Like many professional organizations with sophisticated brand identities, Lakeridge Health has a brand standards guide. This document details the proper usage of their logo, colours and typography to create consistency for all branded communications designed for them. Their designated type font is Helvetica. It’s classic. It’s clean and readily available.

In general, the rules set out in the brand standards should be respected. But sometimes rules need to be broken.

In the case of this annual report, Helvetica, for all the type came across as corporate and cold. Swapping it out for a hand drawn font on the cover and used within the headings on the interior pages softened and humanized the impression. To create even stronger impact with this accent font it was only used for single keywords in the headings at a much larger size.

The theme of this report is Changing Lives. The accent font was one way of representing change. Another was the use of a 12 column grid for page layout. This provided great flexibility for varying the width of type columns in the report and gives the document a less formal and static feel.