Best Practices in Sustainability Report Design

Good design doesn't make a weak sustainability report strong, but bad design will bury a good one. We're revisiting this post because the underlying design principles have barely moved since we first wrote it — but the context around them has: reporting itself is now shaped as much by regulatory format requirements as by design taste.

Why design still matters

Under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), even after the 2026 Omnibus reforms narrowed the companies required to report, in-scope companies must tag their sustainability statement digitally in a machine-readable format as part of the annual financial report — the same discipline already applied to financial statements under ESEF. That's a real shift: a sustainability report is no longer only a document a human reads front to back, it's also structured data a regulator's system reads. But that makes human-facing design more important, not less. Most of a report's readers — employees, customers, investors doing a first pass, journalists — will never touch the tagged dataset. They'll read the PDF or the microsite, and design is what decides whether they get past page three.

What we love in CSR report design

🔍 Pleasing pages with a clear focus, avoiding clutter.

🔍 Consistent design language throughout for familiarity.

🔍 Clear and legible tables and charts with headings in standard case.

🔍 Right-sized fonts, limited to three sizes, for easy reading.

🔍 Horizontal PDF format for more room to play with on the page.

🔍 Authentic original photos of the real business, not stock images.

🔍 Eye-catching design elements like illustrations and icons, used sparingly.

🔍 User-friendly navigation for a seamless reading experience, especially in longer digital-first reports.

🚫 Avoid: vertical text, excessive icons, huge fonts, and generic stock diversity images.

Where content and design meet

The best-designed reports we see are usually also the best-written ones, and that's not a coincidence. A page layout can only do so much with a paragraph that buries its one good statistic in the middle of four sentences of preamble. Before a designer ever opens the file, the underlying copy needs to be structured for scanning: short paragraphs, a clear hierarchy of headings, numbers pulled out where they deserve attention, and captions that actually explain what a chart shows rather than just labelling it. Get that right first, and the design work goes considerably further.

Why horizontal still wins

The preference for horizontal, landscape-format PDFs over the traditional vertical A4 report has only strengthened since we first made the case for it. Most sustainability reports are now read on a screen, not printed, and a landscape layout gives far more room for the kind of side-by-side comparisons — this year against last year, target against actual — that a reader actually wants to see without scrolling. It also tends to force better editing discipline: a wider, shorter page has less room for the padded, three-sentence paragraph that a narrower page can quietly absorb.

Writing for two readers at once

A modern sustainability report genuinely has two audiences, and they read completely differently. One is the human reader who'll spend, at most, a few minutes on any given page, skimming for the headline number, the CEO's letter, or the section relevant to them. The other is the assurance provider, the regulator, or the investor's ESG analyst, who will read a specific disclosure line against a specific ESRS or GRI requirement and check that the wording actually satisfies it. Design has to serve the first reader without undermining the second — which means resisting the temptation to compress dense, compliance-necessary language into a pull-quote just because it looks better, and finding a layout that gives both the summary and the detail their own space.

This is where a lot of reports go wrong in the other direction: some become so focused on satisfying the disclosure checklist that the document becomes unreadable to anyone outside the compliance team who commissioned it. The reports we rate most highly manage to be genuinely two documents in one — a story a general reader will actually finish, and a reference document an auditor can navigate — without either one compromising the other.

A practical checklist

Before a report goes to design, we run through a short set of questions on the copy itself:

• Does every section open with its most important point, rather than working up to it?
• Could a reader who only reads the headings and pull-out numbers still follow the story?
• Are technical terms defined on first use, rather than assumed?
• Does every chart caption say what the chart shows, not just what it's called?
• Is the balanced reporting — challenges alongside successes — genuinely there, or has it been edited out in a later review pass?

Get through that list before the design brief goes out, and the designer is working with material that's already doing its job — which, more often than not, is the difference between a report that gets read and one that gets filed.

It's a small amount of extra discipline earlier in the process, and it consistently saves far more time in review cycles later, when catching a structural problem at proof stage means reworking pages that have already been fully designed rather than adjusting a paragraph before anyone has touched a layout file.

Find out more

Explore our more detailed round-up of some of the best recent reports in our LinkedIn post. And if you're planning your next sustainability report and want copy that's built to be designed well, not fought with, talk to us.