The Moment: A Global NGO developing a brand strategy and visual identity for a humanitarian consortium.
The Impact: a brand that unifies and maps a path forward for two very different organisations to collaborate.
The Scoping.
The impact of branding in this project went beyond marketing.
The consortium aimed to provide critical support to people displaced by the war in Ukraine. To bridge the gap between emergency aid and long-term recovery.
The path forward wasn’t clear. Though they share a goal, the two organisations are vastly different. They didn’t have time to blend their cultures and ways of working, and risked frictions emerging that stood in the way of progress.
By involving both organisations equally in the development of the brand, we were able to create something new - that was neither one organisation or the other - to provide dircetion and momentum for collaboration moving forward.
I collaborated throughout this project with my design partner (Alessandro Pascoli), within a two-person senior team.
The Thinking.
The process was more important than the output.
To brand needed to feel engaging and meaningful - and fully owned - by both organisations. If it was rejected by either side - it wouldn’t be used to it’s full potential.
We delivered an insight-lead and co-creative approach. Beginning with deep stakeholder interviews across both organisations, to understand their hopes and fears. From this we were able to align stakeholders behind a brand promise and a unifying brand narrative.
We explored three concepts. Through facilitated discussions, we were able to gain alignment across both organisations on a route forward that felt right to both organisations.
The final brand concept (‘Br dge Aid’) was both intuitive and engaging: it’s a call to action. Built around the concept of a ‘gap’, it invites the audience in; encouraging engagement with the problem (what’s missing?) and the solution (what can they do?).
The Doing
The brand needed to be put to work, quickly
We translated a human-centric strategy into a brand ready to be deployed across channels and geographies.
We created the name ‘Bridge Aid’ and a visual language to express the mission. The identity balanced sector credibility with human warmth, embedding cultural and geographic cues to signal solidarity with Ukraine.
We built user-friendly brand tools and assets that could be accessed and used by anyone who needed them. Brand activation guidelines: defining grid, typography, colour, and image systems to work across multiple formats and channels. And assets ready to deploy: integrating a flexible “gap” device into layouts and campaign assets to frame problems and solutions dynamically, enabling adaptive storytelling over time.