Apple | Annual Reports

Designing annual reports was a big deal in the ’80s and ’90s. The ease and efficiency of distributing financial information electronically largely eliminated the need for these expensive publications. As the pace of change accelerated, this old-school way of crafting a message went the way of the dinosaurs.

I’m saddened to see the practice largely disappear. It gave designers a chance to learn how to create extended visual narratives about a company—stories that were more measured and nuanced.

Back then, it was also something of a rite of passage: to call yourself a professional graphic designer, you had to have designed a logo, a poster, and an annual report.

Annual report design was a dark art. A designer worked with a writer, the CFO, and the PR department to put an optimistic spin on the past year’s financial performance and the year ahead, without angering shareholders or raising expectations too high.

I was fortunate enough to design the 1984 report and serve as creative director for the 1986 and 1987 reports—all pivotal years. Then again, it seems like every year at Apple in the ’80s was pivotal.

The years from 1983 through 1986 were turbulent ones at Apple. The company went from daring to take on IBM in 1983 to the excitement of the Macintosh launch in 1984, followed by Steve Jobs’s departure and disappointing financial results in 1985. Apple began bouncing back in 1986 with new products, followed by the launch of HyperCard in 1987.

The stories behind the 1984 and 1987 annual reports are worth telling because they serve as bookends to two different Apples. The 1984 report reflected a confident company that colored outside the lines. The 1987 report portrayed a company acting like an adult and coloring inside the lines—still with some quirky brilliance. I couldn’t resist slipping a few Easter eggs into a handful of pages to let Apple diehards know that the quirky Apple they loved still existed, even without Steve Jobs.