Great Online Annual Report Designers

Skip to the list of designers or continue reading to learn how we chose them and why.

By Dominic Jones

GOOD online annual reports are back in style. As new laws make the Web the default disclosure medium, companies are looking to replace their trusty old printed annual reports and proxy statements with suitable online alternatives that won’t cause their shareholders to revolt or simply forget about them.

And if they’re subject to the requirements of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules for online proxy materials, they also want to be sure that they are providing their reports in formats that are convenient for onscreen reading and for printing. The fact is, our research over the years has repeatedly found that most companies are getting bad advice and poor quality work from big vendors that sell online annual reports.

That’s why we set out to find great online annual report designers, firms that have the experience and expertise to design great online annual reports — for companies and their investors. In August 2007, we invited online annual report producers anywhere in the world to submit their work to us to review. As part of their submissions, they also had to promise us they would never compromise and produce poor quality reports that don’t meet the SEC’s convenience standards. There was no fee for firms to enter and there is no relationship between us and any of the firms.

Had to meet minimum requirements

In all, we received 23 submissions from firms in places as diverse as Japan, Sweden and Brazil. Only the small group of firms you see below made the cut. To be included, firms had to show examples of reports that met the following basic requirements:

• All pages of the reports are provided in HTML and not images. Shareholders must be able to copy text from the documents and paste it into software of their choice.
• All data tables are formatted using HTML tables and not images to allow for easy right-click importing into Excel and for copying and pasting.
• A detailed, clearly labeled navigation menu is provided for each document (preferably visible on the left side of the web page) which allows shareholders to, at minimum, access main sections of each report.
• All HTML pages have printer-friendly HTML versions. These strip out unneeded elements from the page to save shareholders wasting paper when printing out information.
• Users can search the annual report and proxy statement with search utilities specific to each document.
• A downloads area is provided where shareholders can download, print or save a full copy of the annual report and proxy statement as well as individual sections of these reports in PDF. The financial statements should be available in Excel as well.
• A link should be provided in the navigation of each document to an order form where shareholders can request the reports to be mailed to them. U.S. companies should provide an email and phone option for ordering print materials.

In our view, the great online annual report producers will produce reports that meet all the above requirements. In fact, they should not do anything less than this because they have promised not to. If they don’t live by that standard, we’ll simply remove their names from the list.

By the way, the first company on the list, GeBer Geschäftsberichte, sent us over a dozen examples and each one was outstanding. But not to take away from the other firms on the list. They’re all really good, but just don’t specialize in online business reports as GeBer does.

Great Online Annual Report Designers 2007

Here are the great online annual report designers presented in order of the quality of their work:

GeBer Geschäftsberichte
Mariahilfer Strasse 71/17, A-1060 Vienna, Austria
+43 (0)1 596 22 68-11
thomas.rosenmayr@geber.at
www.geber.at/en

VSA Partners, Inc.
1347 South State Street
Chicago, Illinois USA 60065
+1 (312)427.3246
pheick@vsapartners.com
www.vsapartners.com

zu.com communications inc.
324 Duchess Street, Saskatoon SK, Canada S7K 0R1
+1 (306) 653-4747
chelsea.fleischhacker@zu.com
www.zu.com

nonfiction studios inc.
Suite 450, 318 11th Ave. SE
Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2G 0Y2
+1 (403) 686-8887
darron@nonfiction.ca
http://nonfiction.ca

Ramp Creative
411 South Main Street Suite 615
Los Angeles CA USA 90013
+1 (213) 623-7267
hello@rampcreative.com
http://www.rampcreative.com

Baker Brand Communications
1424 Lincoln Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA USA 90401
+1 310 393-3993
r.white@bakerbuilds.com
http://www.bakerbuilds.com

Kirchhoff Consult AG
Herrengraben 1
20459 Hamburg
Germany
+49.40.609 186-30
carina.huebner@kirchhoff.de
http://www.kirchhoff.de/

I personally urge you to give any of the firms on this list an opportunity to pitch for your company’s projects. They are all highly qualified and committed to best practices.

If you think your firm should be on this list, feel free to review the requirements and send us your information. And to those companies that didn’t make the cut, please try again when you have examples to show that meet our basic requirements.

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