Editorial Design & Layout

What it is

The report is A Guide for Recruiting and Retaining Talent in the Water Sector, a research study conducted by The Water Tower under a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It surveys the talent crisis facing the water industry: an aging workforce, slow generational replacement, structural barriers to entry, and what the sector can do about it.

I designed and produced the publication.

What I did

The deliverable was a long-form, digital-only research report that needed to actually look like a publication, not a Word file exported to PDF. My scope:

• Layout and typesetting. A typographic system that supports a long read across data-heavy and narrative sections.
• Cover art and the design language that carries through the document.
• Infographics. Visualizations of the data the report relies on, so readers don't have to parse a research table to understand what the study found.

The honest version

This was a grant deliverable. The Water Tower needed to produce a research artifact to fulfill the requirements of the EPA grant funding the study. For most recipients of similar grants, that means a serviceable PDF with an institutional cover and tables that nobody outside the immediate audience opens.

I treated it like a publication someone might actually want to read. Real cover art. Real typography. Infographics that did interpretive work, not just decoration. The result is a research report that holds up next to commercial editorial design, and that the authors and the funder can put in front of stakeholders without apology.

That's the difference design makes to grant-funded work, when somebody's willing to bring it.