Annual Report Design:
The Power of an Interactive Brand Story

Whether you are a global organization or a growing startup, a well-designed annual report is a powerful tool for amplifying your brand message and engaging everyone from investors to customers with a positive and visually compelling narrative of your year.

“Annual report” is a deceptively simple term that has come to house a plethora of different forms of branded content. Depending on the size and nature of your company, it signifies wildly different things—from financial reports to year-in-review storytelling.

In the traditional corporate sense, an annual report is a chronicle of a company’s key activities, operations, and financial health for shareholders, potential investors, analysts and other stakeholders. It’s a huge document that can run up to hundreds of pages.

Yet increasingly, annual reports are becoming elite marketing tools for strengthening brand awareness. They celebrate company achievement, build connection with customers and employees, and hammer home important brand messages. These steer readers through an entertaining and engaging narrative, and—in the case of examples such as Spotify’s Wrapped—can cleverly make the customer the hero of the story, instead of the brand.

Annual reports used to be created using PDFs or other static content creation tools, and often ran to hundreds of pages. (If you’re still doing it this way, it’s time to catch up!) Digital consumers are increasingly expecting more personalized and immersive digital content experiences—and with our increasingly shorter attention spans, content needs to cut through the noise quickly.

Modern web creation platforms have come a long way in helping companies access cutting-edge, interactive digital formats and techniques to ensure their most critical branded content is memorable. Aside from improving reader engagement, choosing a dynamic annual report design format can also bolster your brand’s perception as relevant, innovative, and contemporary. Here are just a few popular options consider:

Wondering how these effects work in context? Take a look at these annual report examples to draw inspiration for your next project.

There are many benefits to building a web-based annual report filled with interactivity and animation over a static PDF one. It’s a huge opportunity to be creative and show your brand personality in an authentic way. From interactive maps and charts, to horizontal scrollytelling, here are a few of the most interesting annual report design techniques to experiment with.

As such a personal piece of branded content, your annual report needs to feel genuine and rooted in your organization.

For NGOs, startups, and small businesses, it can be extremely expensive to create an annual report, particularly if more interactive design is involved. For larger enterprises, it can be time consuming, requiring tremendous back-and-forth as creative control becomes distanced from in-house brand and marketing teams.

More often than not, the result is a lacklustre slideshow or static PDF in an effort to avoid the cost and time involved in creating an experiential content-piece. Yet, this doesn’t have to be the case.

The rise of no-code web creation tools is removing the technical barriers, timelines, and costs traditionally involved in producing premium annual reports with an external agency. Armed with a library of pre-coded interactive design components, you can quickly produce exciting interactive annual reports for a fraction of the cost, while publishing the report to your existing domain through our export and embed functionalities.

Get a whistle-stop tour of designing a slick, animated annual report in Vev without coding a thing. You can find the complete template used in this video inside Vev to take a closer look at how all the sections we’ve covered fit together, and even copy them into your Vev project to customize them to your own branding.

There are average annual reports, and then there are great annual reports that make us forget we are even looking at a report at all because they are fun, engaging, and full of personality. While creating a standout annual report may seem tricky, it’s not as hard as you might think. Follow these annual report design best practices to create a communication people actually want to read.

Looking at the big picture is all well and good, but don’t fail when it comes to the detail. If you’re creating a long-form annual report, a well-designed cover is essential. This is the visual that will be plastered across all your marketing distribution materials—social media, website banners, newsletters, landing pages, and beyond. It’s the first impression of your annual report and your brand, so it needs to pop.

Your annual report cover will act as an introduction to a whole year's worth of activity, so it will take some planning. As a starting point, ask yourself these three questions:

The style of your cover design should set the creative direction for the rest of your report and any surrounding content, such as landing pages. If your cover is graphics-led, your report shouldn’t then be dominated by photography or typography. Whatever you decide, make sure your artistic choices are consistent. People should see the cover and the full annual report as one piece of content.