Working with a designer to produce a report: A guide for content producers

Putting together a report can be a big challenge. You have to work with writers, designers, photographers and other contributors while also meeting the needs and expectations of the many stakeholders. This guide outlines some of the tips, tricks and ideas for project managers, writers and content producers to get the best out of the designer you’re working with.

This guide is a springboard for inspiring best practices for planning, preparation and implementation to produce good report design. It is intended to help shape your conversations with designers in all the stages of creating a report.

Briefing 

Before you commission a designer, you should put together a watertight brief. Once you provide the brief, the designer or agency should provide a quote, outlining their process, costs and timeline. Getting that brief right is important, not only for getting the best designer on board, but for helping the project run smoothly. A good brief establishes a shared language and agreement that you can refer back to during the project and sets expectations for both parties.

Describing your project

Understanding the context and content of the report is important for the designer in order to achieve the best possible result. Below are some key questions to prompt ideas of what you can put in your brief:

• How would you describe the report using three key words? (inspiring, provocative, confident)

• What type of report is it? (a guide, a body of evidence, a call to action for policy makers?)

• Who will use the report?

• What do you want the reader to do after they’ve read the report? 

• How will they read it?

• Do you want the styling of the report to be new or to be based on a previous report? Make this description as clear as possible, as getting this wrong can cost valuable time on the project.

• How many pages do you want the report to be? This is important so the designer knows how much space they have to play with on title pages and case studies.

• Who are the key stakeholders responsible for the sign off of your report? Understanding the design approval process is useful for the designer to ensure that they understand what types of feedback may come and when.

Example brief

We’ve also put together a Google Doc brief that you’re welcome to use here.

Content

Of course with any report, written content is key. It holds all of the key messages and inspires the visual format of the report. Your role as a project organiser is making sure that the content is delivered and communicated in the best possible way. Below are a few hints and tips to help you get there.

Handing over content

When you kickoff the contract with the designer, you’ll probably be in one of two positions: 

1. You’ll have all of the content ready, signed off and proof read to go into design.

2. You’ll be mid way through the drafting process with an idea of the shape of the report, but nothing quite finalised yet.

If you’re in position one, it’s best practice to have a kickoff meeting with the designer once they’ve read through your brief and report. In this meeting, try to clear up any questions that they may have, reiterate the points in your brief that are important and share any visual inspiration and specify pages within your brand guidelines that you feel particularly need to be considered.

If you’re in position two, you may need a few more meetings to make sure you communicate to the designer what will be included in the final report. It’s also important to outline uncertainties about the content. This will avoid the designer styling something that is not actually intended to be included in the final report. 

Confirm your timeline 

Timelines are often included in briefs and proposals, but it is worth revisiting them in case situations have changed. An anticipated delay in content can affect the final delivery time of a design, so it’s important that this is flagged early on. The sign off and approval process may affect this, if there is a delay in feedback from key stakeholders.

Within the design process, these are the following milestones, meetings and decisions that are key to get in the diary to ensure a smooth process:

Kickoff meeting

In this meeting you’ll recap everything that was outlined in the brief and proposal, and give an overview of the content, and structure of the report, making clear any preferences you have. 

Complex content review:

If, within the report there is a complex visualisation or graphic that needs careful considering, it can be worth committing meetings to this specifically. Outline any complex content at the start of the project.

Styling reviews:

This first meeting is all about establishing how you want the report to look, before it’s designed in full. The designer will then put together a few key sample page designs based on the report draft. They may put together and provide 2-3 style options for the overall aesthetic of the report according to your brief. In these meetings, we will discuss which key styles work best with your brand guidelines and identify any issues with text length.

First draft review:

This review is about looking at how the report works as a whole (now that the design is laid out), identifying missing content or copy changes and sense checking the content. You may feel there are visual elements such as photography or infographics that don’t quite communicate what you intended, so this is the time to flag them all. Usually a designer will provide you with 2-3 rounds of amendments within your agreed scope of work, so identifying the major changes early on is important (major changes can take a few rounds of amendments).

Second and third amendments.

These are best provided as annotated PDF documents or written lists with page numbers. It’s best to keep these to a minimum as opposed to sending them back and forth, to avoid confusion.

Organising your content for the designer.

Organising content into types is extremely useful to help the designer and the end reader. It’s also useful for the designer to understand:

• What is the most important section, page(s) and message of the report?

• Why are these page(s) significant?

This level of understanding can help influence which information should be pulled out and how the overall design is structured.

Using a variety of Text styles

Even if your report is expected to be blocks of text, adding short accompanying text captions, summaries or pull out features is helpful to the reader, helping them skim the report and pull out relevant information and distinguish content type. You may want to include a running text style that features across your report such as:

• Expert opinion - Commentary on the main text from an expert’s perspective.

• Action points - Summary bullet points that usually appearing at the end of a section or sub section.

• Food for thought - Short paragraphs featuring ideas that relate to the main body of text.

• Summaries - Short paragraphs accompanying longer sections that summarise longer form content.

