Mixing Messages | Essay


`INTRO THE STREET TYPOGRAPHY The Familiar The Modern IDENTITY Corporate Culture Subcultures Design Cultures PUBLISHING The Book The Magazine Electronic Publishing` `INTERVIEWS`

Kent Hunter and Aubrey Balkind
Frankfurt Balkind Partners

New York, July 1994

Do you think that annual reports have changed in the past fifteen years?
AB: I think we changed the nature of annual reports. Designers used to look at annual reports out of context, as if they existed in a world that only included annual reports. Everything was about design. But annual reports need to compete in the world with other media--TV, magazines. What matters is how they communicate, which includes how they're written as well as how they're designed. Most annual reports are written in corporatese--so you start with non-communication and then compound that problem with non-focused design. We start by asking, Who does this company want to be talking to? What preconceptions do they have about the company? How can we change those preconceptions?
KH: The Why? annual report we did for Time Warner in 1989 was a seminal piece. It actually was reviewed in the general press, including the New York Times. The Times had two quotes from designers who didn't like the piece, and a quote from a Wall Street guy who loved it. The radical thing here was the way we handled the charts and financial information in the back. In their previous report, this material occupied six dense, gray pages of text. We boiled it down to a dynamic double-page spread.
AB: The Why? annual report first stood out because of its color--that's where a lot of the shock lies. The company wanted to say, We're a new company on the leading edge.
KH: It was our idea to put "Why?" on the cover in one-inch letters, because that's the question everyone was asking. We answered the question with a series of icons--the eye, the ear, and so on. The combination of image and type created a new design language.
AB: Mixing type with illustrations was new--you see this now in a lot of annual reports, which are derived from what we did. Some of this stuff with charts and graphs had been in magazines like Spy. Print is an interactive medium. We used icons and factoids throughout the book, playing games that people would have to figure out. If you have to work a little to get something, you will remember it longer. There are a lot of different levels of information, so people can read the report in a variety of ways.
KH: Steff Geissbuhler was working on his new logo for Time Warner at the same time as we were working on the Why? annual report. We didn't know what he was doing, but he came up with the eye and ear pictographic icon while we were working with the same ideas. The second report we did for Time Warner dealt with the idea of communication--from pictograms to hi-tech. This report came out in six different languages, because the company was approaching governments and corporations worldwide to find strategic partners.
AB: In our work for Time Warner, we took things from surf culture, fashion, and media, and we brought them into corporate communications. We don't claim to have invented anything new, but we brought these forms into a new place.

Richard Wurman has said that annual reports are obsolete. Do you think they will disappear?
AB: We think that annual reports have disappeared. Most annual reports now are vehicles for talking to employees or other audiences beyond the financial audience. Analysts aleady know the financial information they need to know--they're wired. They get it way before the report comes out.

But companies have to communicate--there's more need for that now rather than less. They have to communicate in order to exist. But how? Not necessarily in print. In a few years companies will have their own digital channels on-line, for communicating internally.

We've tried to use annual reports as a way to metamorphosize the company's identity from year to year. Corporate identity shouldn't be fixed. Most corporate identity systems are monolithic, like Russian communism. The only thing that works is democracy. You must allow room for counter-cultures in order to sustain the main culture. If an idea is strong, it should continually be challenged; otherwise it will die.