2010 Annual Report
Spirit Mountain Community Fund
When I began working on the Spirit Mountain Community Fund’s Annual Report for 2010, my clients told me that for this year’s report they had a different approach in mind: They wanted to design the Annual Report to look like a slick magazine that you might buy in a store. It would feature much of the usual information we had printed in past Annual reports — like tribal history and profiles of charity and civic groups they worked with — but in order to imitate the feel of a magazine it would also need to have some things that you didn’t usually didn’t see in one of their books, such as advertisements, letters to the editor, and even a crossword puzzle section.
Fortunately, I’m a designer who likes to take on some new challenges. And as it turned out, designing the 2010 version of the Spirit Mountain Community Fund’s Annual Report was one of the most fun experiences that I ever had in putting a book together.
I studied printed magazines to find out how they set up different sections like a Table of Contents and ad pages so that our finished report would look like it could be placed right next to them on a spinner rack in a grocery store. I also took a particular interest in the report’s main section, focusing on 15 of the best nonprofit groups that the Fund had worked with. After discussing possibilities with the Community Fund staff, we decided to develop a look for this section that centered around a theme of “Building” and then created elements like wood panels and tools as decoration and motifs as we told the story of different groups that took their own approach to building up and maintaining both the communities and the people around them.
I built this publication almost entirely on my own, with many of the decorative elements and logos created in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. The finished book was assembled in Adobe InDesign. A few samples of the double-page spreads featured in the report can be seen in the images below.
