“Powerful and engaging. What could have been a dry, formulaic report communicating key issues that impact people’s well being was instead built as a vibrant visual fabric of everyday transactions—creating a language that demanded you to engage.” —Anthony De Leo
“‘At What Cost?’ takes the grocery store’s typographic landscape and mixes digital type, photographed type and lettering in a way that strongly supports the visual metaphor and message of the piece. Combined with good pacing, the brochure stood out in its category, directing engaged attention to the message.” —Ben Kiel
Designed by Calgary-based Daughter Creative, this report for nonprofit organization Calgary Foundation uses typography built by the fabric of everyday transactions: bills, receipts, tickets and even hand-painted signage.
Comments by Scott Wilson:
Tell us a bit about Daughter Creative. What are your creative specialties and typical clients like? Daughter Creative is a women-owned and -led branding and ad agency in Calgary and a bronze winner in Strategy magazine’s Small Agency of the Year and Design Agency of the Year categories in 2022. We help purpose-driven organizations get the attention they deserve, and we firmly believe that focusing on feelings helps forge connections between people and brands. We create to delight, intrigue, inform and entertain, and daughter is a word that reminds us that everything we do should be done with empathy.
What is Calgary Foundation’s mission, and how long has it been a client of yours? Calgary Foundation connects donors to community organizations and, through funds generated by long-term endowments every year, it flows millions of dollars to every corner of Calgary, supporting causes as myriad as our population. Calgary Foundation publishes a quality-of-life report and an annual report that often confront difficult topics. We’ve concepted and designed each report since 2018. Creating a compelling narrative and bringing these reports to life with highly engaging design gives context to complex statistics and helps achieve wider attention within our community.
What was the focus of the “At What Cost” brochure, and how did it influence your print design? 2022 had offered Calgary a very cautious sigh of relief. With the city slowly beginning to open back up after the pandemic, our social and work lives have been returning to what they once were. Meanwhile, the cost of living has not seen that same return, and we’re left with sky-high prices and inflation pushing up every transaction—along with our stress and anxiety levels. This year’s report sought to explore that new sense of tension, highlighting statistics pointing to the effects of higher financial stress in the city.
We dove into the report with an aesthetic pulled from the heart of retail. The report begins with a cover designed to truly evoke the chaos and unrelenting feeling of compiling costs. We see layers of stickers upon stickers, initially appearing as discounts and reductions. However, on closer inspection, we see prices are increasing instead.
Inside the report, we developed a design language built by the visual fabric of anywhere money is spent. Loud and chaotic on every page, this language symbolizes the compounding stress of the rising cost of living. Photography was also a key consideration: hard lit for a raw, immediate and uncomfortable feeling to suggest the tension of financial stress. All of this is supported by a blazing, bright retail color palette of primary reds, blues, yellows and oranges.
What typefaces did you use for your design? The book utilizes a contrasting two-part typographic system: number one being a hefty, shouty, all-caps Futura Extra Bold Oblique—a stalwart of the classic BUY! BUY! BUY! value-based advertising and consumerism. This loud, obnoxious typeface represents the hard-sell point of sale with its unignorable presence and force, tightly tracked and leaded to really get that bursting-at-the-seams feeling and giving readers no space to think.
On the other end, representing the completed sale, is GT Pressura Mono, typeset to mimic the layouts of printed thermal paper receipts utilizing a single-point size, with a string of hyphens as strokers or rules and right-aligned statistics as balance figures. The mechanical, technical feeling of the typeface and layout references the nickel-and-diming people feel they need to do with their regular spending, keeping track of every expense.
How did the client react to the brochure design? From the first presentation, the client was totally on board with the concept. The greatest tension we had to navigate, one also true for previous years’ reports, was keeping a positive outlook while discussing often-confrontational statistics and themes. This year, we maintained this balance through the bright, vibrant color palette; more playful imagery; and fine details such as the choice of GT Pressura over other monospace faces for its softened edges and terminals.
