Imagine you work for hours to pull data from several different tools to create a report design — only to realize it’s crammed with information that’s frustrating to read. Or doesn’t communicate the value you want your reader to perceive.
It’s not enough to have fine words stapled to your doc anymore. You need to go a step beyond and think not only as a presenter but as a reader.
How do you like to consume information? What kind of data do you retain the most? Or find most engaging?
When you create a report, the goal is to document information in a way that’s compelling, engaging, and actionable. You want to share your findings in a professional and well-thought-out manner that conveys the most important information in a short period. That’s where design comes in.
Interactive elements, engaging designs, navigation bars — it’s all part of the report design mix now.
As much as a successful report requires great content, it also needs excellent design. The north star for creating a report is that it should be designed in a way that looks appealing, helps readers quickly identify the important information, and makes it easy for them to skim to find relevant sections.
Throughout this article, we're going to list the 10 best report design tips and report design examples that can help you design a visually interactive, engaging and informative report.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit report templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
You want to have a clear design for your report. Don’t try to jam so much information into a page that it’s impossible or rather frustrating to read and understand at a glance. You might want to educate your reader, draw their attention to a certain challenge, influence their decision-making, or show interesting insights.
The more clarity you have in your design, the better the information will flow and communicate your narrative.
Your report’s audience might be managers or executives, who probably would like to know the bottom line quickly. To facilitate this, you might follow a report writing format that ensures your report is easy to read and understand. In the same way, you also need to think about how your visuals fit in the grand scheme of your report.
A good starting point is identifying the most crucial pieces of information.
Even starting with some figures or a headline, and then working your way down into a paragraph is a form of basic content hierarchy, which translates well into a report. You can then add on a visual element to further make it more actionable.
As a reader, you don’t want to be bogged down with paragraphs of text. You want to take in information in a digestible manner — possibly in the least amount of time with the most precise data. Take a look at this example to get an idea of what we mean.
Similarly, when you create a report , readers prefer to take in the information visually, without having to read between the lines or big blocks of text.
Short, clear and actionable text tends to resonate best with readers. Think about it: what made you stick through this blog till now? Words or pictures? As humans, we are naturally more inclined to consume information in a visually engaging manner, for instance, videos and images, as compared to text.
When creating a report, it’s important to break up text into paragraphs, imagery such as maps, photos of real people (not stock images), screenshots, and other design elements to make your content easy to read.
By combining well-placed and well-chosen graphics with a ton of white space and adding short, concise sentences, you can make your report’s content incredibly easy to understand.
If you want to highlight one or two specific sections on a page in your report, use size and portion to show hierarchy. This will help you make sure that the reader's attention is naturally led to the action you want them to take.
Take a look at this report page as an example.
Content in your report must be organized in a way that reflects the nature and importance of the information being displayed. That means you should decide on what information should take priority ahead of time. Further, you need to arrange the content in a logical, contextual order so that it flows well.
The key design principles for many modern designers go way back to the 1900s when the Gestalt School of Psychology began studying human perception and laid out their design principles .
Using these principles as a starting point, you can create a report with better structure and layout. Alternatively, you can also choose a pre-designed report and customize the content as per your needs.
"The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures." - Ben Shneiderman
No one will remember each and every data point you mention across your report. You need to write your report effectively , and design it in a way that it becomes actionable.
Whether you’re preparing a marketing report, a sales analysis report, or an annual budget report, you want to present the most contextually relevant information in a dynamic and easy to digest form. This will help the reader draw valuable conclusions faster.
One way of doing this is by using callouts . These are used to emphasize the importance of a facet of a report or web page. For example, a report for a webinar might use breakdown by gender and industry to show the attendee participation.
By using various tables, icons, fonts, and font colors to illustrate the accompanying text, you can add callouts to direct the reader or viewer’s attention to that specific section and make it easier for them to visualize and retain the information covered in the report.
I recommend keeping your callouts minimalistic. That way, your reports will not only look more professional but also have more clarity. Leave out the noise.
The idea is to include callouts to supplement your visuals, not to distract the focus away from them. To keep callouts simple and effective, avoid arrows or any other heavy graphics that draw too much attention away from the main element.
Overloading your report with too many components that occupy a lot of visual space can end up distracting your audience from obtaining key information at a glance. If you have one or two specific things of importance, funnel the users into these sections right away so you don’t lose their interest and attention.
Consistency is one of the key principles of the Design DNA. It’s highly useful and helps make the interface more intuitive. In short, when elements have a consistent look in your report, the usability and learnability significantly improve for the reader.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — keep it simple. Having a consistent design flow throughout your report eliminates confusion.
