Snapshot
Audience: Donors, campus leadership, alumni, prospective students, current students
Challenge: First-ever annual report covering three core engagement areas plus innovation, exposition, and featured stories, all within strict U-M brand requirements
Solution: Full design of the 2022-23 ELO Annual Report built to UMSI and U-M brand standards
Result: A polished 29-page inaugural report with a design system the team can build on every year
Where They Started
The Engaged Learning Office at the University of Michigan School of Information had a year worth celebrating.
960 students. 225 projects. 112 community partners. Over 14,000 hours of service. $207,331 in funding across scholarships, awards, and project support.
But this was their first annual report. Ever.
And a first annual report isn't just a summary of the year but a foundation everything after it gets compared to. The ELO team knew that. They came in with a vision and a real sense of what they wanted the report to feel like. They needed someone to take what was in their heads and make it real on the page.
What Was Getting in the Way
The ELO's work spans three core engagement areas (civic, course-based, and global) plus innovation programming, a student exposition, and featured stories like Alternative Spring Break. Each with its own data, stories, and community partners.
Pulling that into one coherent document is a design problem before it's anything else.
The audience made it harder. Donors read differently than prospective students. Campus leadership wants something different than alumni. The report had to speak to all of them without losing any of them.
And because this is the University of Michigan, there was no room to improvise on brand. The design had to stay within UMSI and U-M visual identity standards (specific color palette, typography, logo guidelines) while still feeling dynamic and worth reading.
The challenge was making three core engagement areas (plus innovation programming and a student exposition) feel like one story, told to five different audiences, inside a brand framework that left little margin for error.
What We Built
We designed a 29-page inaugural annual report for the Engaged Learning Office from the ground up.
The cover brings together a collage of student and community photos executed in a way that feels warm and energetic against the U-M maize and navy palette. It sets the right tone immediately: this is a people-first work with real reach.
Inside, each engagement section follows a consistent structure so readers can move through civic, course-based, and global engagement without losing their footing. Circular data visualizations make the numbers scannable at a glance. Bold color blocking keeps the U-M identity present without overpowering the stories underneath.
We built the layout to balance both types of readers, the person scanning for stats and the person reading every word. Pull quotes from community partners sit alongside program outcomes. A director's letter opens the report with honesty about the year. Partner acknowledgments close it with gratitude.
Every design decision was made for how this report would actually be used, reviewed on laptops, shared in meetings, sent to prospective students deciding where to apply.
What Changed
The Engaged Learning Office now has an inaugural report that matches the size of what they're actually doing.
The work was real before. Now the document is too.
Campus leadership, donors, alumni, and prospective students can all open this report and immediately understand what ELO does, who it serves, and why it matters. The story isn't scattered across internal documents anymore. It's in one place, in a format people will actually read.
Beyond this year, the design system we built gives the ELO a foundation. The layout logic, the visual hierarchy, the section structure... it all carries forward. The inaugural report becomes the template.
