The annual report is the one document your investors, lenders, regulators, analysts, journalists and future employees all read. Most of them give it a few minutes. They open the PDF, scroll past the chair’s letter, look for two or three numbers, glance at a chart and close it. Somewhere in the 180 pages is the story of a good year, a hard decision or a strategy that is finally working. If it is not on the pages they actually see, it might as well not be there.
We design and produce annual reports, integrated reports, sustainability reports and the investor and board material that sits around them. We shape the narrative, design and typeset every page, turn verified data into charts people understand, build accessible digital and PDF editions, manage print where you still need it, and arrange translation through native-speaking specialists. We are equally clear about what we do not do, because in reporting the boundaries matter as much as the layout.
What we do, and what stays with your finance, legal and audit teams
A report is a shared document with many owners. Getting the ownership wrong is how errors reach the printed page. So we agree it in writing at the start.
| Content | Who supplies and owns it | Our part |
|---|---|---|
| Financial statements and notes | Your finance team and auditors | Typesetting from the final signed files, with change tracking between drafts. |
| Regulatory and governance disclosures | Your company secretary and legal advisers | Layout and consistency; we do not draft or interpret legal requirements. |
| ESG data and targets | Your sustainability team and any assurance provider | Charts, explanation and design, using only the data they sign off. |
| Strategy, highlights and narrative | Leadership, with us | Storyline, drafting, editing and the chair’s and chief executive’s letters. |
| Photography, film and design | Us | Art direction, commissioning or creation, and the whole visual system. |
We do not audit, assure or verify figures. We do not give legal, accounting or listing advice, and we do not tell you what a regulator requires. Where a machine-readable filing format applies, the tagging sits with your finance team or filing agent; we make sure the human-readable report matches what they file. What we do bring is a second pair of eyes on consistency: if revenue is described one way in the highlights and another way in the strategic report, we raise it with the owner rather than quietly choosing one.
Finding the story in a year of numbers
Every report has a storyline whether anyone planned it or not. Usually it is accidental: a sequence of divisional updates in organisational order, each written by a different person, each beginning with “This year was a year of”. The reader has to assemble the meaning themselves, and most will not.
We start with a short series of video interviews with leadership, the CFO and the heads of the businesses, then write a one-page storyline before any design begins. What changed this year? What does the company want investors to understand that they currently do not? Which three numbers prove it? That page becomes the brief for the cover line, the highlights spread, the chair’s letter and the order of the strategic report. Our leadership communications team drafts the letters in the voice of the people who will sign them, and our corporate communications team keeps the report aligned with the results announcement, the press release and the investor presentation.
Design and typesetting that survive the late changes
Report design is mostly engineering. The cover gets the attention, but the real work is a grid, type scale, table style and chart system that still looks considered when the finance team changes a number at eleven at night, three days before publication. We design the system first, test it on the hardest pages (dense notes to the accounts, a five-year summary, a governance table with fourteen columns), then apply it across the document.
- Typography chosen for long reading and for numerals that line up in tables.
- A table style that handles negatives, restatements, footnotes and currency without improvisation.
- Photography of real sites, products and people, art directed to show evidence rather than stock optimism.
- Version control so every page carries a known draft status and every change is traceable to who asked for it.
The identity follows your brand. If the brand itself needs work first, that is a job for our identity design team, and the report becomes its most visible early application.
Data visualisation readers can trust
A chart in an annual report is a small public promise. Truncated axes, three-dimensional pies and a colour that shifts meaning between pages all chip away at trust, even when the underlying number is correct. We build charts from the data files your teams provide, keep axes honest, label directly rather than relying on a legend, and use the same colour for the same thing from the highlights to the appendix.
Every chart is checked against its source file before each proof round, and the source is recorded so your finance or sustainability owner can confirm it in minutes. When a figure changes, the chart changes from the data, not by someone nudging a bar in a layout file.
Is this year’s report on a deadline that already feels close?
Send us the briefSustainability reports without greenwashing
Sustainability and integrated reports carry a particular risk. The temptation is to make the year look greener than the data says: a forest on the cover, a target described as an achievement, a pilot project presented as company policy. Regulators, investors and campaigners are increasingly alert to misleading environmental claims, and the reputational cost of being caught is far larger than the benefit of a flattering spread.
Our rule is simple. We never write an ESG claim that your sustainability team has not supplied and signed off, and we never let design imply more than the words say. Targets are labelled as targets, estimates as estimates, and scope boundaries are stated next to the numbers they limit. Your sustainability team reports against whichever framework applies to you; we make that framework’s structure easy to follow rather than redesigning it. If you choose certified paper for printing, we say so only where the printer’s documentation supports it.
Restraint also reads better. A clear page that admits a missed target and explains the plan earns more credibility than a glossy page that avoids the subject.
Accessible digital and PDF editions
Most people now read the report on a screen, many on a phone. A print-first PDF forces them to pinch and zoom through two-page spreads. We plan the digital edition alongside the printed one, not as an export at the end.
- Tagged, accessible PDFs with a correct reading order, document structure, alternative text for charts and images, and colour contrast checked against accessibility guidance.
- Single-page PDFs for screens, alongside spreads for print.
- Web editions where they help: the highlights, the letters and the strategy as responsive pages that search engines and AI assistants can read, linked to the full PDF. Our website team builds these into your investor pages.
- Downloadable data for analysts, in the formats your finance team approves.
Investor presentations, board packs and the material around the report
The report rarely travels alone. Results presentations, investor day decks, fact sheets, capital markets material and board packs all draw on the same numbers and the same story. When each is made by a different team in a different template, small inconsistencies creep in and analysts notice them.
We design these as one family: a presentation template that matches the report’s charts, a fact sheet that uses the same highlights, a board pack layout that makes long papers easier to read and annotate. Board material often contains sensitive information before it is public, so we agree access, file handling and confidentiality terms in the contract before any draft is shared.
Print, translation and the production plan
If you still print, we manage it end to end: specifying paper and finishes, getting quotes, running proof rounds and checking colour on hard proofs couriered to your team and to ours. We work remotely, so press checks are handled with the printer’s own proofing and our sign-off rather than a visit, and we plan the timing around that.
Translations are done by native-speaking specialists with experience in financial and corporate language, never by unchecked machine translation. Each language version is typeset, not merely pasted in, because a German or French report runs longer than the English one and the tables have to be rebuilt.
Plan and ownership
Page plan, content owners, sign-off routes and a calendar that works back from your publication date.
Storyline
Leadership interviews, one-page narrative, highlights and letter drafts.
Design system
Grid, type, tables and charts tested on the hardest pages first.
Build and proof
Typesetting from approved files, tracked proof rounds, data checks against source.
Publish
Accessible PDF, web edition, translations and print, released on the agreed date.
Fees are a flat fee agreed for the scope, with additional proof rounds or languages priced up front; see how we charge. The notes below come from our team’s experience in earlier roles, where one explanation had to hold across reports, websites and client communication.
