Jake Naish
COPYWRITER
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Brown Advisory

Brown Advisory was looking to freshen up its annual report approach. We looked at the competition in the sterile financial services landscape, and felt there was an opportunity for much more than just freshening up.

-2019 Gold Addy for Annual Report (Intangibles)

- 2018 Gold Addy for Annual Report (Step Ahead)

Art Director: Gavin Sullivan

Brown Advisory Annual Report - Intangibles

Performance in the financial services industry is almost exclusively measured on an objective basis. Numbers, concrete results, and so on. For Brown Advisory’s 2018 Annual Report, we stepped back to ask, “what about everything else?” What about the stuff between the lines? The soft skills that lead to hard results? The art of finance? Asking these questions resulted in commissioning two artists to create abstract imagery based on ten intangible traits we shared with them. These artwork/trait pairings became the mile markers for the entire annual report, each complementing related, if not more objective, content in an art gallery-inspired book.

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Brown Advisory Annual Report - Step Ahead

At first, the esteemed Gavin Sullivan and I thought there’s no way “shoes” was even a concept, let alone something that could carry an entire annual report. We were wrong. Calling upon different types of shoes and their respective purposes, we soon realized there were lots of rich parallels between footwear and financial planning.

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