Portrait, Landscape, or the Awkward Middle Ground?

Across the 86 nonprofit annual reports analysed, portrait orientation remains overwhelmingly dominant. 77% of organisations adopt a portrait format, compared to 22% using landscape and a single outlier using a square format.

At one level, this is entirely predictable. Portrait mirrors the printed page, aligns with regulatory templates, and reflects decades of established production workflows. In that sense, the prevalence of portrait tells us very little on its own.

What is more revealing is the minority. The 22% of organisations that choose landscape are not distributed randomly. They cluster in ways that point to underlying differences in purpose, audience, and organisational context. Understanding those differences is where the real insight lies.

The 19 landscape reports in the sample fall into two clearly distinguishable groups.
The first consists primarily of statutory reporters, many of them UK-based, including Alzheimer’s Research UK, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Oxfam GB and Wellcome Trust, alongside European organisations such as Cordaid and the LEGO Foundation. These documents are typically long, often exceeding 100 pages, and carry the full weight of audited financial statements, governance disclosures and regulatory reporting requirements.

A common assumption is that landscape orientation is driven by content needs, particularly the accommodation of wide financial tables or complex governance structures. However, this explanation does not fully withstand scrutiny. Several large statutory reports in the sample, including Barnardo’s (140 pages), the National Trust (172 pages), NSPCC (133 pages) and RSPB (136 pages), present equally dense financial and governance material within a portrait format without apparent difficulty. The choice of landscape, therefore, cannot be attributed solely to content constraints.

The second group is more indicative of a deliberate communications strategy. It includes organisations such as charity:water, Direct Relief, Plan International, National Geographic Society and World Vision. These are narrative or impact-focused reports, free from statutory requirements and designed primarily for external audiences, particularly individual donors.

In these cases, landscape orientation aligns closely with a broader design philosophy. The charity: water report, for example, runs to just 16 pages and is constructed entirely as a sequence of full-width, screen-filling layouts. Photography is full-bleed, typography is scaled for on-screen reading, and financial information is presented through infographics rather than tabular statements. The result is not simply a landscape document, but a report that behaves more like a digital product than a printed artefact.

A comparison between UK- and US-based organisations reveals a notable divergence. Within the sample, 29% of UK organisations adopt landscape orientation, compared to 14% of US organisations. At first glance, this might suggest that UK organisations are more progressive in their approach to format.

However, this interpretation does not hold when regulatory context is taken into account.

In the UK, the majority of annual reports are statutory documents, combining narrative reporting with audited financial statements under Charity Commission requirements. The Charity Commission’s guidance on preparing a trustees’ annual report sets out the reporting requirements that shape these documents. Of the 31 UK-based organisations in the sample, 27 produce statutory reports. In contrast, none of the 42 US-based organisations are required to produce a statutory annual report in this format, as detailed financial disclosures are instead captured through IRS Form 990 filings, which are publicly available and separate from any voluntary annual report the organisation may produce.

This distinction fundamentally shapes the role of the annual report. In the US, it functions purely as a communications tool. In the UK, it must simultaneously satisfy regulatory compliance and stakeholder communication.

Within this context, the presence of landscape orientation among UK statutory reporters becomes more significant. Organisations such as Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation and Oxfam GB have adopted landscape formats despite the structural constraints imposed by regulatory reporting. All three operate large-scale fundraising programmes and engage heavily with public audiences. The choice of landscape in these cases appears to reflect an understanding that the annual report is not only a compliance document, but also a publicly consumed asset.

By contrast, US organisations operate with far greater flexibility, yet show a stronger tendency to retain portrait formats. This suggests that the constraint is not regulatory, but cultural. Established production norms, board expectations and agency workflows continue to reinforce portrait as the default, even in the absence of any structural requirement to do so.

If annual reports are considered part of an organisation’s broader communications and fundraising ecosystem, it is reasonable to ask whether investment levels correlate with format decisions.

Across the sample, organisations using landscape orientation allocate a median of 8.8% of income to fundraising, compared to 6.5% among those using portrait. While this difference is not large, it does indicate a directional relationship.

The pattern becomes more pronounced when focusing specifically on UK statutory reporters. The landscape group includes some of the country’s largest fundraising organisations, including Oxfam GB, British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK. In these cases, the annual report is positioned not merely as a regulatory requirement, but as a component of donor engagement. The decision to adopt a screen-optimised format can therefore be understood as a commercial as well as a design choice.

Among US organisations, the relationship between fundraising spend and format is less evident. Given that the annual report carries no compliance function, format decisions appear to be driven more by institutional habit than by investment level.

A further layer of complexity emerges when considering how portrait reports are presented digitally. Of the 86 reports analysed, 27% are portrait documents exported as facing-page spreads, with two pages displayed side by side in a single landscape-proportioned viewport.

When combined with the 20% of reports that are natively landscape, this means that 47% of the sample presents a landscape viewing experience to the reader, regardless of the underlying design format.

