Every year, as a certified B Corp, Octopus Group publishes a report on how it’s living up to its values — not its financial performance, but its commitments to people, planet, and community. Think of it as a calling card for what the company believes in, aimed at employees and the public alike. The theme I was given for this edition was a single word: Hope.
The thinking
Hope is an easy word to design badly. The risk was something bland and aspirational — stock photography of sunrises, soft gradients, meaningless warmth. I wanted to do the opposite: make something that felt genuinely energetic, even a little joyful, in a sector not known for visual generosity.
The visual language I developed centred on three motifs — starbursts, flowers, and fireworks — each carrying a quiet double meaning. A firework is light in the dark. A flower pushing through a pavement crack is resilience, not just prettiness. Together they built an abstract visual system that kept returning to the same idea without spelling it out.
I paired this with photography drawn from across the business: students at Aurora, Octopus’s special needs school brand; volunteers serving food at a soup kitchen; portraits of the people who run the financial products day to day. The principle was simple — always bring it back to people. And to contrast with the warmth of the photography, I introduced 3D imagery: bright, playful, slightly unexpected. The tension between the two visual registers is what gives the layouts their energy.
A firework is light in the dark. A flower pushing through a pavement crack is resilience — they built an abstract visual system that kept returning to the idea of Hope without spelling it out.
The work
The result is one of the most visually ambitious pieces I’ve made in a financial services context — deliberately so. Annual reports in this sector tend toward the cautious. This one leans into colour, movement, and joy. The internal response was the strongest I’ve received on any project at Octopus, which inspired me to enter it for an industry award.
Creative team: Johnny Campbell, Alex Hill, Emanuel Zahariades
