5 Tips For Annual Report Templates And Design

Annual report is a business document consisting of a company’s yearly progress and achievements that are expressed in a short story. It is like a booklet that represents data through infographics and images regarding a company’s past year financial statements, growth rate and achieved goals. This document is designed for the shareholders to let them know about the performance of the company to build confidence among them as well as future investors.

To provide the readers a rich visual experience, the annual report is designed in the form of various templates. Each annual report template is loaded with visuals and eye-catching graphics. Moreover, the images and quotations are placed on these templates. Similarly, an annual report is featured with icons, charts and even full of color choices.

The purpose of an annual report is to educate, inform and boost the readers through visuals and pictures. It is said that a picture conveys a meaning more effectively than reading a thousand words article. So an annual report is a landmark to grow your business and let your employees and shareholders encourage that they are investing their time and money at the right place.

To make your annual report and design templates in a more impressive way, here are some valuable tips that will surely lead you to express your business goals and strategies more clearly.

1. Choose Leading Topics

Whether you are going to design an annual or a consulting report template, first choose an engaging topic and make a structure of the main content to be written in your report templates. Then find statics, graphs and other visuals for your annual report templates.

So if you want to make an annual report for your company, the possible leading topics could be:

• About the company
• Company’s logo
• Business missions and goals
• Some words from the CEO
• Financial statements
• Company’s overall performance in previous year
• Various business segments
• List of the employees
• Company’s special deals

2. Pick An Absolute Theme

Once you have chosen the topics and visuals for your annual report templates, pick an absolute theme. The theme should be in clear and precise words which represents the company’s goals and mission. To make a strong theme for your annual report templates, go through all the topics and content. Then write down all the prominent points in a well-structured line or a short paragraph. The theme should be like telling the whole story of your company in short words so that the reader can understand what your company is all about. You can also tell certain success stories of your company in order to attract the readers. In other words, you have to add a crux of information regarding your brand in the theme.

Your theme could appeal to the readers who are going to read the annual report. Hence, conclude all the relevant information into a short story that forces the readers to respond.

3. Use An Eye-Catching Layout

A well-ordered layout with perfect color scheme is essential to make your content readable. The annual report templates with an inappropriate layout look boring. The most important thing to consider is that your templates should catch the eyes of readers at first look. Otherwise your whole content and visuals could be wasted in the reader’s eye.

Use the best layout so that the provided information could be easy to read. First of all, design your annual report in a way that the whole information should be divided into different sections including headings and subheadings. In this way, the reader could easily understand the ideas and skim the irrelevant information. Because some readers might be interested in a particular segment of information.

Moreover, if your first cover looks pleasant and easily readable, then there is a chance of getting readers to move to the next pages. Plus, adding spaces between segments is also a convenient way to let the readers engage with your content. Adding graphs and other visuals is a plus point as it helps the reader to memorize the information you are conveying in your annual report templates.

4. Add Attractive Data Visuals

The boring information can be made interesting if you choose attractive data visuals. Data visualization affects the reader’s mind a lot. If you use boring and complicated data visuals, the reader might be less interested in reading your annual report.

Infographics are quite popular to visualize your data in an attractive way. They are considered extremely helpful in presenting information. So when you are presenting your data regarding your business, use beautiful visuals to make it more pretty and convincing in the readers’ eyes.

Beautifying your templates by using attractive icons with a great combination of colors is also helpful. While adding data visuals, you must remember to use an appropriate file size because it matters a lot if you are working on digital formats. Consequently, your annual report templates with informative visuals and images would be ideal and worth reading.

5. Be Consistent With Your Brand

Annual reports are usually representing brands. Every brand has its typical typography and color schemes. Beyond adding a logo, you also need to consider your brand’s specific color scheme while designing the annual report templates. Choosing a brand’s typical colors provide the readers a vibe that the annual report belongs to that particular brand.

Likewise, the color elements of your brand should match other colors and visual design so that they could apparently represent your brand or company. Overall, the first glance at your annual report should give flashbacks of your brand to your target audience.

Conclusion

Whether you are making an annual report, consulting report or a newsletter design, what most appeals to the reader is all the readable content and attractive visuals. An annual report delivers the first impression of a brand or company to the shareholders and investors. Not only this, it is the very first step to enhance a brand’s growth and gain more money. Hence the best designed annual reports leave a good impression on the reader’s mind for a longer period.