Grain Season

Cooperative annual reports have a peculiar audience: the readers are also the owners, they are going to vote on the contents, and most of them will read it at a kitchen table in February. Cross Grain's previous reports had been produced by an agency that treated the document as marketing, which is why the yield tables were set in eight-point grey and the chair's letter ran to four pages.

We inverted the priority. The tables came first — literally, in the production schedule and physically, in the book — and everything else was designed around them. Yields, prices, distributions and the vote itself sit in the first third of the document at a size a sixty-year-old can read without glasses, in a table style that survives photocopying, because a significant number of members photocopy the pages they care about.

The narrative sections are shorter than they were and set as a running text rather than as spreads: no captions floating in white space, no full-bleed wheat. The photography is documentary and mostly of equipment and hands, shot over four visits across a single season, and it is captioned with the member's name and the farm. Members told us afterwards that the captions were the part they read first, which is the kind of finding that quietly reorganises a whole design.

The one indulgence is the cover, which changes colour each year according to the season's dominant crop, and carries nothing but the year and the cooperative's name. Members have started keeping them in a row.