Why You Should Hire a Graphic Designer for Your Annual Report Design

When you write and design an annual report, you’re not just telling the world about your finances, but everything about your business or organization. You can also include things such as photographs of events or fundraisers you held and trade shows you were a part of, or even showcase informal party pictures of your staff. In short, you’re telling a human story by doing this, which allows you to make a connection (or reconnection) with your partners and stakeholders.

That all goes to say that when you’re producing an annual report, you need to combine graphics with the content you’ve written. Do this well, and you’ll keep your readers both in the loop and interested.

So why else should you hire a graphic designer to produce your annual report? Here are just but a few of the reasons why.

Make a Good First Impression

If you hire a graphic designer and pick a good one, your annual report will be noticed by your clients. It may even be impossible to ignore. Pick a bad designer, or try to work with design tools yourself with no training, and it, too, will be impossible to ignore. The difference is you may lose a customer or donor. Or two. Or three.

Basically, hiring a good graphic designer means you’re going to leave a great first impression with the report. They also have the added advantage of helping you brand your business. An expert will be able to explain, through images who you are as an organization in the report, which can only be good for driving home the report’s salient points or written content.

You’ll Save Time and Money

If you hire an efficient designer, you’ll save both time and money because someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing will cause you to pull your hair out and you’ll possibly be forced to redesign your report from scratch.

Plus, when you hire an experienced graphic designer, you’ll be letting someone else do the job in a fraction of the time that it would take an amateur with less than middling results. A good graphic designer also knows ways of keeping printing costs to a minimum (assuming you’re not just putting the annual report on the Web). For instance, they will probably already have the tools and software that are friendly with printing companies, who won’t then charge you overage for either using a design program that they may not be familiar with or is one that is a nightmare for printers to work from.

If you’re worried that a designer will blow your budget, understand that a good one will be able to work within the constraints of how much you can afford to spend. They’ll probably be more efficient in the process, too. Which, again, saves you money.

Graphic Designers Understand How to Communicate and Make You Stand Out

Designers are well versed in knowing how to properly layout information and knowing how to use colour, style, lettering and other design aspects to make your message pop. In that sense, they’re excellent communicators — which means that good design goes hand in hand with the content you’ve crafted.

In offering a better design that resonates with readers, a designer is going to help you stand out from the competition, which, frankly, is the one sure way that your audience is going to remember you.

You’ll Be Consistent and Deliver Results

If other pieces of collateral have been produced by a designer, but you do the annual report on your own, your look and feel may be off and you’ll lose consistency. A good designer, on the other hand, will make sure your look and feel remain the same with other publications and your website, which will help readers better identify with your brand.

This ties into another point: a graphic designer will help you deliver. They will go through all of your preferences and make sure that your annual report achieves all of the goals that you want it to. (Namely, drive more business or donations.) While there are, as you can see, many benefits when you hire a graphic designer, this is ultimately why you’ll want to hire one.

Contact Cyan

If you’re looking for a graphic designer to deliver an annual report that hits a homerun, contact Cyan Solutions today. We have the tools and expertise to deliver winning annual reports and are ready to assist you with your needs.