We’ve been way too busy lately – not that we’re complaining, it’s a good thing! – to update the portfolio section of our website, so we thought we’d show our latest work on the blog. So here’s the Annual Report that we designed a few months ago for the Canadian Housing & Renewal Association. CHRA is the national voice for the full range of affordable housing and homelessness issues and solutions in Canada. We thought: what’s better to illustrate that than a row of houses, of all shapes and kinds?
CHRA’s colours are a bright green and a blue that turned out to be perfect for the sky. We kept the green for the subtitles and page numbers inside the report. After our “Helvetica-on-everything” phase, we seem to be on a “dotted-line-on-everything” phase, so we used that visual element throughout the design to separate the various text zones.
It was our first annual report design and we found out how challenging it can be to make a bunch of disparate sections with a lot of non-related information look like they belong to the same document; that without being boring and doing the same thing on every pages. From a long letter from the President and Executive Director to the Audited Financial Statements, we ensured that all layouts remained consistent while staying visually interesting. That approach allowed, we believe, each page to “make sense” – both within the report but also on their own, when extracted from the document as in the examples below:
Font-wise, CHRA uses the Zwo Pro family as its corporate font, so we used it for the main text and subtitles. However, for the titles we chose to use a Serif font, because, well, we like Serif fonts and think that the combo serif/sans serif can be very interesting plus it breaks the monotony of using just one font. For this project, we used Droid Serif Pro, a contemporary serif typeface family designed for comfortable reading on screen which also really look good, as we found out, printed.
Droid - http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/ascender/droid-serif-pro/
Zwo - https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/zwo/regular
If you want to see the report in its integrity, its available to download here. If you want us to work on your next annual report, please send us an email (info@yellowcardesign.com) and we’ll be happy to discuss with you.
