CTA Annual Report
CTA (Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation) is an organisation based in the Netherlands with a mission to advance food security, resilience and inclusive economic growth in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific through innovations in sustainable agriculture.
Competencies
Art Direction
UI/UX Design
Printed communication materials
The Project. The Story.
The Protagonists
During the last years, CTA has invested part of its money to improve and reinforce its brand and, in light of this change, many company websites have undergone a general redesign and alignment.
With the new brand style guide in place, CTA has also acquired a fresh mindset with respect to the way they communicate and engage with their farmers and stakeholders. For this reason, at the beginning of 2017, the organisation contacted me to design the digital and offline version of their 2016 report.
The Plot
The report was going to be a series of important articles, facts and events that transpired in 2016. The objective: to create a one-page website that would be easy to navigate both on the desktop and mobile devices.
The first draft of the content helped me to determine the structure and the level of interactivity for each article.
I worked hard to define the hierarchy between facts and articles. Also finding pictures that could harmoniously match with the CTA colour palette and meaningfully link to the content proved to be a laborious endeavour.
Once the structure was defined and layout approved, I spiced up the page by adding subtle movements to bring attention to some UI elements.
A smooth parallax animation was added to the opening and closing sections of the report while we added some nice transitions to define the breaks between the different CTA’s areas of focus. I wanted to ensure fluid navigation on mobile devices as well so some tweaks to the code were needed, so as to avoid consigning the report to a very long, boring page.
The last bit of our work focused on a consistent and pleasing offline version that would be aligned with the online version of the report and, of course, to current CTA branding.
In this case, I wanted to ensure that content was easy to be read, easy to locate and fully linked back to the main website for further information and research.
The Results
In both English and French, the report provided a good overview of CTA's interventions that assisted smallholder producers and helped them benefit from innovations in agribusiness.
The way we built and structured the information in the report highlights how CTA is able to stay ahead of trends that enhance the central role of agriculture in ACP countries and how their mission has evolved over the years.
The client says:
There needs to be a transformation in the way agriculture is conceived so that each smallholder farm is treated as a competitive business.
-Michael Hailu, CTA Director
