Creating the Annual Report
While working in Goochland County, I was asked to start thinking about the design of a semi-annual report to go out to parents. This started as a seasonal publication, printed full color, and pushed in community locations for pick-up. We later went to a full-year edition and did direct mail to citizens.
All my work on these, was in hindsight, not my best, as I was pushing the creative angle pretty hard. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun putting these together and creating something that could amplify our work out into the community.
October 2016
Great photography was key at making these reports resonate with parents. The cover features a classroom at one of our schools, with students engaged in Minecraft. The back cover featured our recent student graduates who would graduate with a diploma plus an associates degree from our local community college. Future back-covers would feature data on our test scores.
The inset article, Working in Goochland, was a feature of quotes from teachers about why they loved working for our division.
October 2018
The cover here is the smallest component, the first one where I took the “explorations” title and made it larger, akin to a magazine cover. I used the Adobe font “Poetica” which I’d admired for years but finally had a reason to use the alternate ligatures. My cover story was “Action Research,” highlighting our project with Apple. On the far right is one of our recurring “finance” stories, using a real dollar over a pie-chart, to show how we were funding our district’s priorities.
September 2019
At this point in doing these for several years, starting in Winter 2012, I’d found a better sense of design language for the report. In this one especially, I used a limited color palette and used it across the booklet.
In each case, the majority of photos were taken by staff (including myself) and the booklets were created in Adobe InDesign.