Publication - Development Effectiveness Overview 2015
Client: Inter-American Development Bank
Languages: English & Spanish
Download PDF: https://publications.iadb.org/handle/11319/7834
This annual report on the development results of the IDB has evolved a lot in the years since we started designing it in 2012. For 2015, the client purposefully did not want to print the report in the interest of reducing paper waste. That, along with the changing ways that people consume content on screens, informed our process for approaching this edition. The content evolved a lot as well. This year, the technical articles dominate the report, and the project stories would have no photos or illustrations – so we had essentially zero visual content to work with, just text and data.
We arrived on a much cleaner design than previous years – with plenty of white space, a single column of text, and very few photographs and graphical decoration. But rather than leaving it completely stark, we chose to use archive and stock photography from the region as a texture behind the few charts, sidebars, and title pages sprinkled throughout. The charts and data tables were also scaled up and stripped of most decoration.
To help break up the mostly text-on-white pages of the report, the chapter title pages use a positive/negative space treatment of a numeral over a full-bleed photo. Each chapter also had a color theme used on titles, headings, and sidebar boxes.
A major part of this publication is the reporting on the results of the organization's five main priorities that drive their focus on development projects [see Chapter 2]. Continuing a theme set in past editions, each priority has a unique color, and all articles, charts, and stories are color coded to match the relevant priority.
Sidebars in the technical articles – internally referred to as Boxes – received the heaviest graphic treatment, with photographic backgrounds of selected scenes from the region, graded to match the color theme of each chapter, so they would clearly stand out as auxiliary content outside the flow of the main articles, as well as adding some justified visual "interruption" to the white pages of text – we didn't want to add irrelevant stock photos just for the sake of having photos.
Project evaluation stories were given a unified theme within Chapter 3, rather than individual unique styling as in years past. Each received a color which was used in the title banner, text headings, and the accompanying infographics. Those infographics were sort of a visual snapshot of these project evaluations, summarizing key takeaways in one page, designed to also be printed out or shown in a meeting on a projection screen.
The charts have photographic fills rather than the usual solid colors, and were over-sized, often taking up a full page, so they would be easier to understand across a range of display sizes. [See Appendix I]
A special challenge each year are the results data tables [see Appendix II] – a key part of the report, referenced and used daily inside the Bank and externally. They have the difficult task of conveying a lot of critical layered data to a wide ranging audience, so it still has to look like a familiar table – any visual enhancements should not confuse or distract from the data. As this was a summary year for the goals reported, it included 5–10x the data as previous years, which necessitated more space for each table. Rather than being economical and trying to fit them all into a few pages as in the past, we gave them all room to breathe. A minimum of lines and decorations are used to draw the table itself, instead relying of the structure of the information to build out the shape of each row and column. A lot of coordination with the client went into "cleaning" the data to remove wordy footnotes, symbols, and other filler from the data cells while preserving the integrity of the data's meaning – deemphasizing or eliminating visual clutter was one of our primary goals for these tables.
