I was contacted in early fall by the JMU Foundation asking if I’d consider designing their Annual Report. I met with a couple members, and we discussed what they’d like to change, and what they’d like to stay the same, and we set up a timetable, and a system for sharing files and communicating edits.
Often I’m starting from scratch, but thankfully, they had an Adobe InDesign file from the previous report, so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. There were some challenges, namely, the graphs and charts. The data was provided in an excel spreadsheet, and so I needed to create each graph in Excel, format the colors, and labels, save them each as an SVG file, and then edit them in Illustrator to more easily edit how the labels appeared in the final image, and saved them as EPS files to import into the document.
I needed to add a few articles from Madison Magazine that had to do with donors and Foundation funded initiatives. Rearranging those so that they worked with a totally different page layout was challenging at times, but I was able to make it work. I also had to reconfigure things toward the end of the project because we were not at a page total divisible by 4. To address that, I made the main picture for the two articles full page, and had the article, itself, on the facing page.
To make the cover a little cleaner, I created a reverse version of their current logo so that it could be easily visible without being inside a white block.
To view the booklet online, click here.
To learn more about the JMU Foundation, visit their website.
