Awhile ago I was talking with one of my co-workers and he mentioned that he’d heard of a financial report that the shareholders actually had to bake in an oven in order to be able to read it. It sounded too good to be true- financial reports make up a large portion of a lot of printers’ business, and are generally comprised of dozens or even hundreds of black and white pages filled with dense text, charts and graphs. In short, these sorts of documents don’t seem like the kind of thing that anyone would put that kind of creative effort into.

However, it is commonly understood that while annual and financial reports are a necessary byproduct of all public companies and many privately held ones, most shareholders don’t relish reading them. In fact, Glenn Curtis states in an article for Investopedia, a Forbes media company, that when these reports begin to “clog up mailboxes across the country… a large percentage of shareholders might toss this document in the trash can when they receive it.”

So what should a company do to create a compelling financial report, one that any recipient would find intriguing, even delightful? When faced with just such a dilemma, Podravka, the biggest food company in South-East Europe decided to hire the company Bruketa & Zinić to spice up their annual report. Called “Well Done,” the report consists of two parts: a big book containing numbers and a report of an independent auditor and a small booklet that is inserted inside the big one that contains the very heart of Podravka as a brand: great Podravka’s recipes.

This smaller inner book contains blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that when wrapped in tinfoil and set to bake in an oven at 100 degrees Celsius will reveal both recipes and illustrations of the previously empty plates filled with food.

To see more photos and read in detail about the project, visit Dezeen. The comments are also interesting to read as they reflect everything from praise to a somewhat misinformed outrage about possible environmental impact. I found this project to be an inspiring piece of communication design and it has certainly created a buzz, which is of course a great form of promotion. At the very least I hope it will encourage companies and individuals to introduce and implement creative ideas in traditionally non-creative realms.

Posted in Graphic Design, Innovation, Just Plain Cool | Comments Off

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