Every year, Germania Insurance produces a strategic plan guide that recaps the progress in the previous year and outlines plans for the upcoming year. It's a challenging assignment because the document is very text-heavy and is limited to an eight-page self cover. Previous verions of this publication have essentially been nothing but pages full of words with a small image thrown in here or there.

I decided that I wanted to make this thing very easy to read and to use large imagery that fit in with the year's theme, "Charting the Course." The idea was to use road and map elements because this document was like a road map for the future of the company.

I chose a sans-serif typeface that has a large x-height to make it more readable at small sizes. Setting type at small sizes, in addition to in-line headlines, gave me enough space to run full page photos on the facing pages, which sets the theme for the page. I also shot every photo in the book.

To the untrained eye, this book doesn't seem very exciting. But that's what good design does - it presents information (in this case, large amounts of it) in a way that is both readable and attractive.