The Investor Diaries
Brand Identity & Editorial Design
DELIVERABLES
Brand Identity • Microsite • Publications • Social Graphics
ROLE
Designer, Creative Director
Project Overview
The Investor Diaries is a national research initiative from Commonwealth studying the millions of people who started investing after 2020, especially those living on low and moderate incomes. Over 15 months, the project followed 50+ investors through voice diaries. It paired those stories with a 2,750-person national survey and an analysis of billions of transactions.
I was brought in to give the initiative its own identity. It had to sit under the Commonwealth brand but feel distinct, human, and credible to an audience of industry leaders and policymakers. Once the sub brand was finalized, the task was to create assets within those guidelines, including several reports, a microsite, and social graphics.
DELIVERABLE #1
Sub Brand
Before any reports were designed, I built the visual foundation for The Investor Diaries. The sub-brand needed its own identity, one that could stretch across years of reports, web, and social, while still pairing well with both Commonwealth’s and The BlackRock Foundation’s branding.
The system pairs a confident palette of golden yellow, deep blue, and bright cyan with two complementary image styles. The first is an illustrated cast of diverse investors to represent the diarists, keeping real participants anonymous while still putting people at the center. The second is a photography direction mixing warm, candid lifestyle images with bold halftone collage, in which hands push yellow growth arrows across blue charts, a visual shorthand for momentum and ambition.
The brief also set the editorial toolkit the series would be built from: three cover concepts (illustrated, photographic, and collage-with-data), section openers with custom icons, diarist quote callouts paired with their avatars, and large-format stat layouts. Together these established the rules every later report, microsite page, and social graphic followed.
DELIVERABLE #2
Microsite
The final publication brings the whole initiative together, combining the voice diaries, the national survey, and the transaction analysis into a single set of findings and recommendations for industry and policy leaders.
The design challenge was to make three very different kinds of evidence feel like one story. I gave the report a repeatable structure: each of the three opportunities follows the same arc, moving from the insight to the evidence to industry actions, so readers always know where they are. Within each section, survey stats, big-data findings, and diarist quotes sit side by side, with every figure tagged to its source, so the numbers and the human voices reinforce each other rather than living in separate chapters. A persistent navigation bar across every page lets readers jump straight to the opportunity most relevant to them.
As the culminating piece, it pulls together everything the visual system had built over the previous two years: the stat callouts, the data graphics, and the diarist voices.
DELIVERABLE #3
Report
This was the first major publication in the series. It is built on Commonwealth’s National Perceptions and Habits Survey of 2,750+ people, focused on investors who started after January 2020, and its findings were featured in an exclusive Wall Street Journal story.
It was important that findings be identifiable at a glance, so industry executives and policymakers would still get the core message even when skimming. My biggest decision was to minimize body text wherever possible and let the visuals carry the story. Every key stat and finding became a chart, a large-scale callout, or an infographic, so a reader could flip through and get the full argument from the visuals alone. The result is a research report that reads more like an executive briefing, dense with data but fast to absorb.
DELIVERABLE #4
Brief
The second publication in the series is built on an analysis of billions of transactions from more than 25 million checking accounts, produced in collaboration with the JPMorganChase Institute.
Big-data research is easy to bury in methodology, so I kept this one short and visual: an 8-page brief rather than a full report. Each of the five findings is anchored by a single dominant visual, including a 2.7x growth callout, side-by-side bar charts comparing participation before and after 2020, a calendar graphic showing when investors make deposits, and a savings scale marking the threshold where people tend to keep investing. A numbered findings page gives readers the full story on one spread, and a simple diagram places this research alongside the diaries and national survey so readers understand how the three studies fit together.
DELIVERABLE #5
Capstone Report
The final publication brings the whole initiative together, combining the voice diaries, the national survey, and the transaction analysis into a single set of findings and recommendations for industry and policy leaders.
The design challenge was to make three very different kinds of evidence feel like one story. I gave the report a repeatable structure: each of the three opportunities follows the same arc, moving from the insight to the evidence to industry actions, so readers always know where they are. Within each section, survey stats, big-data findings, and diarist quotes sit side by side, with every figure tagged to its source, so the numbers and the human voices reinforce each other rather than living in separate chapters. A persistent navigation bar across every page lets readers jump straight to the opportunity most relevant to them.
As the culminating piece, it pulls together everything the visual system had built over the previous two years: the stat callouts, the data graphics, and the diarist voices.
DELIVERABLE #6
Social Graphics
The second publication in the series is built on an analysis of billions of transactions from more than 25 million checking accounts, produced in collaboration with the JPMorganChase Institute.
Big-data research is easy to bury in methodology, so I kept this one short and visual: an 8-page brief rather than a full report. Each of the five findings is anchored by a single dominant visual, including a 2.7x growth callout, side-by-side bar charts comparing participation before and after 2020, a calendar graphic showing when investors make deposits, and a savings scale marking the threshold where people tend to keep investing. A numbered findings page gives readers the full story on one spread, and a simple diagram places this research alongside the diaries and national survey so readers understand how the three studies fit together.
