A Report to Sink Your Teeth Into
Art direction and design for the Dental Trade Alliance Foundation
Our bodies hum with complex, unseen energy, powered by intricate systems that collaborate to keep us in good working order. But when we consider these systems that keep us healthy, there’s one that we often forget: Our mouths, full of teeth. Oral health is a critical window into our overall well-being, and it’s this truth that inspires the Dental Trade Alliance Foundation.
Since 2014, Journey Group has been invited to design the annual report for the Foundation, motivated by a bold ambition: To broaden awareness of oral health’s impact on our overall health and to increase access to oral health care for all people.
The challenge
The past year marked the 15th anniversary of the Foundation’s work delivering grants to dental programs and providing scholarships to dental students across the country. The Foundation wanted a delightful way to share its work, using creativity to push against the expectations of dentistry as a stuffy, jargon-laden profession.
In 2014, Journey Group worked with the Foundation to create Pearl E. White, a friendly illustrated character by Mikey Burton. Pearl guided readers through the annual reports and brought a welcoming, approachable vibe to the Foundation’s yearly accomplishments.
This year, however, in light of the important anniversary, the Foundation wanted to draw on past creative work but not duplicate it.
The work
The Foundation came to Journey Group with open hands, trusting the print studio team to run wild with new ideas. They decided to move away from the illustrated character, hoping to instead show the broader story of the impact of scholarships and grants on specific people and programs. Journey Group was challenged to push toward photography instead of illustration and seek a fresh but sophisticated approach to the report’s overall design.
Guided by a concrete content strategy produced by Journey Group, the art director and designer took the report in a new direction, beginning with photo collage. A collage approach to photography put real people and real faces back into the report and gave more flexibility to the design system. Photo and illustration could now live comfortably side by side.
The collage approach also brought new life to photography of dental environments, which can often look sterile or flat. The art director used primary shapes to anchor numbers or quotes to the engaging layout. Using large blocks of color and quarter-point rules to separate space, the Journey Group team pushed the report toward a stronger narrative sensibility than it had exhibited in the past.
Rhythm is palpable across the pages, with the lines and divisions adding vertical movement and tech-inspired graphics that invite the reader to pause. The Journey Group team also created a custom numerical typeface to open each section of the report.
Following the content strategy, Journey Group also provided original journalism to furnish the feature stories in the report. Interviews with a scholarship recipient and a grant program director unearthed powerful stories that highlighted the tangible impact of the Foundation’s work.
The result
“From the beginning, we had immediate trust in what Journey Group does,” Laura Doyle, executive director of the Dental Trade Alliance Foundation, said. “I can have a seed of an idea and Journey can just take it and run with it.”
Once the report was printed, Doyle said she handed a copy to a board member and said, “I know it’s a lot of content, and you may not get to it,” and he replied, “Oh, no, I always read your reports from cover to cover!”
From the design to the art direction to the original content, this year’s fresh take on the annual report brings renewed focus to the Foundation’s history of empowering tomorrow’s leaders in oral health.
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