Behind the Scenes: The Process of Designing the NAACP’s Annual Report
I’ve noticed that we often see only finished design pieces in design portfolios. It makes sense that we want to present our work to the world in its most polished and finished state, but I’m always curious about all the stuff that goes on throughout the design process. We just recently got the annual reports we designed for the NAACP back from the printers and have put up some glamour shots in our portfolio, but we thought it would be fun to also show how the piece evolved from our first presentation to the client. Here’s a little behind the scenes look at the various concepts presented.
We began exploring concepts for NAACP’s annual report in late summer of 2009. It was originally intended to be the centennial annual report, so we focused all our initial concepts on paying tribute to the history of the organization. Our initial cover sketches reflected historical events as well as their roots in activism. The first direction involves a transparent overlay cover with bright yellow printing of the title. Through the title you’ll be able to see photographs of important historical events the NAACP has been a part of.
This second direction explored the organization’s history through numbers. The persistence of the organization’s efforts would be highlighted by the amount of time it took to accomplish significant milestones. In the center of the cover, we featured “100 Years Fighting for Social Justice.” This title would actually be printed on the first inside page and revealed on the cover through a die cut square. The inside first spread contained a mission statement message.
This third direction paid homage to the boldness and clarity of activist posters of the past.
After some back and forth we developed a fourth solution, which combined some elements from a few of the concepts presented in the first round. The client liked the idea of incorporating important photos on the cover with a translucent overlay. On the overlay there would be numbers that correspond to the photo below. The concept was to show the richness of their history and their accomplishments through these numbers.
The concept was broadly liked by the client, but a last-minute decision was made to refocus the annual report to reflect accomplishments for 2008 rather than 2009, which meant we had to go back to the drawing board at a very late stage in the process. Our next iteration kept the look and feel of the previous sketch but brought in the new theme of “Power, Justice, Freedom, Vote.” This ended up being the winning solution.
Check out our more images of the completed piece here.
The annual report was printed by Recycled Paper Printing in New Hampshire. We used Cougar 80lb. cover and 80lb text. It was printed as CMYK with a spot color of PMS cool gray 10. The transparent cover is 48lb clearfold, printed with two hits of white, two hits of yellow and process black. Typefaces used are Modern 20, Century Expanded and Knockout. The final piece is saddle stitched. Here it is on press, where we watched over it like worried parents witnessing their baby’s birth:
