At Labrador, we follow and understand evolutions in corporate communications and transform our knowledge into opportunities for our clients. Our award-winning experience helps companies engage with their stakeholders, including employees, investors, analysts, and others, through effective corporate disclosure materials.
In this Thought Piece, we will discuss ways to use overall styling and design elements to make your company’s annual report on Form 10-K more readable and in line with your other disclosure materials, which in turn can more effectively support your corporate messaging.
Through our advisory and design services, Labrador can provide bespoke recommendations and create custom infographics, as well as apply an approved, consistent style to your Form 10-K.
Labrador has been a Workiva Partner since 2017. For our Workiva clients, we are able to design files directly in the Workiva platform, eliminating the need to export content, and streamlining the process.
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throughout for examples known to be created on the Workiva platform.
Deeper Dive
As corporate disclosure documents continue to evolve from the old onion skin, small font, black and white documents that they once were into highly visual, digitally delivered communications, the annual report on Form 10-K is now ripe for its evolution to keep pace with proxy statements and ESG reports. There is a wide range of possible visual enhancements that can be made to the Form 10-K to increase readability, beginning with the application of a style sheet and the use of infographics throughout the report.
Approach to Formatting and Style Related Enhancements
As a starting point, companies can consider style related changes that can be applied universally to the Form 10-K and Forms 10-Q, including:
- Style sheets that provide for font, addition of color, and heading designs (which should coordinate with that used in their proxy statement, if applicable).
- Iconography to break up dense runs of text, highlight key information or to pull through themes across the document (such as discussions of business segments as they occur across the business section, risk factors, Management’s Discussion and Analysis (MD&A), and the financial statement footnotes).
- Side bars, callout boxes and other design features that highlight key information and effectively break up paragraphs of text.
Incorporating Infographics
Infographics can be particularly effective to communicate information in a more digestible format. Many companies are already incorporating infographics into investor presentations and their proxy statements which would be just as impactful in the Form 10-K and Forms 10-Q (where applicable). Opportunities include:
- In the Business section, companies can lean into infographics used in their investor presentations, proxy statements, and ESG reports to present business overviews, including segment highlights; strategy; key developments; and human capital management, including culture, vision and values, or other programmatic or statistical highlights.
- Executive Officer biographies can be designed to coordinate with board bios in the proxy statement and include photos of the individual officers.
- If required to include a summary of risk factors, an infographic can be used at the outset of the risk factors section, which can also be replicated in the forward-looking statements when a similar list of risks is presented.
- In MD&A, financial highlights can be presented with bar graphs in lieu of tables, infographics related to segments can be pulled through from business section where appropriate, and presentation of information such as costs of goods sold, operating expenses, critical accounting estimates and non-GAAP measures can be made more visual.
Early coordination with financial reporting teams will be important so that the design changes do not interfere with the existing disclosure process and to ensure alignment in approach, particularly in sections like MD&A or the design of the financial statements – making the offseason an ideal time to implement these changes.
Disclosure Examples
Style Sheets
Applying style sheets to the Form 10-K creates visual interest and breaks up long blocks of text through the use of color, fonts, and heading styles, making the document much easier to read and navigate.
Section Divider Pages
Taking the style sheet a step further, the examples below use color-coded table of contents and divider pages to differentiate the sections of the report and then pull that color through the entirety of the section headings and tables.
Additional Design Features
In addition to style sheets, other straight-forward design elements can be incorporated to aid in navigation, increase visual interest, and allow companies to highlight key information for readers.
Table of Contents
Best practice in disclosure documents is to include at least two title levels in the table of contents to aid in the reader in navigating lengthy and dense disclosures. The same can be applied to the Form 10-K where companies can either expand upon the historical practice of listing the Item numbers or alter the order of the information in the Form 10-K to better tell the financial story (see Intel and Honeywell example below, the latter of which also includes both the modernized table of contents along with a reconciliation to the traditional ordering at the end of their Form 10-K). In addition, some companies are including expanded internal table of contents for MD&A and the financial statements (similar to the addition of an internal table of contents for CD&A in proxy statements).
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Many companies include a glossary of key terms or acronyms to which style sheets can be applied to increase readability.
Nike
Use of Icons
Iconography can break up dense runs of text, highlight key information and pull through themes across the document.
Callout Boxes
Callout boxes and other visual cues can be used throughout the Form 10-K to highlight key information and to present useful takeaways and considerations. Where disclosure tends to remain consistent year over year, the callout box is particularly helpful in calling the reader’s attention to those aspects that are new or significant for the given year.
Infographics in the Business Section
Companies increasingly use infographics on their websites and in their investor presentations, proxy statements, and ESG reports to describe their business, segments, highlights, and strategy, as well as their ESG and human capital management approach and priorities, all of which can also be repurposed and used in the Form 10-K to allow for consistency of presentation across the full suite of investor-facing disclosures.
Risk Factor Summaries
When companies are required to include a summary of their risk factors, infographics can be created to highlight the main categories and underlying risks, or the overall design can be coupled with bullets to create a list that is easier to read.
Executive Officer Bios
Given that companies can opt to include the biographies of their executive officers in the Form 10-K or in their proxy statement, presenting the bios in a manner consistent with the director biographies in the proxy statement creates uniformity across both documents and allows for symmetry if used in other presentations, like investor decks or on company websites.
Infographics in MD&A
Infographics can be used throughout Management’s Discussion and Analysis to create more engaging presentations, consistent with investor decks. In addition, companies can augment current narrative and tables with more visual presentations to allow stakeholders to digest the information more readily.