• Case studies - Real world examples relating to ideas and theory within the running text.

Giving a target word count (exact or a range)

Where this can become tricky is in the draft stage. Styling for reports will sometimes take place before the written content is signed off. For layout and spacing reasons, when designers are putting together page templates and assigning layout, an understanding of approximately how many words in each section can inform the final visual result. This will create a visual balance and consistency in the design. 

Color coding your content styles

It can be helpful to assign a highlight color to a content type when handing over the text for your document. This will give the designer a very clear indication of content groups to consider and avoid complication. This is particularly helpful if there are multiple section styles.

Allowing the designer to suggest copy alterations

In the first draft, the designer may suggest minor text edits in order to enhance the understanding and impact of the text within the report. This is often to do with emphasis and hierarchy of the content to make sure the key messages are seen in the right order. It’s worth having this conversation up front and asking their opinion on the structuring of your text and if they have any ideas for adjusting it. This will make them feel open about communicating on this level and may encourage them to provide more suggestions.

Giving feedback

Be open to feedback, but get the balance right

You will have outlined feedback points at the proposal stage, but sometimes the design process means the designer will ask you for feedback that wasn’t included as an ‘official feedback point’. Embrace the opportunity to contribute to the conversation. Picking up on a major design decision that doesn’t work could avoid a delays and wasted effort. Avoid sending constant feedback, as it can cause confusion and increase the likelihood of exceeding your allocated feedback rounds.

Know what type of feedback you need to give

If a designer sends you a design of a single page that you can see isn’t quite finished, make sure you understand why they are asking you for feedback. They should have specified this within their communications with you, so be sure to double check if it’s not clear. This is more likely to happen at the early stages of a project where the text draft is not complete and the styling is being established.

For example, I may say:

‘I have designed this double page spread with the current draft content. It’s not finished yet, but I’m interested in what you think of the messaging of the infographic treatment on page x’

In this instance, it’s clear what feedback you should be giving as the request was very specific.

Use moodboards & screenshots to communicate

If you feel the specific style or visual look is not right but you can’t put your finger on what’s right, checkout some other reports from your sector and see how they have treated similar types of pages. Some people find this helpful to highlight how something has worked in another report. This is not saying that you should tell the designer to copy another design, but more to observe how another design is effective. This will help communicate what needs to be more effective in your design.

Language for style feedback

Fill in the gaps using adjectives in the square brackets.

• It needs to be more… [assertive, confident, professional]

• And less… [bright, loud, playful]

• It needs to feel more like a… [call to action]

• And less like a… [part of the body text]

Having these conversations on the phone can be beneficial as a verbal discussion and can result in deeper insights and a clearer direction.

Visual elements of a report

Infographics & data visualisations

Complex visualisations can cover a double page spread or continue across several pages.

Simpler infographics tend to be a feature of a standard page alongside body content. They may visualise a key piece of information, enhancing the understanding of the written body content. 

Here are a few useful questions to help provide a brief / explanation on the infographic specifically. 

• What should people understand from the infographic?

• What are the most important pieces of information within the infographic?

• What should the focus and story of the infographic be? With several data fields in each data set, a steer on what the reader should focus on can be useful. A data set can often hold several stories, so clarity on the important story is important.

Designers can make the call to pull out particular pieces of the body text as a diagram or infographic if it assists in the understanding of a complex idea. It’s also worth indicating in the draft when you would like an infographic featured.

Photography

If possible, it’s useful to provide section specific content to the designer and outline any other content that needs to be sourced. 

If the designer sources photography:

If you have a photography bank and you’re happy for the designer to explore it, it's useful to give a few sentences on the type of photos that can be used and how to find them. The same applies for if you’re using stock photography.

If the client provides the photography:

If you have access to a large photo bank, it can be useful to select a variety of landscape or portrait photos. Portrait photography is very useful for full page images, whereas landscape photography can be more easily stacked. Provide an even and consistent number of photos per section.

Providing photograph captions

Captions can add useful context to the design, so it’s worth providing or composing short, informative descriptions to accompany the photographs.

Front page

Front pages often take on ‘house’ styles, following a uniform brand style. Covers tend to be down to interpretation if the report is of a particular type. If the designer you’re working with is proposing a complex or unusual cover, it’s worth asking to see a few versions of this. This could be in sketches or a full mockup, depending on the complexity of the proposed design. It’s best to discuss and establish this as kickoff stage if possible to avoid additional feedback rounds.

Illustrations

You may have commissioned illustrations to feature within the report, or there may be sections within the report which the designer decides to illustrate. This could be title pages, or particular pages where an illustration is useful to complement the mood of the content or emphasise the section.

It may also be that illustrations are used to represent part of the written content, whether that’s displaying places, people or objects. This is often a stylistic decision and depends on the mood of the report and your brand guidelines.

Looking for a designer for your report? It would be great to chat. We produce reports and infographics for third sector organisations including Nesta, Guy’s and St Thomas’s Charity, the Centre for Ageing Better and Oxfam Cymru.

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