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[EDITORIAL DESIGN]

The Impact Book: 100 Pages of Thank-You Notes

A yearly booklet of messages from people Impact Suite’s apps helped, designed for the team and stakeholders.

The Impact Book on a gray surface: a white cover with a navy patterned panel and the Impact Suite mark, beside an open spread with a photo of a hand holding a phone among flowers.

Most companies measure impact in a dashboard. Impact Suite also measured it in a book.

Impact Suite’s apps help thousands of people every year overcome addiction and compulsive sexual behavior, and manage anxiety and depression. Every day, some of those people write in to say thank you. At the end of each year, we gathered those messages into a booklet of more than 100 pages and shared it with the team and our stakeholders.

I designed it.

Why it mattered

The Impact Book wasn’t a marketing piece. Nobody downloaded it in exchange for an email address. It was for us.

It was a big part of the company’s culture: the idea that small steps every day add up to real change in someone’s life. When you build software all day, it’s easy to forget there’s a person on the other end. This book put a hundred pages of them on your desk.

The approach

The cover keeps it simple: a navy panel with the Impact Suite mark, and a photo of the app in someone’s hand to open the book. When the content is this personal, the design’s job is to get out of the way. I kept the pages quiet and airy, with plenty of white space, so every message had room to breathe.

  • Big pull quotes for the lines that stop you, like “Thanks for changing my life.”
  • Soft, friendly illustrations to break up long runs of text without making the book feel clinical.
  • App screens in a few places, so readers could connect the messages to the product the team builds.
  • A themes section that sorts the year’s feedback into the ten major themes that came up again and again.
An open spread with an illustration of a runner breaking a finish-line tape on the left and a cluster of Impact Suite app screens on the right.
An open spread with a long message set on a lavender panel and a large quote, “I just took my drug test for the first time in my life with not having to worry…”, beside small illustrated portraits.
An open spread of short messages in narrow columns, with a few lines highlighted in teal.
An open spread with the large blue pull quote “Thanks for changing my life.” and an illustration of a person meditating in a cozy room.
The “Ten Major Themes of Positive Feedback” section opener: a large number 10 over line illustrations of a book, sneakers, a bike and a dove, with a branching diagram of themes on the facing page.
The ten themes that came up most often.