Corporate sustainability reporting is a fairly recent trend, which has expanded over the last 10 years. Intended to be “vessels of transparency and accountability”, sustainability reports also contribute to improve internal processes, engage stakeholders and persuade investors. Our team elaborated two consecutive editions of the annual sustainability report for Holcim Romania, part of Holcim Group, one of the world's leading suppliers of cement, ready-mixed concrete, aggregates and constructions-related services.
More client info and work: Holcim Romania
Skills: strategy, brand identity, copywriting, art direction, DTP, photo shooting, project management
Holcim Romania annual sustainability reports are overviews of the company’s activities and efforts to strive for sustainability in its production of cement and concrete, as well as to promote sustainability in construction. The reports play an active role in consolidating the company’s identity and in promoting the corporate spirit. The message conveyed by the concepts we created for these reports is that Holcim is a responsible, grounded company, committed to contribute to building a better future and changing people’s lives for the better.
“Building”, seeing a project through all the stages of its evolution, was the key concept we used for creating the first report. We chose images showing aspects related to Holcim core business, construction sites, workers, devices, and performant equipment. For section openings we used cut out images against white backgrounds in order to draw attention towards certain elements, objects, people, which are related to the topic of the respective chapters. Inspirational quotes from worthy people recognized for their competences, but who are not famous to the general public (a professor at Harvard Business School, an American soccer coach, an environmentalist) also supported the idea of “building” performance through effort, in time.
The brief for the 2009-2010 edition of the sustainability report asked for the placement of people (employees) at the heart of Holcim success and a general look & feel intended to warm up the perception of Holcim, both for stakeholders and for the press. One solution was to shoot pictures of real people working with Holcim, in their professional context, combining photo reporting and portrait, for the opening chapters, and pictures of Holcim important construction sites inside the chapters.
Production of cement and concrete is a business that requires thorough knowledge, hard work and attention to every little detail – a state of things that is reflected in how we edited the information in the annual report. Primarily, annual reports are descriptive and informative materials meant to provide a summary of how a company has performed in the preceding year and offer a glimpse of the future. We edited all data in a well-ordered and easy to understand way by using tables, charts, as well as infographics, in order to communicate more complex processes. Sidebars and highlights are small boxes of information that complement the main text. Accompanied by icons, they capture the reader’s attention and bring more sparkle into a material that is otherwise quite arid by nature.
The core team of Publicator, Diana Moldovan (Capatina) and Iulian Puiu, started under the name Reply in 2002.
In 2015, the team changed the name Reply into Publicator and continued the business as usual.