Reporting on sustainable business practices
Challenge
On the surface, it would seem that a large luxury cruise liner company exists in opposition to the tenants of sustainability. But dive a little deeper and you'll find that environmental stewardship has been a core principle for Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCCL) for quite some time. Since 2008, RCCL has been reporting on how it performs against its long term objectives to safeguard the world’s oceans and destinations in which it operates. These annual reports have been an important way to measure the company’s progress, hold itself accountable to its commitments, and to celebrate and share milestones. RCL was seeking ways to make the information more engaging and accessible so it could share key elements with the public and others less familiar with the technical aspects of its operations.
Solution
In the role of creative director for Blue Marble Creative, Lisa worked with RCCL to present the information that came out of third-party evaluations of its environmental, health, and safety programs in a format that would appeal to a diverse group of internal and external stakeholders. For the 2010 evaluation report — a lengthy document covering a range of topics — heavy emphasis was placed on eye-catching imagery from various destinations around the globe to which RCCL’s ships traveled. These visuals helped to explain some of the technical details of RCCL’s operations, break up heavy blocks of text, and entice readers to move through the content.
In the following year, Lisa developed a series of two-pagers to accompany the annual report. These two-pagers presented the highlights of RCCL’s stewardship efforts, and a unique color scheme for each topic made it easier to distinguish sections and locate which ones were of most interest to readers. An integral component of the two-pagers were information graphics developed from the report’s quantitative and comparative data.
With the text heavy analysis translated into an inviting layout with eye-catching graphics, RCCL’s constituents were able to see and understand what progress RCCL was making toward its environmental, health and safety goals. The two-pagers made technical and detailed information from the full report accessible to a wider audience. They so effectively presented RCL’s progress that the two-pagers were later assembled into a single document and replaced the full report that had previously been available for public access. Information graphics gave life to the numbers and became visual soundbites to promote the release of the annual report and share portions of the total analysis.
