Walworth Garden Farm has the entrepreneurial spirit of a business and the zest of a charity to serve its community. That’s what makes social enterprises so interesting – and challenging – to design for.

This year’s annual report, for the Farm’s 25^th anniversary, needs to show off the organisation’s courses, gardening groups, training and business activity – and to celebrate a visit by HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. Audiences range from the local community through partners and funders to clients for the Farm’s gardening services so the tone is high quality but on a human scale.

Printing on paper that’s 100% recycled post-consumer waste, production management has also been important and it’s here that it matters to work with great printers (Thank you, Tradewinds) who can achieve astonishing results on challenging materials.

Part of this process has also involved reverse-engineering a visual identity from existing materials, which has clear guidelines and can be rolled-out consistently in the future – leaving the Farm’s hands free for its work.

Adult learning organisation Red Kite Learning and Inside Job productions have produced a film for ex-offenders about disclosing convictions when applying for a job.

With stark choices and a film telling parallel stories about the consequences of making different decisions, we took a noir-ish approach to the packaging: strong black and white stills were taken and we added some expressive typography for the film title. We combined the booklet and DVD sleeve into one item, both to save cost and avoid the two items being separated in use. We also designed the face graphics for the DVD and the typography was used for the film title.

We had no idea what a development pipeline was when we first started working with Victoria Business Improvement District. It’s all about keeping businesses informed about what’s going on when and where with the massive amount of redevelopment going on in Victoria, since you ask. And that’s important in showing companies in the area the benefits that will result from the short-term disruption.

There were two jobs that design needed to do: translate apparently-dull planning data and maps into visual language that would resonate with business contacts and to do that in a way which would provide our client with a ‘prop’ to spread out and refer to in meetings.

So we designed a broadsheet, with an overview on the cover focusing on the improved business district, opening out to an illustrated timeline and finally to a large simplified map showing only the relevant information. The broadsheet folds down to the same format as the organisation’s other key publications to form a cohesive set of materials when they’re used together.

Is it un-webby enough? That’s the question we always ask ourselves when we’re creating publications and marketing materials for web effectiveness analysts Bowen Craggs & Co. You might wonder why… well, the company’s focus is on how companies use the web so it’s business and not technical language that’s appropriate for telling the story.

For this year’s FT Bowen Craggs Index of web effectiveness, we’ve produced the usual elegant typographic layout with tactile materials. But with a festive few months coming up for the UK, we’ve added some bling. The marvellous Tradewinds rose to the challenge of printing silver on dark grey with such skill that the metallic colour for the giant ampersand was in danger of upstaging the title – so there was a visit to the presses to add a smidgeon of black.

We’ve also designed a ticket-style advance mailer for the three upcoming Web Effectiveness Conferences.

To pull together AgeCare’s 150-year history including a young surgical appliance maker, invalid carriages, Lord Shaftesbury, First World War soldiers, spectacles, 1960s residential homes and modern specialist dementia care, you need a theme. Delving into the charity’s fascinating archive, we found quality of life running all the way through its work.

The challenge for the anniversary booklet was to design something elegant, keepable and at the same time legible for its majority older readership – then to produce a single casebound copy for presentation to Agecare Patron HRH the Duchess of Gloucester at the anniversary event.

It was a thrill for us having a book bound, working with physical materials and a proper ‘brown coat’ bindery: in a digital world, we’re finding that print is becoming all the more special.

We also produced invitations for AgeCare’s celebrations and displays giving a potted history.