Autonom Services S.A is a large, family-owned car rental agency based in Romania. The company, founded in 2006, is already a major player in its field and services 33 cities in Romania and Hungary, with a fleet of 12,000 vehicles.
Autonom’s 2021 report is built around a dedicated website and opens with a single, vertically scrolling screen. This screen functions as an overview of the report. It also functions literally as an overview, as the reader occupies a position above an illustrated landscape, through which they are taken. This landscape is drawn mainly in a colour palette of soothing grey and pale green, with dark blue and purple working as accents.
This landscape is composed of a single, winding road, with a white car travelling through a city beside a mountain range. It is a motif utilised throughout the report, sometimes as a visual break from the text, sometimes as part of an infographic and always as a way of linking the various sections, visually.
Pop-up text boxes along the road allow the reader to access relevant sections in the main report, if they choose to (or they can wait until the end, where they are directed to the main report).
The design of the site allows the reader to experience the report in two ways – as a simple slideshow or as a downloadable PDF built to resemble a book. In the PDF, the designers make good use of the grey in the colour palette and apply it to the body text, lending the report a pleasing lightness.
Designed by Zebra Corporate Communications, Autonom’s visually clear report makes good use of a small website to function as a contents page for a much larger volume of content. It goes to show, you don’t need to be extravagant to be effective.
