The best annual report designs of 2025, opened and inspected

Four annual reports worth studying for their design — and what opening the actual PDF files reveals that a screenshot of the cover never will.

21 September 2026 · Roundups

Every roundup of annual report design shows you the covers. We downloaded the files and ran them through pdfinfo and pdffonts as well, because the design decisions that matter most are not all visible on page one — and because what we found is more interesting than the covers.

The four

Dr. Martens — Annual Report 2024/25. Cream ground, the numerals 24 and 25 set enormous in black condensed type and cropped hard off both edges, with a single boot photographed at an angle across them so the yellow welt stitch reads as the only colour on the page. It is the most confident cover of the four: no photograph of a building, no stock imagery of people in a meeting, just the product and the year at scale.

Ørsted — Annual Report 2024. A full-bleed photograph of an offshore wind farm, one turbine dominant, a service vessel small enough in frame to give the blade real scale. Logo and title set quietly in white at the lower left. Restrained and photograph-led, and the composition does the work that a headline usually has to.

Rapha — Impact Report 2025. Pure black, with IMPACT REPORT set in white letter-spaced capitals so large they fill the frame edge to edge, and a single thin line between them carrying the wordmark and the three section names — PEOPLE, PLANET, PRODUCT. No image at all. The most typographically severe cover in the group and the most self-assured.

Signify — Annual Report 2024. A mosaic of small photographs — a stadium pitch lit in red, street scenes, interiors, a bridge at night — with a grey panel centred over them carrying the logo. It is the busiest of the four, and the one where the grid is doing the holding rather than any single image.

What the files say

The page geometry is the most revealing number in the table, and nobody writes about it. A PDF page is measured in points, 72 to the inch. A4 portrait is 595 × 842 and means the document was laid out for paper. Ørsted and Rapha are both 16:9 — they were laid out for a screen and were never really meant to be printed.

Rapha's is the most committed: 1920 × 1080 points is not a paper size at all, it is the pixel dimensions of an HD display expressed as points. The document is 26 inches wide. Printing it would be absurd, and that is the point — it is a 45-page presentation that happens to be delivered as a PDF, which is also why it carries seven times the megabytes per page of the Dr. Martens report.

Why is one annual report 32MB and another 9MB?

Page count barely explains it. Signify at 245 pages is 32.6 MB while Dr. Martens at 238 pages is 9.5 MB — near-identical length, more than three times the weight. The difference is images: how many, at what resolution, and how they were compressed on export. Signify's mosaic-heavy layout carries far more raster content per page than a report built around type and white space. If your report is unexpectedly large, the cause is almost always one oversized image class rather than the document as a whole.

The finding that should be embarrassing

None of the four is tagged.

Tagging is the structure that lets a screen reader convey a document — headings as headings, tables with headers attached to cells, a reading order that is not simply "top to bottom, left to right across two columns." Without it, a 258-page annual report is, to anyone using assistive technology, an undifferentiated stream. It is the requirement at the centre of PDF/UA, and three of these four companies are listed in jurisdictions with accessibility obligations attached.

These are not cheap documents. They have been art-directed, photographed, typeset and legal-reviewed. The tagging would have cost a fraction of the photography, and every one of them skipped it.

Are annual reports required to be accessible?

Increasingly, yes, and the direction of travel is one way. The EU Accessibility Act, the UK's public sector accessibility regulations and Section 508 in the US all reach documents as well as web pages, and the European Single Electronic Format already mandates structured tagging for certain listed-company filings. The gap between "we filed a compliant XHTML version" and "our designed PDF is readable by a screen reader" is where most of these documents sit.

Fast Web View, and who bothered

Linearisation — Acrobat calls it Fast Web View — reorders a PDF so the first page can render before the rest of the file has downloaded. On a 15 MB document delivered over a link, it is the difference between a page appearing in a second and a blank screen for ten.

Ørsted and Rapha both linearised. Dr. Martens and Signify did not, which means a reader on a slow connection waits for the whole file before seeing anything. For a document whose entire distribution is a download link, it is free performance left on the floor.

The one that gives itself away

Signify's report was produced by Workiva, a compliance-reporting platform, while the other three came out of Adobe InDesign. You can see it in the file before you see it in the design: it is the largest document, the only one carrying encryption (AES-256, with editing disallowed), and the only one whose producer string names a reporting tool rather than a design tool.

The encryption is worth a moment. Restricting editing on a document you publish for the world to download is a permissions flag, not a lock — any reader that chooses to ignore it can, and removing it requires no cracking. It signals intent to cooperative software and nothing more.

What makes a well-made annual report PDF?

Separately from whether the design is good:

• Tagged, so it can be read by assistive technology
• Linearised, so the first page appears immediately over a link
• Fonts fully embedded — all four of these got this right
• Page geometry matching the destination — A4 if it will be printed, 16:9 if it will not
• Images sized for the destination, not straight from the camera
• No permissions encryption on a public document, which achieves nothing

Three of those six cost nothing but a checkbox at export.

What we would take from each

From Dr. Martens, the confidence to put the product and the year on the cover and nothing else. From Ørsted, a photograph chosen for scale rather than prettiness. From Rapha, the decision to stop pretending a screen document is a paper one and lay it out at 16:9 — and then to linearise it so it actually arrives quickly. From Signify, a reminder that the tool you produce in leaves fingerprints all over the artefact.

And from all four together: a beautifully designed document that no screen reader can navigate is still an inaccessible document. The design work is visible and the file craft is not, which is exactly why the file craft keeps getting skipped.

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Files inspected on 21 September 2026 using poppler's pdfinfo and pdffonts. We link to each company's own hosted PDF rather than republishing it. Measurements describe the specific file at the URL on that date; companies re-issue these documents and figures may change.