WCG’s yearly “Trends & Insights” piece is the biggest and most exciting deliverable of each calendar year.

Featuring our deep lineup of subject matter experts, the campaign serves to highlight their perspectives on the hottest topics and trends for the year ahead in research.

in 2023, it was our first year doing it within the new brand, and I was asked to lead the discovery and execution from the design and experiential side.

See the full PDF report:

See the Report

View the web version:

See the Report

Visual
Identity

Background:

2024’s themes heavily indexed on:

Humanity/Hopefulness
Connection/Journey
Focus/Clarity

To the right, you see the defining graphic we designed for the piece. Something cutting edge and abstract that tells the story of connection across our four main topic areas.

in 2023 we opted to only go forward with 4 main topics as opposed to 10+ in previous years. We believed this would convey our “focus” on only the most important subject matter. Our design complemented this idea of “focus” through it’s modular design system and color coordinated sections.

Photo Treatments:

Our photo treatments were aimed to really pull through those themes of hopefulness, humanity, and focus.

We created an illusion of depth with our extruded gradient shapes warmly “hugging” the subjects of the photos and bringing a sense of hopefulness with their bright, yet soft colorful glow.

Our backgrounds were deliberately made to look fuzzy and pixelated. This allowed our gradient shapes to convey this sense of focus/clarity by bringing a sharpness to the foreground subjects.

Modular Design Approach:

Crucial to the experience, we wanted our readers to feel a sense of calm and direction while experiencing our piece.

The future of clinical research is uncertain and the market faces headwinds. We wanted our piece to be a guiding light and a sense of clarity in uncertain times.

In our design, we heavily indexed on a modular design system. These types of reports can often be robust and heavy and confusing. This approach allows for our piece to be simple and light, and for our readers to always know where they are in our piece with visual markers and color coded sections.

The path forward in clinical research may be uncertain and unclear, but those feelings should not be present when engaging with this piece.