The Design of Corporate Annual Reports in London, 1980-2000

The annual report is a long-lived mechanism of corporate accountability and governance. Economic historians have dated the formal regulation of financial reporting in the United Kingdom to the nineteenth century, when companies in some economically significant industries, such as banks, insurance companies and railways, were subject to statutory reporting requirements. These companies published annual (and in some cases semi-annual) financial statements so that boards of directors could both demonstrate how investors' capital had been used and could justify payments of dividends. It was not, however, until 1967 that annual reports became a fiduciary requirement for all UK limited companies and a prime means of corporate communication. Since then, annual reports have included a comprehensive report on a company's activities and financial performance throughout the preceding financial year and have been sent to current and potential shareholders and stakeholders.
This research examines annual reports produced by British design companies in the 1980s and 1990s, a period of significant growth in both the number of companies using external design services to produce their report and in the number of reports being printed. It asks firstly, to what extent annual reports contributed to a changing political and economic system in Britain between 1980-2000 and, secondly, to what degree did designers aid in delivering that contribution.
The annual report has been largely neglected in histories of design. The restraint of the existing literature remains unchallenged, particularly that which deals with design and visual matters. Furthermore, despite the significance of the political and economic changes in 1980s Britain, and despite the fact that annual reports were an increasingly lucrative business for British design companies within the late 20th century, little historical attention has been given to the relationships between social changes and the design of corporate annual reports. Although some historians and commentators have recognised that the increase in market activity in the late 1980s went hand-in-hand with an increasing self-questioning by businesses of the importance of corporate identity, there is little critical analysis of how annual reports contributed to changing political and economic structures in Britain between 1980-2000.
Most writing concerning annual reports has been confined to the fields of finance and business and within the research that has been written by design specialists, the analysis is equally circumscribed at the at expense of the broader contexts in which the annual report operated. There is little writing from within the fields of design that looks beyond ideas of success and towards wider contexts at work. This research aims to begin to shift the imbalance in the fields from which the established literature has emerged by offering a design historical approach that combines the critical enquiry of a historian, with a knowledge of design processes. In asking after relationships between political and economic contexts, annual reports and designers this research aims to begin to fill the lack of knowledge surrounding the design of annual reports in the late twentieth century. Moreover, it is hoped that the combination of object analysis with interviews will bring new methods to histories of finance and accounting and new insights into the significance of the annual report within design history.