Sustaining St. Louis’ Health and Prosperity.

Annual report design clearly conveys St. Louis’ approach to improving energy efficiency across the city.

Services

Let’s use design to simplify the complex and inspire action.

The Challenge

In St. Louis alone, 77% of the greenhouse gases are produced by municipal, residential, industrial and commercial buildings. The impact on air quality greatly affects everyone, but especially the children. The City of St. Louis wants their residents, workers and visitors to breathe easy in their flourishing city. The City found experienced partners in the City Energy Project, a joint IMT/NRDC effort focused on improving building energy efficiency. And since you can only manage what you measure, the City launched an energy efficiency benchmarking project in 2017 for their largest buildings.

The Solution

The MLY team leveraged their experience working with many energy efficiency projects, including several of the CEP cities, to help the St. Louis team compose an approach. Establishing processes to measure and manage energy efficiency in buildings is both complex and technical work. We put together a content strategy that included providing guidance for how to communicate in straightforward terminology, define or translate jargon, and structure the information flow.

How We Got There.

Focusing on the best practices of data driven storytelling and data visualization, we provided guidance on content, structure and flow. We then integrated the storyline and data visualization structures with a design inspired by the City’s own seal. This approach was paired with individual graphical elements extracted from the City’s seal to illustrate and support the flow, allowing the report to be useful to all their constituents: policy makers; property owners/managers; building engineers; and those who work and live in the City of Saint Louis.