the tables out in InDesign. Having said that, I spent quite a lot of time at the beginning setting up table and cell styles which inherit from various other styles so I was able to tweak the styles as the document was finalised without any repetitive work. Of course, changing text and numbers in last-minute edits is a bit of a hassle and certainly much fiddlier than Excel but the look is great. In a new project, I have embedded graphs from Numbers (Apple's challenge to Excel) as PDFs and that's working very well too.”