The 2021 Water Quality Report, titled Our Water, Our Future, was designed to feel less like a compliance document and more like a story about where Palo Alto’s water comes from and why it’s worth protecting. Starting with the cover, sweeping landscape photography of the Sierra Nevada and the Hetch Hetchy watershed establishes a sense of pride and place before a single data point appears.

Inside, editorial photography is balanced with clear, well-organized data tables and approachable body copy. Pull quotes break up the technical content and draw readers into sections they might otherwise skip. Topics like tap vs. bottled water, lead in drinking water, and water fluoridation are handled with clarity and care, giving residents the context they need to feel informed rather than overwhelmed. A clean two-column structure with a restrained color palette of deep navy and warm white lets the photography and data breathe, while section headers, callout boxes, and a consistent typographic hierarchy make it easy to navigate whether a resident reads cover to cover or skips straight to the data tables.