Annual Report
Haltech Regional Innovation Center | 2023
Project Overview
During my 2023 summer work term, I was tasked with creating Haltech Regional Innovation Center’s annual report. The report recaps the company’s accomplishments, performance, and client highlights from the 2022 / 2023 year. This was my first big project working in InDesign so I learned a lot about the program as I developed the report.
Project Scope
Graphic Design
Branding
Performance Review
Applications & Tools
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Illustrator
Duration
Start – July 2023
End – August 2023
Creative Process
1
Content
The project started with planning out the bones of the report. Using reports from previous years and looking at successes in the company from the current year I planned out what would be repeated from earlier reports and what new content would get a spot.
The content planning stage ended with a similar structure to previous reports but focused more on Client Highlights and Women Entrepreneurs as they had big developments this year.
2
Graphics
Unlike repeating content structures, innovating graphics is necessary for engaging the reader with visually appealing “eye candy” to keep the report fun and interesting. The next stage was to design professional but fun graphics and patterns to use. Integrating angular elements and geometric patterns into my designs elevated the impact of my graphics. Doing the graphics after the content ensured I could design around text instead of formatting text to fit my graphics.
3
Construction
With the base of the report ready, I started combining the planned content with my graphics to create a rough copy of the full report. This stage was the most tedious and least technical, as its purpose was to have a base layer to later touch up.
4
Styling
Using the base report, the report content was styled with appropriate fonts, colors, and graphic elements to bring it closer to a final product. This step included lots of fine-tuning, including ensuring consistent fonts, font sizes, colors, logo styles, and icon styles throughout the whole report. Using a style guide helped to keep things consistent, however, the guide was created during the process of styling as font sizes changed often with shifts in text length and position.
Elements like client data were formatted in combination with visual elements like graphs and standout sections to highlight their importance from the rest of the text.
5
Review
The final step was getting approval from my boss, co-workers, CEO, and others from close working companies. Anyone who had statements or testimonials in the report was asked to review their part in the report to ensure what they said was correct and was delivered how they wished. Once all reviews were finished the report was ready to publish.
Conclusion
Although I outlined my creative process in this order, executing this project had me jumping around through all these steps at random. Often I went back to writing and planning content when what I had didn’t make sense and that resulted in creating a new structure with new graphics and new styling. My overall progress was linear but I wasn’t always on a straight path to finishing the report.
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