Content Design: Trusted Access Report 2022

Problem

Each year the Duo Trusted Access Report is a main source of PR for the Duo product. This began before the acquisition by Cisco. After the acquisition Cisco became a sort of co-sponsor of these reports and there was a need to co-brand the report between Cisco Security’s visual identity and Duo’s established branding. This meant both maintaining the brand trust customers had built with Duo and helping our customer understand Duo existed within the ecosystem of a suite of security offerings from Cisco.

This was the first year that research was conducted with the assistance of an agency rather than our in-house data scientists. As I’d worked on the report in prior years it was critical I communicate with them about which data was pulled, and how we aim to make all our data accessible and understandable to all types of security professionals.

Solution

I opted to feature the Duo green our users had such positive connotations with, while utilizing the collage style utilized by the Cisco Secure brand at that time (now Cisco Security and branding has since evolved). With a narrative surrounding logins, the easy choice would be visuals of a laptop screen, and given the word “dangerous” in the subtitle, there’s a temptation to lean into the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of shadowy hackers in hoodies. The collage relied on the tension of a user balancing on a log-in box, almost as-if they were relying on the login to support or save them from the fall below.

Within the pages, I limited collage work. The data is truly what shines. The collages are helpful for expressing complex stories in simple ways, however data serves the same purpose. I maintained the texture and color palette set within the cover throughout the guide to keep unity, but focused my energy on the accessibility of the data. This meant not only styling the text and spacing for legibility, but also interpretting the raw data itself to choose which format would best tell the story of the data. Bar graph? Scatter plot? Infographic? Each has their time and place, and as I worked with the agency we learned from each other about styles of data visualization.

This PDF is no longer available on Duo’s site, but a synopsis can be found on the Duo blog.