The brief

A local authority annual report is a statutory document. It has to be produced, it has to be accurate, and it has to be published by a date that does not move.

Carlow County Council needed the 2023 report designed and printed, in both an English and an Irish edition, running to 88 pages each.

Two languages is not one job twice

Irish runs longer than English. The same paragraph takes more words and more lines, which means a layout that fits perfectly in one edition overflows in the other.

So the grid has to be built to absorb that from the start rather than being squeezed afterwards. Headings, captions and pull quotes all need room to grow, and tables need to hold their shape when a column header doubles in length. Get that right at the template stage and both editions set cleanly. Get it wrong and you are re-flowing 88 pages twice.

The data is the hard part

Council reports carry a lot of figures: budgets, housing numbers, service statistics, committee attendance. Supplied as spreadsheets, they arrive in whatever shape the department that produced them used.

Those get rebuilt as consistent charts and tables that read the same way throughout the document, so a reader learns the visual language once on page nine and can use it on page seventy.

Managing the print, not just the file

We wrote the print specification rather than leaving it to the council to guess at: 150gsm silk throughout, 300gsm on the cover, full colour, matt lamination on the cover only, PUR bound.

That spec went to a printer we sourced and the price came back at €785 for the run, which we brought to the council rather than marking up. The job then ran through print under our management, so there was one person answerable for whether the thing arrived on time and looked right, instead of a design file being handed over and hoped for.

Why that matters for public bodies

For a council, the risk in this kind of job is not aesthetic. It is a missed publication date, a mistake in a table of figures, or an Irish edition that does not match the English one page for page.

Taking the print management as well as the design removes the gap where those problems usually happen.