Fresco Creative worked alongside Bailador Technology Investments to prepare their 2025 Annual Report. The design was centred around a visual metaphor – sandstone. Being a sedimentary rock (stability, longevity, trust), sandstone is made up of trillions of small particles of sand (investors, ideas) which come together under pressure (entrepreneurs, investments) to create something solid and beautiful (an innovative and successful business, returns). The notion that rock builds up over time and creates layers year-on-year led to this concept being chosen as a suitable visual metaphor for the Annual Report.
We introduced two tertiary colours in addition to the pre-existing, but limited, blue colour palette and created a navigation bar on the right-hand page to help readers navigate the 88 page publication. The cover continued a ‘textural’ theme from previous years, and we worked with the client to re-organise sections within the document and add subheadings for better readability. The fonts were inherited from a previous report but we expanded the paragraph styles to create a more engaging aesthetic. Fresco added icons and pulled out large numbers in certain sections to highlight key information and break up data. We suggested bar graphs as a way to communicate accruing investment levels which the client loved. We also requested they add large quotes from the leadership team and they were happy to source these soundbites. Splash pages and full pages images with short sentences about the company were scattered throughout to compartmentalise the content. The client were pleased with the end result which was delivered on time and on budget.
