Annual report for Svenska kulturfonden
Annual reports have a reputation problem. They are necessary and thorough, but often designed for an analogue era, and especially when published as flippable PDFs on a website, they have a low chance of being read. For Svenska kulturfonden, one of the Nordic region’s most significant cultural funders, the annual report is also one of the clearest ways to show what the foundation does and what impact it has. The question was: how do you redesign an annual report so that a digital reader wants to stay with it?
Our answer was to stop treating it as a report. We took the visual language of an art catalogue, with generous space, bold image choices and a confident, expressive layout, and made it the starting point. The texts were made shorter and more compact to suit how people read on screens today. The result is a printed book and a digital annual report that feel like part of the same world, and that give Kulturfonden’s work the presence it deserves. We built the platform in WordPress and took overall responsibility for the editorial work, from article production and coordinating freelance writers to working closely with the photographers.
The images carry much of the report’s character. We worked with two Finnish photographers whose approaches complement each other. Helen Korpak’s deeply humane portraits bring the grant recipients close, and Juho Huttunen’s art photography adds a more poetic, expressive layer. Together they lift the report out of the familiar visual world of annual reports and give it the feel of a cultural publication.
A flippable PDF is still a printed page on a screen. It has to be zoomed, dragged and squinted at, especially on a phone. A site-based annual report is designed for the digital environment from the start, and the difference shows in the reading experience. Text, images and layouts adapt to any screen size, so the report works as well on a mobile as on a desktop. Navigation is clear, pages load quickly, and readers can jump straight to the story that interests them instead of paging through a document. A site is also easier to find, share and link to, and it can be updated and developed after publication. For an organisation, that means an annual report that is read, shared and used throughout the year, not just opened once.
