It goes without saying that 2020 was an unprecedented year. Instead of shying away from the moment, The Progressive Corporation rose to meet it—embracing the theme of resilience in their Annual Report. Using brightly colored portraits and still life by the painter Aliza Nizenbaum, the printed annual report design establishes a book within a book—utilizing full bleed layouts of the artwork to create frames around each section of the report.

This framing is mirrored in the web design of the annual report’s microsite, which also incorporates a series of carefully selected words that move as you scroll through the site and overlay the artwork, presenting a lens through which the artwork can be viewed and interpreted.

The Work

In an unprecedented year, The Progressive Corporation looked to embody the theme of resilience in the 2020 Annual Report.

Progressive and N+S turned to painter Aliza Nisenbaum, whose brightly colored portraits and still life evoke a sense of the uncanny. They are at once familiar and comforting, illustrating the reclined postures and togetherness of everyday lives and ordinary objects, and new and unusual—in the choice of color, shadow, and perception. These feelings, communicated through Nisenbaum’s vibrant work, were in some ways a perfect allusion to the year, the pandemic, and the rising social justice movements across the country.

The Results

To fully embrace Nisenbaum’s use of color, N+S wanted to allow the images to occupy the entire space of the page. Known as a full bleed, this layout allows the paintings to extend to the very edge of the page—and helps to communicate the nuance and texture of each artwork.

The contents of the reports are printed on crisp white sheets, which were cut shorter than these full bleed pages. This design choice essentially created a book within a book and, when held in your hand, allows for you to see the paintings as a frame around the shorter white pages.

The full bleed pages are not reserved for the cover or some singular section of the report. Instead, they recur throughout the printed piece, creating the effect of chapter breaks for each section of the report and pacing the reader through the content of Progressive’s annual report. Each time, the break provides new, colorful frames of artwork.

This year, the report design also featured a series of stickers. N+S proposed the stickers as "badges of honor;" a way for the Progressive community to engage with one another. Whether connecting remotely on video calls or in person in their offices across the country, the stickers can be worn by stakeholders to demonstrate solidarity and to echo the report’s message of resilience.

The annual report microsite takes up the book within the book design, placing a larger artwork in the background and overlying the content in a smaller white “sheet” that scrolls over the image. This again produces the colorful framing effect seen in the printed annual report.

Similar to the printed report, the microsite utilizes a unique layout for its content—moving across the white column, and balancing against portraits, still life, and diptychs. While the layout is unconventional, the web design itself is constructed to be completely accessible by all online users.

When it came to creating clear chapter breaks and pacing readers through the digital material, the web design incorporated words knocked out in the white space, creating a mask effect that allows you to view the artwork through the word—and asks you to see the people in these portraits through the lens of words like resilience, together, and pride. The words were carefully chosen and paired with the artwork, a unique problem that arose within the web design and one that provided an opportunity to establish meaningful connections between these two fundamental aspects of the design.

In some instances, the words and images come together to construct their own narrative—one that illustrates the intimacy of the person and the everyday object and that calls into question the intersection between the individual and resilience during the pandemic.