How To Design An Annual Report [+ Template & Examples]

 An annual report offers a comprehensive overview of your business’s yearly operations. As the content in these reports is heavy-hitting, it’s essential to present it in a way that helps your audience understand and visualize your successes.

These reports also incorporate various design elements that support your metrics and create a unique, creative, and visually appealing story of your business activities.

In this post, we’ll outline annual report design best-practices, provide a template you can use to create your own, and go over examples of annual reports from other businesses that you can use for inspiration.

→ Free Download: 4 PowerPoint Presentation Templates [Access Now]

What is an annual report?

As a refresher, an annual report is a document created by businesses that display yearly performance, including successes and challenges. It gives a big-picture view of operations and strategies while also going in-depth on key performance metrics.

Annual reports differ from weekly reports in that they address anything and everything that has happened over the past year, including content you’ve already mentioned in weekly, monthly, or any other style of report you’ve made.  

Designing an annual report is a careful process, as it is crucial to find a balance between powerful graphics and clarity and understanding. Most reports contain data visualizations, like charts and graphs, to enhance the experience and really call attention to heavy-hitting metrics.

Below we'll provide a template that you can use to design an annual report for your business and outline the sections that should be included in every report, regardless of industry.

Annual Report Design Template

The template you choose to use to design your annual report should be based on your individual business needs and the metrics you’re hoping to include.

However, you can adapt most templates to fit your business needs, like this template offered by HubSpot. The image below features two pages from the downloadable template, including a company overview and a yearly performance analysis.

annual-report copy

Image Source

The template allows you to go in-depth into aspects of your business that the annual report will discuss, whether it’s marketing campaigns or yearly sales performance. Despite this, there are specific elements that should be included in all annual reports, and we’ll discuss those below.

1. Summarize your yearly goals and strategies.

The first section of your annual report should summarize your yearly goals and strategies. This provides your audience with an overview of your annual focus and gives the information necessary to understand and contextualize the rest of your report.

Essentially, it sets the tone for the rest of the report as it explains the intention behind your operations. If you’re a marketing business creating an annual report, this section could outline your marketing goals and the campaigns you created to reach those goals.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Biggest and Most Authoritative Library of Open-Source UX Design Resources

Open-Source, Open-Access Literature The democratization of design knowledge is at the very heart of our mission. That’s why—over 19 years after we started—we will never stop bringing leading designers, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors together to create open-source, free-to-access textbooks on UX design. This is the world’s most comprehensive compendium of design knowledge, made available to everyone around the world. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Free textbooks written by more than 100 leading designers, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors. We have assembled our textbooks in a gigantic encyclopedia, whose 4,000+ pages cover the design of interactive products and services such as websites, household objects, smartphones, computer software, aircraft cockpits, and what have you. Name an item of design interest, and you'll probably find it discussed inside. Table of Contents 1 In
Read more

Want to Learn Graphic Design? 8 Tips & Tricks for Beginners

  For many of us, the thought of high school conjures memories of ample notebook doodles. Hand-drawn bubble letters, pictograms, and stick-figures would decorate homework, tests, and papers -- and teachers, of course, were constantly asking us to knock it off. And so, most of us did, perhaps because we figured out that we just weren't that good at drawing on paper. But when some of us were in high school, we didn't yet have the numerous digital options for "drawing" our ideas. But now, machines can help us bring them to life -- and it's become a career path for many people. Graphic design is something that marketers can always benefit from learning, even without a formal education. In those cases, we enter a world of do-it-yourself education, with repeated recommendations like, "learn Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign," or, "read a book about basic design principles." And as much as those help, learning fundamentals, navigating new tools, an
Read more

Introducing Ultimate Gray and Illuminating: Pantone's Colors of the Year for 2021

Image
  There is   strength in optimism . Or at least that's Pantone's proposal for 2021: a color story that combines vitality and fortitude. The resilience we'll need to overcome 2020's challenges and the vivacious energy that will inspire us to do it. In selecting Ultimate Gray and Illuminating (Yellow) as their colors of the year for 2021, Pantone hopes to convey a mix of temperance and warmth. In the last few years, we've gotten used to seeing a single hue as Pantone's Color of the Year. Perhaps as evidence of our conflicting emotions, this year's color pair invites us to embrace the value of our differences. Creatives' reactions to this choice are divided, to say the least. We're used to adding white to create tints, gray to create tones, and black to create shades. Many use gray as a tool to precisely  reduce  chroma, or neutralize colorfulness; so seeing it as one of 2021's most influential color picks creates mixed feelings. However, regardless
Read more