How to design a more interesting report cover

Jan 18, 2008 by Jennifer Farley

Posted under: Design Stuff!

If you want to improve a simple report cover without adding images, you can use bold blocks of colour combined with alignment to create a statement!

I’ve put this cover together in Photoshop but this is something you could do in loads of programs including Word.

We’ve probably all seen (and made) covers that look a bit like this;

The text in the header is centred and set in Times New Roman. The bullet points are also centred and look fairly higgledy piggledy (to use the official design term) and the logo is up in the top right corner.

So here’s what I’m going to do to change it and make it a little more visually attractive.

Change the alignment of the text AND the logo to left.
Add a large block of colour behind the text
Add a couple of white lines to the top and bottom of the block of colour to add a little bit of elegance. Also added a drop shadow below the block of colour
Changed all of the text from Times New Roman to Trebuchet and reversed it out i.e. change the colour of the text to white so there is nice contrast.
Put the bullet point text in small uppercase.
Finally I added the company name to the report

And this is what it looks like:

So no fancy techniques or clever image manipulating, but I believe it’s a much more eyecatching cover report. This is something you could use for a school or uni report, or a business or company.

9 Comments + Add Comment

paul January 20, 2008 at 6:09 pm

nice ! I like the extra white lines alot. I’m not sure about the position of the logo, but I guess there’s not a whole lot of places to put it really.

paul
Jennifer January 21, 2008 at 10:29 am

Hi Paul,

Yep, it’s amazing what a couple of white lines can do for ya! I put the logo to the top left to create a nice straight (invisible)line down the left.
Alan January 21, 2008 at 3:50 pm

Very eye catching indeed – nice work.

Saw you were in the Sunday Times yesterday – good stuff!

Alan
Jennifer January 21, 2008 at 5:51 pm

Cheers Alan. Yes my first brush with fame!
Graphic Design Blog » Can You Teach Yourself Graphic Design? January 22, 2008 at 9:57 am

[...] Lion Design contains lots of photoshop tutorials. A recent post also shows how you can change a boring looking report cover into a more interesting [...]
Sherif January 29, 2008 at 7:54 pm

As usual, simple and elegant, i feel like i am going to Digg all of your articles and posts, i just hope that i amn’t overflowing your blog with much comments, but it’s me, i can’t help expressing how i feel about stylish and valuable things, keep it going, this blog is my favorite to check daily, i hope it’s the same for all right here.
mark March 29, 2010 at 9:07 pm

http://www.laughing-lion-design.com/2008/01/how-to-design-a-more-interesting-report-cover/

the graphic images are no loading: ~/clip image 002 and 004
R September 16, 2010 at 3:09 pm

The images aren’t loading for me either.
chloe October 22, 2010 at 6:56 am

its not working