Editorial Design — 2025
Common Thread Annual Report
An annual report whose most important numbers were buried in an appendix nobody opened.
A 68-page report that funders read past page three.
- Client
- Common Thread Foundation
- Discipline
- Editorial and information design
- Engagement
- 10 weeks, Feb to Apr 2025
- Team
- Communications director, two programme leads, photographer
Overview
Common Thread funds housing advocacy across the upper Midwest. Their annual report existed to keep major funders engaged and to attract new ones, and it was structured like a compliance document.
The content was strong. The order was wrong, the data was inert, and the reading experience assumed a level of duty no reader actually has.
Role
Editorial and information designer, contract
10 weeks, Feb to Apr 2025 · Communications director, two programme leads, photographer
- Content restructure with the communications director
- Grid, typographic system and print specification for 68 pages
- Design of nineteen charts and data displays
- Photography art direction and edit
- Accessible digital version with tagged reading order
Problem
The previous report opened with four pages of governance and put programme outcomes on page 41. Funders confirmed in conversation what everyone suspected, which is that they read the opening spread and the financial summary and skipped the rest.
The data was also doing no work. Nineteen charts, mostly pie charts, several three-dimensional, none carrying a stated point. A chart that does not say what it means is decoration with axes on it.
Process
Reordering around the reader
Outcomes moved to the front. Governance moved to the back, where it remains complete for anyone who needs it. The first spread now carries the single number that best describes the year, at full size.
Rebuilding every chart around its claim
Each of the nineteen got a written sentence first, the point it exists to make. Then the form followed. Pie charts became bars, three-dimensional effects went, and five charts turned out to be single numbers and were set as single numbers.
A grid that carries three densities
A twelve-column grid supporting narrative spreads, data spreads and photographic spreads, so the rhythm changes without the structure changing. The reader always knows where they are.
Photography with a point of view
I art-directed a shoot across four programme sites and edited hard, from about six hundred frames to twenty-two. Fewer, larger, better-chosen images. Nobody has ever been convinced by a grid of small photographs.
A digital version that is genuinely accessible
The PDF is tagged with a correct reading order, real alternative text on every chart, and a plain-language summary of each data display. The web version is a proper HTML document, not a flipbook.
Outcomes
- 68 pp
- Report, restructured around outcomes
- 19 → 14
- Charts, with five reset as single numbers
- p41 → p6
- Where programme outcomes appear
- Tagged
- Accessible PDF and a real HTML edition
Two foundation officers told the communications director they had read the whole thing, which she reported to me as unprecedented.
Gallery
Tools
- InDesign
- Illustrator
- Datawrapper
- Acrobat Pro
- Capture One