Define the typography, colors, grid, space, size and positions you’ll use in your report. With a strong visual hierarchy and continuity, you can deliver a smooth experience to the reader, one that’s easy on the eyes, and even easier to retain critical information.
Create a defined grid of your choice that allows you to arrange different elements of your report in a nice and aesthetic way. Use the same color palette across the report. Make sure all the padding and margins are consistent in all similar elements (text, images, buttons, cards, etc.).
It’s always a good idea to incorporate your company’s branding into your reports. Using brand elements such as logo, color palette, and text from start to finish makes the design more cohesive.
Our brains process visuals faster than text, which means you’re better off painting a picture for your reader than writing an essay in your report.
If you have important information to share within your report, use data visualization to make it easy to digest.
Let’s say you’re creating a financial review report of your department. Of course, this would include a lot of complex financials, including expenses, budgets, MRR, ARR, CAC, etc. If you present this info as is, it can get painful to see massive data spread across documents and screenshots.
A better way is to use visuals to summarize the data and tell the reader what’s important within 10 seconds. Visuals like charts, graphs, pictographs, and more add a component to your report that text cannot: speed. This applies to monthly or annual report designs as well.
Take a look at the report below:
It’s worth pointing out that data visualization doesn’t mean stacking up all the graphics together. If you add multiple formats like graphs, pie charts, and histograms all together in a single page of your report, you run the risk of dispersing the reader’s attention everywhere on the screen.
If you’re using graphs, label the X and Y axis correctly. Keep your text minimal. Stick to no more than 3 main colors in your report.
Learn more about how to visualize statistics in your reports by watching this video.
Interactive elements are powerful and user-friendly components that make a big impact on your report. Whether you’re creating a marketing document or a budget report, adding interactive elements can help you create a great user experience.
Interactive UI components usually include animations and gestures that create a responsive experience.
It’s important to remember though that adding too many interactive elements can quickly frustrate your reader. They may look pretty, and using them may be fun for a moment, but they should ultimately be able to give insights directly to the reader. So, don’t add things that aren’t necessary.
Consider asking these questions before you add interactive elements to your report:
It’s important that when you’re putting together a report you let the components on the page breathe. This means adding more whitespace around elements to make them stand out clearly.
Whitespace is a great design tool to balance other elements and better organize content to improve the structure, flow, and communication experience.
The goal of your report should be to highlight key takeaways and add context to that information with supporting visuals. When your report’s layout has information cramped up in sections, your reader will find it difficult to understand what the report is really trying to convey. That’s where you bake in whitespace to isolate crucial elements of your report.
Whitespace doesn’t necessarily mean you need to make your background color white. In fact, a solid background color that makes the front elements pop and stand out is just enough to make a good case.
Take a look at this report as an example:
This report template has a grey solid background as the whitespace that contrasts the primary red color of the headings and numbers. With a few design elements on the page and a good amount of whitespace, you can significantly improve your report’s readability.
Consider incorporating your company’s logo, color scheme, title, and font into your report that helps you put your brand at the forefront.
Regardless of whether you’re creating a report for internal purposes or external stakeholders, it should be a reflection of your brand. Thus, it should feature not only your brand’s style but personality too to maintain cohesiveness and consistency.
An easy way to do this is to give your content and design a quick pass to see if anything seems off, and keep an eye out for any specific elements you should eliminate.
For example, if you have a brand style guideline ready, consider taking into account the primary and secondary colors mentioned already.
To make it easier, check out Visme’s Brand Kit . You can easily build your own brand kit in minutes with your brand templates, colors, fonts and logo. This way, every report you create will have consistent designs every single time.
Watch this video to learn how you can create a brand kit for your business with Visme .
A very simple but effective way to make sure that your designs are coherent and cohesive is by creating a report template. Think about it. One of the major challenges in designing a report is the amount of time it takes to get every element, text and visual, in place.
So, if you’re someone who creates reports on a regular basis, you’re far better off creating well-designed report templates that you can instantly pick and work on without having to worry about what the report would ultimately look like. Create and customize Dynamic Fields to pull in personal and company information across multiple pages, reports and projects.
A well-designed report template should ideally feature a variety of elements that you can mix and match as per your needs. Charts, images, headers, callouts, and font family are the visual pillars of your report that’ll automatically fast-track your report making process.
Even if you’re a non-designer or have little experience with designing, having ready-made report templates will instantly ease the process for you.
Create a stunning report design quickly and easily by getting started with one of Visme’s premade templates. Share content with your audience visually. Find a free report template that you can easily customize for your own purposes.
