City of London Corporation.

The brief

A report worth reading, not skimming.

The City of London Corporation publishes a year-end report covering policy, public realm, and the financial position of the Square Mile. Previous editions were dense, designed for compliance more than for the people the work serves. The brief was to keep the rigour — every figure, every sign-off — and rebuild the reading experience around the audience: members, residents, businesses, and the press.

The work needed to land in two registers at once. A bound print edition for the chamber and the desks of stakeholders, and a screen-first microsite for everyone else. Same content, different architectures. No "digital companion" afterthought.

The constraint

Civic rigour, no visual fatigue.

Civic publishing has a default look — sober, grey, heavy with bordered tables and stock photography of skylines. It signals seriousness but it costs readership. Our wedge: keep the seriousness, lose the fatigue. The typography would do the authority work. Imagery would be specific to the year's stories, not decorative. Tables would be set as carefully as the prose.

A second constraint was accessibility, taken seriously rather than audited at the end. Colour contrast, type sizing, screen-reader structure, and a plain-English summary were defined in the first week and held to throughout.

The approach

Four passes, in order.

Most reports get designed page by page, then proofed. We work the other way around: structure first, then language, then layout, then production. Each pass has a sign-off so the cost of changing your mind goes up over time, not down.

1. Structure

   A reading map of the entire report. Sections, hierarchy, what a reader can skim vs. what they should read. Signed off before a single page is designed.

2. Language

   Plain-English passes on every section with the policy leads. Tables and figures captioned so they stand alone. Glossary for anything that genuinely needs one — and pressure to use fewer of those terms next year.

3. Layout

   Print pages and screen breakpoints designed in parallel from the same content model. Print sets the typographic tone; screen inherits it without translation losses.

4. Production

   Press supervision in person, web build in WordPress with editorial controls the comms team owns. Accessibility audit on the live site against WCAG 2.2 AA before launch.

The work

A book that reads like a magazine, a site that reads like a book.

The print edition is set in a single column at a generous measure, with marginal callouts holding the tables and footnotes. The grid is asymmetric on purpose — heavier on the outside edge — so spreads feel pinned to the desk, not floating on it.

The screen edition rebuilds the same content for narrative scroll. Sections are anchored, deep-linked, and printable in their own right. The microsite ships with a built-in long-read mode and a print-stylesheet that renders any section into a clean PDF without a server round-trip.

The outcome

Read, not just published.

The print run cleared the chamber and is now distributed via the City's standing list of stakeholders. The microsite has measurable session depth — not "engagement", but readers reaching the end of sections — and the comms team report that policy press queries increasingly cite specific page numbers, which is the best signal we could ask for.