The easy way to produce your own annual report

Producing imaginative annual reports for corporate clients can be a valuable income stream for many designers. They can prove to be a challenging exercise in producing an engaging and well-designed document that also has to convey a lot of dry financial information, and consequently there are plenty of ways to create a killer annual report. But have you ever thought of producing your own?

Of course you haven't; only some kind of megalomaniac would want to do that, surely? But hang on a second; don't you just hate it when well-meaning idiots ask you how your year was and you're reduced to a sort of muttered, "Er, yeah, fine thanks"? Don't wish you had a handy document you could point people at instead, packed with relevant yet entertaining data summarising your past year, and all presented in a way that's nice and easy on the eye?

You're in luck! Socially conscious designer eyewear firm Warby Parker has come up with a nifty Annual Report Generator that you can use to put together your own unique and attractive annual report in just a few minutes.

Simply follow this link and enter your name, then tackle eight straightforward yet searching questions about last year, such as what was your favourite colour, what was your preferred reading position, and why did the chicken cross the road? Challenging stuff.

Warby Parker then crunches all your data and then turns it into your very own annual report detailing your 2014 activities and packed with revealing information, including what your spirit animal is, which emoji characters best represent you, and how many dance moves you learned. You even get your own Latin motto, a forecast of your favourite colour for 2015 and much more besides, and best of all you get a short link to your report that you can share with all your friends or simply hand to the next person who asks you how your year was.

Want to see Creative Bloq's own annual report? Of course you do; here it is.

We're particularly pleased with our projected nicknames for the year ahead; feel free to start referring to us as Crouching Tiger before everybody else does.

Words: Jim McCauley

Jim McCauley is a writer, editor and occasional podcaster, and is available for children's parties.

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