SWM Magdeburg is a German firm that supplies gas, electricity and heat, among other necessities to the town of Magdeburg. Their 2017 report comes as something of a surprise then as it features almost entirely ballet dancers as its key visual element.
The outsized report is cloth-bound and the title, ‘Expansion’ is silkscreened in a brush typeface on the cover. The word is split into three and the ‘writing’ is quick, expressive – a theme that will be applied throughout the report in various clever ways.
This sense of scale and speed is most immediately apparent in the use of images. Aside from the corporate portraits that are quite small, the rest of the images – soaring dancers, spacious rehearsal studios, backstage at a theatre – are presented at full-page or double-page size using a restrained, black and white reportage-style of photography.
Coupled with enormous type treatments, the book feels, quite aptly – expansive.
To counterbalance this sweeping scale, colour is restricted to a 2-colour palette (black and purple) and the type treatments for body copy are likewise restricted to a simple, stoic, sans serif.
And yet, the movement of the dancers and the intimacy of their art are echoed gently in the setting of paragraphs – some nuzzling up to others, while yet others snake around the paragraphs that came before.
It’s a beautiful effect and speaks to how carefully thought out the various elements of the design of this book is.
