I'm up for a gong at the Communicators in Business Awards next month. It's for the Oskar Mobil annual report, which I worked on with design company The Farm last year. Oskar - until it was acquired by Vodafone - was a small, quirky Czech mobile phone company which liked to do things a bit differently. Hence the unusual annual report, which is bulit around the theme of 'love', and looks more like a cross between teen magazine and a birthday cake than an all-important corporate review.
Don't get me wrong, the client was just as demanding as the next one, and the four-day trip to Prague to conduct interviews was exhausting. But the project allowed plenty of scope for creative ideas and writing - including directors' biographies treated as lonely hearts ads.
Here's some feedback from the CiB judges:
"Among this year's entire crop of annual reports, just two have broken the bounds of convention and soared off into the stratosphere and one of them is Oskar Mobil's. It fulfils the statutory duty with flair; as an exercise in communicating brand identity, it has no equal. Red is the colour of passion - and Oskar's report. We love it!"
Incidentally, trawling the Communicators in Business Awards shortlist, I discovered that another piece I'd worked on is also up for an award. A brochure - part of the extensive 2005 BDO Stoy Hayward graduate campaign I wrote for design company SAS - has been nominated in the corporate or promotional brochure category.
