Findex's annual SME Growth Index report surfaces research on the advice gap holding back Australian small businesses. The 2026 edition found that 85% of Australian SMEs lack the strategic guidance they need to grow, and close to half have made costly decisions as a result.

My role was end-to-end: from the interactive PDF report and landing page through to EDMs, infographics, social media campaigns across paid and organic channels, animations, and internal communications. The design challenge was translating dense financial research into something an SME owner would actually read.

The core decisions centred on the first two blocks. An SME owner landing on the page has limited time and little tolerance for complex financial language, so everything above the fold was deliberate: lead with the finding that lands, not with the Findex brand story. Layout and content structure came out of close collaboration with the comms team, working through what the report needed to say versus what the audience actually needed to hear first.

There was also a technical constraint to navigate: the hero image was stretching and losing its margins across different screen sizes, which required working directly with the dev team to find a solution that maintained the intended layout without compromising the visual. A separate layer was adapting the Findex palette for digital: the brand was built for print, so reworking the colour system for RGB web environments while meeting WCAG accessibility requirements was a non-negotiable part of the process.

The landing page was A/B tested against the previous year's version to identify what was driving performance, informing decisions on layout and content structure. The campaign delivered a 20% increase in views year on year, alongside stronger engagement across channels.