Report design strategy across regions and industries

Role: Creative direction, Lead designer

Thales commissions research reports every year and required a new theme for the 2023 versions.

Challenge

The main challenge was that this year they were going to slice the data up to create multiple reports targeted at different industries (verticals) as well as different markets (authentication and encryption). Creating a template that would be easy for designers in the team to work with and also something that would work across different vertical markets and discuss different solution areas but look like they were from the same family of reports was the biggest challenge.

Approach

My first step was to look at any issues and feedback that was had from the previous years reports, and a common theme was that the report was harder to read online. The previous report was set up to be printed, but the reality was that most people just read it on their device. For this reason i removed the multiple column layout, increased the font size and also made sure any spreads (if printed) would also work as single pages. In addition to this the diagrams also became full width and easily editable within indesign, helping the production time faster.

There was also feedback that a lot of the images used in the previous reports were not diverse enough and it created a lot of back and forth when being reviewed by stakeholders, so the new design featured less photography, and more graphical elements.

Results

Research report cover design options

I developed a theme that would work across regions and verticals, based around using the corporate secondary colour palette and applying it to abstract characters that represented data. Using a different graphical approach to each cover distinguished it from the other. I also applied different background colours for the vertical reports, so instead of dark grey, a blue would be used for example.