The Australian Government’s renewable energy agency, ARENA, engages with a wide range of organisations to deliver on its mission: accelerating Australia’s shift to a renewable future. Following successful digital and brand-led projects, ARENA invited Ellis Jones to undertake the design and development of their Annual Report 2016-17.

The project involved the concept, layout and artwork for a 155pp printed report and a purpose built report microsite, integrated and administered through the central WordPress CMS for arena.gov.au.

It required interviewing, writing and editing copy within the concept to surface different, interplaying narratives – while ensuring readers understood the (at time) technical nature of the subject matter.

The brief for both was to deliver a concept and aesthetic that was ‘not what you’d expect from a Government agency’. Ellis Jones’ response was to employ a system of super display sized typography, combined with layout that could be applied seamlessly to physical and digital applications.

In the digital report, we created a number of custom user interactions with the interface, to bring data and statistics to life, this included live animation that responded in browser to the users cursor, interactive ‘clickable’ funding tables, ‘counting’ figures and more.

The result, engaged readers and users, set new standards in interactive report content and was a finalist in the internationally recognised Best awards.