New work on public policy report design

Over the past few months we’ve completed a series of public policy report design work for our long-time client Policy Connect. These are three of the longest, most involved reports in the genre we’ve ever worked on. The reports run the gamut on the major themes of conversation across government today – Manufacturing, Sustainability, Data and Higher Education. This made for an intense period of work, not least because the Manufacturing Commission report ‘Industrial Evolution’ was the longest report projects we’ve ever worked on – and featured a re-work of our layout, grid and typography for the company.

The ‘Industrial Evolution’ report

Working with the Manufacturing Commission team, we completed easily the most complex and involved report we’ve ever worked on.

Running to some 130 printed pages including 24 of those with custom information graphics design, this report was a watershed in the history of our print design work as a design team.

‘Industrial Evolution’ – a great example of public policy report design

‘Industrial Evolution’ – a great example of public policy report design

A page like this is a good example of the level of detail we worked to – custom illustrations as part of a large information graphics design to simplify a complex new proposed system of working in the future.

‘Industrial Evolution’ – a great example of public policy report design

The whole report is available to download here

The ‘Link to Link’ report

The All-Party Parliamentary Sustainable Resource Group essay series ‘Link to Link’ gave us a title and a graphic brief that was hard to resist: depicting a supply chain using bold colours and a report cover which could be recognised very widely.

The report was launched this past February at the House of Lords to wide media coverage and a very positive response from Policy Connect.

‘Link to Link’ – a great example of public policy report design

As with all our reports, we try to bring the bold design of the covers as a running theme throughout the piece.

This approach worked particularly well here as we opened each of the essays in the report with a bold, graphic chapter opener. An example of one of these is below… each varied in colour and execution giving the report pace and a bold finish.

‘Link to Link’ – a great example of public policy report design

The whole report is available to download here

The ‘Bricks to Clicks’ report

Continuing our work for the Higher Education Commission, we completed work on ‘From Bricks to Clicks’, a report which was summed up to us at the outset by the HEC team as being about ‘your digital footprint’.

This notion was not one we’d heard of before but it seemed to conjure up images of paths of binary data and so the team briefed us to work on this idea.

The graphic ended up working incredibly well as a design motif for the report and thus it appeared throughout the report as each chapter began.

‘From Bricks to Clicks’ – a great example of public policy report design

‘From Bricks to Clicks’ – a great example of public policy report design

As with all our other work for Policy Connect, the report required bespoke information graphics design to bring complex points to light, or counterbalance dense quantities of text. A page from the report is below, continuing the simple illustration style we’ve used elsewhere and extending this graphic language.

‘From Bricks to Clicks’ – a great example of public policy report design

The whole report is available to download here

See more of our work on public policy report design

This series of reports is part of a considerable background in public policy report design. Below are a series of further pieces of work – including a more extensive look at our creative output for Policy Connect.

Read more about our work for Policy Connect

Read more about our work for the Rail Delivery Group

Read more about our work for the V&A, University of Brighton and Humanities Research Council