Founded in 1990s, BMS United supplies tankers and other ships with bunker space, lubricants and risk management services. They have offices in Piraeus, Limassol, Hong Kong, Vladivostok and Buenos Aires.
Kommi Graphics, a visual communication agency specializing in print and digital, was in charge of their annual report project. They gave the publication a thorough overhaul and redesign that lends BMS United a distinctive corporate identity and adds a luxurious value to their name.
The starting point for this design was taking the audience’s understanding of financial reviews into account in order to deliver a product that is unambiguous and intelligible.
The publication’s financial elements, figures, graphs and stats are clear, even to readers who may not be familiar with the industry.
The multipage bulletin renews the company’s identity with a striking, contrasting design that utilizes garish colors against monochrome surroundings.
The selected typeface adds a deeper level of clarity and forms a content breakdown that is simple to comprehend.
The font is easy on the eye and makes reading a pleasurable experience, while the combination of printing technology and a unique color palette conveys the feeling of a company that is at the top of its game as a righteous industry leader.
As one of the world’s leading marine service companies, BMS United takes special pride in its multinational vocation and culture. This, along with the company’s transparency, responsibility and reliability, was the guiding force behind the brochure’s look that goes well beyond this niche's comfort zone.
The minimalistic cover boasts the BMS United logo in classy, dark red sans serif font against a special rough paper in beige. According to Kommi Graphics, the choice of paper is meant to project the feel of modern design and the company’s industrial expertise.
The inside of the publication features occasional two-folds containing hi-res photography of the company’s key figures and other aspects of note. This creates a welcome break from plenty of infographics, pie charts, fact sheets, column charts and other depictions of financial figures.
BMS United’s core values, mission statement and quotations appear in the form of a magazine article, with stand-out headings in highly contrasting colors and strategic use of copy.
Kommi Graphics opted for a very straightforward yet highly impactful color scheme for this print design.
Except for the beige covers, the bulk of the bulletin’s pages come in red, white and black/grey tones that are used on different visual assets: typography, highly-processed photos, infographics and background.
Only the occasional full-page photography comes in color, in a successful effort to break the monotony of the three-tone content.
It’s the use of these three colors that makes the report special.
For example, following a page with a red background and transparent photograph in a matching hue, comes a page with minimal, white background and a highly contrasting heading in the same shade of red.
This results in a perfectly eye-catching design where every page evokes an element of surprise and is different from the next one, although they all use a very limited arsenal of colors.
Red is BMS United’s main corporate color and is a vital part of photo editing in this annual report.
The photography’s crimson filter removes the excessive “noise” and lends a very uniform and recognizable style to the design, so that it stands next to the potent typography quite effectively.
Certain photographs, like those of docks and ships, are given an extra contrast treatment, enhanced by the quality of the ink and paper. The latter, in particular, is the type used by museums to create their own art publications. This lends the BMS United’s bulletin a very luxurious appeal.
Kommi Graphic’s design of BMS United’s annual report redefines the often inaccessible and arcane category of financial bulletins.
Its opulent treatment comes from the quality of the materials as much as it does from the graphic design solutions.
Reliant on a very strict color scheme and a combination of serif fonts inside and sans-serif typography on the cover, the final look of the report embodies class and professionalism, no doubt being one of the best in the business.
As a great asset to the company’s branding, this multi-awarded design marks a natural progression from BMS United’s reports from the previous years, which exuded a much more linear design, opaque layers of colors and, overall, fewer surprises.
The annual report redesign came hand in hand with a new website, which introduced a whole new online identity for the company.
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