Expanding Access, Scaling Opportunities

  • Client: Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD)
  • Sector: Finance
  • Deliverable(s): Printed Reports, website and motion graphics
  • Services: Art direction, design and print management, digital, and editing
|

Every annual report faces the same underlying challenge: how do you make complex financial and developmental impact legible to a broad, mixed audience without flattening it into statistics? For ICD's 2026 report, that challenge was sharpened by the theme itself: capital, access and opportunity are abstract concepts unless the reader can see who they change. Our starting point was a communications question before it was a design one. How do you make systemic impact feel personal on the page?

Brief

Create a unique look and feel that resonates with this year’s theme of ‘Capital that works: Expanding Access, Scaling Opportunities’.To create a distinctive look and feel for ICD’s Annual Report that reflects this year’s theme, ‘Capital that Works: Expanding Access, Scaling Opportunities‘, while adopting a print-first approach that preserves the traditional book experience valued by key audiences and seamlessly translates into digital viewing and animated interactions.

Solution

The selected creative route uses an elevated, overhead perspective to position the individual within the broader context of processes, flows of capital, movement of people, and access to opportunity. Cut-out photography of individuals superimposed on illustrated systems mirrors the Annual Report’s emphasis on ecosystems – showing how SMEs, communities, and capital interconnect.

Our approach keeps the person central while making visible the networks, infrastructure, and pathways that support growth. It conveys that ICD’s impact is both personal and systemic: each individual is actively empowered, active and supporting the report’s key theme.

The elevated perspective allowed us to reveal the wider ecosystems behind ICD’s work while keeping the individuals, entrepreneurs and communities at the centre of the story. By combining illustration with human-focused photography, we created a visual language that shows how capital works: enabling access, supporting growth and helping opportunities scale.

Jez Webb,
Art Director, Blackwood

Impact

Beyond its cross-platform reach, the identity gave ICD a distinctive visual language for talking about development impact, one that moved the conversation away from figures alone and toward the people and systems those figures represent.

For Blackwood, it reinforced a broader shift in how we approach reporting for institutional clients: treating the brief as a communications strategy problem first, with design as the tool that makes the strategy visible.

|