Principal Financial Group

One of the world’s leading financial services groups, The Principal has offices in 18 countries and employs over 14,600 people worldwide. Ranked among the world’s most powerful companies, it is mission critical that their communication strategy and execution remains above reproach. That said, we were honored to accept the challenge of developing and deploying their digital annual report.

A glimpse of the “year in review”

We were fortunate to work with Steve Pattee of Pattee Design, long time creative director of The Principal’s annual reports and business collateral. This fact alone ensured that we’d be working with an amazing design that was true to the brand. We worked together from early phase design comps, iterating through the development process making client-mandated edits along the way.

Mobile Ready

Chief among our objectives was to make the templates accessible, legible and beautiful across a variety of devices. A mobile-friendly version of this report was a first for Principal Financial, but our mobile-first development methodology makes this an ‘out of the box’ feature of all web projects.

Testing, Deployment and Delivery

On account of The Principal’s global audience we needed to support an array of devices as well as Internet Explorer as far back as version 7. By building standards-compliant, simple and concise front end code this was a relatively trivial process.

Our quality assurance process begins with thorough markup validation and DOM testing. This alone catches many errors that would otherwise disrupt cross browser compatibility. Upon completion of this testing, we found that our cross-browser support was largely complete and we were able to move forward with deployment.

Working on such immensely visible work can be daunting, but working with such a professional staff on The Principal’s end, as well as Pattee Design, made this project a joy to work on.

For security purposes, finalized templates had to be converted from PHP, which we used for rapid development, into vanilla HTML prior to launch. Using custom generated scripts we were able to package all and hand off to Principal’s IT staff for deployment.

Working on such immensely visible work can be daunting, but working with such a professional staff on The Principal’s end, as well as Pattee Design, made this project a joy to work on. We’re proud of the results and thankful that the successful launch has yielded new initiatives that are currently in progress.