---

PITE CREATIVE SERVICES
DENVER , COLORADO

RIBOZYME PHARMACEUTICALS: SHEDDING LIGHT ON A COMPLEX BUSINESS

Ask the average investor what a ribozyme is and they probably won't know the answer. But if you ask a shareholder of Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals [NASDAQ: RZYME], he or she will most certainly be able to tell you after they have skimmed the company's Year 2000 annual report.

Hence the primary goal of this annual, designed by Jonathan Pite. Now with his own firm, Pite Creative Services, Pite produced the Ribozyme report when he was still creative director of Carl Thompson Associates in Boulder.

A five-year-old research and development biotech firm, Ribozyme wanted their annual report to communicate the complexities of their scientific research in language and a format that are understandable and evoke the investment potential of a product portfolio which has yet to hit the market.

"What we tried to do was use the end report as a way to clearly and quickly give the audience a glimpse of what the company has been doing in R&D and what they are going to come out with," explains Pite who in his 10-year career has produced more than 100 annual reports, many of them for small, niche clients like Horizon Organic Daily.

Pite's design solution for Ribozyme was a clean, skimmable annual report with a strong focus on the potential market for the company's products, its accomplishments and its plans for the coming year. Pite used photographs of Ribozyme scientists, management and future consumers of the product; a timetable of company milestones; and graphs and charts. Says Pite: "It became a very user-friendly, eye-pleasing annual report. So I think it was successful in solving their particular challenge, which was to communicate a complicated story."

[Note: Ribozymes potentially represent a new, important, broadly applicable class of therapeutic agents, according to the company's 2000 annual report. Products in development would be used for the treatment of several forms of cancer and hepatitis.]

CARRIER ACCESS: DOING DOUBLE DUTY
Like many high tech businesses, Carrier Access was having trouble attracting top talent in recent years. The strong economy and telecommunications sector of the late 1990s meant that the Boulder-based provider of broadband digital equipment solutions was losing ground to its Silicon Valley counterparts.

Enter Pite, whose design for the 1999 Annual Report used a combination of high tech and extreme sports photographs and typography to project a cutting-edge image. A snowboarder flies across the cover, accompanied by a line that says, "On the Edge of the Network..." Inside, bold, full-page photos depict a mountain biker, kayaker, inline skater, snowshoer, all fully-engaged in their sport.

And the adrenaline-generating book helped Carrier Access to woo young talent, says Pite. "They were paying the same prices as Silicon Valley, but they were able to attract people to Boulder because of their annual report."