The prevalence of spread formats is consistent across geographies, with 40% of US portrait reports and 36% of UK portrait reports adopting this approach. This consistency suggests that the spread format is not driven by regional factors, but by shared production conventions.

In some cases, the use of spreads is clearly intentional. Organisations such as the National Audubon Society, Conservation International and the Wildlife Conservation Society design their reports around the double-page spread as a compositional unit. Full-bleed photography, illustrated maps and multi-column layouts are constructed to function across facing pages, particularly in sectors such as conservation, where visual storytelling plays a central role.

However, regardless of intent, the reader experience remains consistent. When viewed on a standard laptop screen, spread-format PDFs compress two pages into a single viewport, reducing text size and often requiring zooming or horizontal scrolling. The design may be optimised for print, but the on-screen experience is compromised.

The data reveals four distinct positions nonprofits are occupying:

Portrait, single page (50%). The traditional default. Designed for the printed page or the scrolling single-page PDF viewer. Works well in print. Readable on screen at full zoom. The most conservative choice, but a coherent one. Barnardo’s, NSPCC, National Trust, MSF, UNICEF. For organisations like The END Fund, where the photography is composed for portrait framing and the document is intended as a physical object, this is not a default. It is a deliberate decision that serves the content.

Portrait, spreads (27%). The most ambiguous position. Some of these are design-led documents where the spread is the intended canvas: The Nature Conservancy, Audubon, Conservation International, Greenpeace, Wildlife Conservation Society. Others may be technical defaults from a print-oriented export workflow. Either way, the result is a landscape-shaped viewport with portrait-sized content. The design intent varies, but the readability compromise is consistent.

Landscape, single page (20%). The screen-first position. Native landscape format, one page per view. charity: water, Direct Relief, National Geographic Society, World Vision, the V&A. These organisations have committed to the format their audience actually uses. The V&A has gone furthest, designing for the screen as a medium rather than simply choosing landscape as an orientation. Among UK statutory reporters, Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation and Oxfam GB have made the same choice despite the constraints of compliance content, backed by fundraising operations that treat the annual report as a donor-facing asset.

Landscape, spreads (2%). A rare combination (Alzheimer’s Research UK, Plan International). A landscape page saved as a spread creates an extremely wide viewport that doesn’t map naturally to any standard screen ratio.

There is a solution that gives organisations the best of both worlds, and it requires no change to the design process. PDF files carry a display preference that tells the viewer how to present the pages on opening. Both Adobe Acrobat and most design software (InDesign, Affinity Publisher) allow this to be set at export: single page, two-up, or two-up with cover page.

An organisation that designs in portrait facing-page spreads can save single pages but set the default display to two-up with cover page. The viewer opens the document as spreads, preserving the intended design relationships between left and right pages. But the underlying file contains individual pages at full size. Readers who want to zoom in see full-resolution single pages. Readers who want to print get standard portrait sheets. The spread presentation is a display instruction, not a structural compromise.

This is not a new feature. It has existed in the PDF specification for years. But the number of reports in this sample saved as flattened spreads suggests it is either unknown or overlooked by the designers and agencies producing these documents. Adobe’s documentation on setting PDF initial view preferences covers the full range of page layout options available at export.

For any organisation currently exporting spread-format PDFs, switching to single-page export with a two-up cover page display preference is a five-second change that immediately improves the on-screen reading experience without touching the design.

For a report like The Nature Conservancy’s, where the cross-spread photography and colour-coded section openers depend on the pairing relationship, this approach would preserve every design intention while giving the reader full-resolution single pages when they zoom in.

The most significant finding is not the proportion of portrait versus landscape formats, but the mismatch between how reports are designed and how they are consumed.

While nearly half of the reports analysed present a landscape viewing experience, only 20% are intentionally designed as landscape documents. The remainder arrive at this format through convention or export settings, without the corresponding adjustments to typography, layout or image scaling that would support effective on-screen reading.

This points to a broader issue. For many organisations, format decisions are inherited rather than deliberate. The annual report continues to be shaped by print conventions, even as its primary mode of consumption has shifted to digital platforms.

The distinction, therefore, is not simply between portrait and landscape, but between formats that are internally coherent and those that are transitional. Reports such as charity: water’s, designed explicitly for digital engagement, and Barnardo’s, designed consistently for print, represent two clear and effective approaches. The organisations occupying the middle ground, particularly those using spread-format portrait PDFs, are the ones most exposed to usability challenges.

Several organisations in this sample also publish web-based versions of their annual reports, either as standalone microsites or as pages within their main website. The Nature Conservancy, UNICEF, World Vision and others produce HTML reports alongside (or in some cases instead of) their PDF downloads. These raise a different set of design questions: responsive layout, scroll behaviour, animation, accessibility, and the relationship between the web version and the downloadable document.

This article focuses specifically on the PDF as a format because it remains the dominant distribution method across the sample and because the orientation and export decisions examined here are unique to PDF production. The question of how HTML annual reports compare, and whether they render the PDF redundant, is worth examining separately.