We kick-started our first brand identity design project with CLTC

The opportunity

Miriam came to us through Deepak’s old colleague Devika who is a user researcher in Bangalore. Miriam is an experienced and influential human rights lawyer based in Brussels, Belgium. She wanted to establish Centre for Law & Transformative Change (CLTC) as an organisation that focuses on transformative change through people power.

Users & audience

Human Rights and International Law community, NGOs

Team & Role

My co-founder and partner, Roopal and myself as the graphic designer and creative director

Goals

1. Ensure communities exercise their voice, leadership, and agency in international justice development sector
2. Move away from the established business-like projection of Human Rights and International Law
3. Establish CLTC as an organisation that focuses on transformative change through people power.
4. Build a brand personality that questions the status quo.

Brand strategy & insights

After our initial meeting, we proposed our brand strategy approach and ran a series of interviews to understand Miriam’s goals for CLTC. We found that ensuring communities exercise their voice, leadership, and agency in international justice development sector is at the core of what Miriam aspired for CLTC. The brand goals;

1. Ensure communities exercise their voice, leadership, and agency in international justice development sector
2. Move away from the established business-like projection of Human Rights and International Law
3. Establish CLTC as an organisation that focuses on transformative change through people power.
4. Build a brand personality that questions the status quo.

Questioning the status quo

It was important for Miriam to move away from the established business-like projection of Human Rights and International Law and emphasise the community and grassroots aspects of her work. With that insight, we gravitated towards a brand personality that is bit more informal in tone, crafted and illustrative in look & feel to project CLTC as a people and community-based entity.

The mood-board we created reflected this spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, was the established, overused symbols, imagery around law and justice like the lady of justice, courtroom icons like the gavel, law books etc. On the other end was metaphors related to people-power, activism and human rights campaigns. We positioned CLTC more to the right to create a people-centric appeal.

Design solution

Humanising Law and Justice

To convey the idea of humanising law and justice and transformative change we designed two distinct logo marks

1. A symbolic one using a stylised dragonfly representing change and transformation
2. The CLTC acronym composed in a hand-drawn style to form a “human-face-with-a-voice” symbol.

Outcomes & learnings

After the 2-month effort, Miriam launched CLTC with the newly minted identity into the international community out of her office in Brussels. Her offline community outreach programs showcased the brand identity which was much appreciated. She established her online presence with the new website which successfully garnered support through 3-5 sponsorship enquiries per month. In Mariam’s own words:

We, at Centre for Law and Transformative Change (CLTC), have been immensely fortunate to work with the dynamic duo at Stoodio Iterati. Deepak and Roopal have been an integral part of CLTC right from the inception stage. They have helped us shape the organisation by skillfully transferring their design and branding expertise and knowledge.

We have benefitted from Deepak’s cutting-edge mastery as a designer in developing our unique and artistic CLTC logo and tag line. The logo dexterously and cleverly embodies the overall vision and mandate of CLTC. Above all the logo stands out as a powerful symbol of the impact we seek to achieve in the international justice development sector. The logo is a testament to Deepak’s brilliant design mind.

In addition to being aligned to a user-friendly approach to design, Stoodio Iterati team are spot-on professionals who respect timelines, promptly follow-up on decisions made and execute it efficiently. They have strategically guided us at every step of the website branding and have even stepped forward to help us access through design and branding a broader engagement with our target audience.

We are grateful for our partnership with Stoodio Iterati who stand out for their design empathy and professionalism throughout the process of ideation by generating mindful and creative solutions. We will continue to source Stoodio Iterati’s state of the art expertise in UX/UI and digital product design in our global projects when we use digital technology to strengthen access to justice.

Miriam Chinnappa

Executive Director and Co-founder, CLTC