1Password State of Secure Access Report 2024
Role: Systems Design, Art Direction
Each year, 1Password releases the “State of Secure Access Report.” This is a thought leadership piece which addresses issues and challenges in cybersecurity facing businesses and employees. The statistics are gathered working in partnership with Method Research. My role as designer and art director was to create an elegant, engaging design system that could be applied to not only the downloadable pdf guide but also to related assets such as animation, social media posts, and advertisements across the web.
My first goal was to research past annual reports we’ve done to audit what was or was not working, and what could be improved and further developed for this report. I also got the greenlight from my creative director to explore a direction that was inspired by midcentury modern concert posters and record labels. The giant graphics help to tell the story of each section of the report. Additionally, I conducted a competitive analysis of infographics from other data designers to see what could work in this project.
Before beginning any work on graphics of the report, I established the color palette and type scale from 1Password’s existing brand color palette. This helped me later establish other design rules.
Once colors and type had been established, I then set about creating “supergraphic” illustrations inspired by midcentury modern concert posters. These illustrations created a story from start to finish, including the opening page, section intros and closing section of the report. Each graphic served to tell a story about the report as a whole as well as each specific challenge the report addresses. I had developed the concept for use in a previous ebook system, but we chose not to use it for that particular application, and the concept worked perfectly for this project.
The “supergraphics” then informed the styling of the rest of the report. Working closely with the content and marketing team, as well as another designer, I devised flexible templates that then held data visualizations that helped tell the story of the challenges security teams face in today’s landscape. The end result was an engaging, legible report that was downloaded at a 56% higher rate than annual reports in previous years.
Not only did this system lend itself to a digital annual report, components were restyled into multiple derivative assets, including blogs, social media posts, and advertisements. In particular, I collaborated with the talented animators on our team to produce beautiful animations used to promote the report on social posts.
