Objective

Sustainability regulation does not arrive as one rule. It arrives as many, in different places, on different timetables, from bodies that are not coordinating with each other, which the report says plainly: each region follows an independent process based on its own existing frameworks.

For a compliance team the practical question is never “what is the regulation?” but “which of these applies to us, and when?”. A document that answers the first question beautifully and leaves the second to the reader has failed at the only job it had.

Creative response

Report design and information design at Coriolis Technologies.

• Geography as the primary index. A world map with a flagged pin on each of fourteen jurisdictions: Canada, the United States, the UK, Europe, Egypt, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, so a reader finds their obligation by looking at where they operate
• A quarterly cadence, issued as the Sustainability Regulation Update, the Q4 2022 edition timed to COP27 at Sharm El Sheikh
• A route out of the document. The map page ends in a button through to the live tracker, on the principle that a quarterly PDF is a summary of something that changes faster than quarterly
• Successive versions of the tracker report, and the Sustainability Awards artwork that ran alongside the programme

Indexing by country rather than by theme is the whole design. A thematic contents page, disclosure, taxonomy, reporting, is how the subject organises itself, and it is useless to somebody who needs to know whether the rule reaches them. The map inverts that: it puts the reader's own situation first and the regulation second.

The button out to the live tracker is the other half of the same honesty. A printed quarterly on a subject that moves weekly is a snapshot, and a snapshot that pretends to be current is worse than one that tells you where the current version lives.

• Geography as the primary index. A world map with a flagged pin on each of fourteen jurisdictions: Canada, the United States, the UK, Europe, Egypt, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, so a reader finds their obligation by looking at where they operate
• A quarterly cadence, issued as the Sustainability Regulation Update, the Q4 2022 edition timed to COP27 at Sharm El Sheikh
• A route out of the document. The map page ends in a button through to the live tracker, on the principle that a quarterly PDF is a summary of something that changes faster than quarterly
• Successive versions of the tracker report, and the Sustainability Awards artwork that ran alongside the programme

The work