Miriam came to us through Deepak’s old colleague Devika who is a user researcher. Miriam is an experienced human rights lawyer. She wanted to establish the Centre for Law & Transformative Change (CLTC) as an organisation that focuses on transformative change through people power.
We kick-started our first brand identity design project with CLTC
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 the international justice development sector is at the core of what Miriam aspired for CLTC.
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, were the established, overused symbols, and imagery around law and justice like the Lady of Justice, courtroom icons like the gavel, law books, etc. On the other end were metaphors related to people’s power, activism, and human rights campaigns. We positioned CLTC more to the right to create a people-centric appeal.
Humanising Law and Justice
To convey the idea of humanising law and justice and transformative change we designed two distinct logo marks
- A symbolic one using a stylised dragonfly representing change and transformation
- The CLTC acronym is composed in a hand-drawn style to form a “human-face-with-a-voice” symbol.
The pivot
After Miriam shared the designs with her team, they gravitated towards the acronym-based logo-mark since it captured the essence of what CLTC stood for and they felt the letters CLTC forming a human-face-with-a-voice to be quite “clever”. The one concern was that the hand-crafted feel gave it too much of a “grassroots” feel and may not appeal to sponsors who may relate better to a more professional-looking logo. That got us to rethink the personality spectrum a bit which was originally more toward the right;
A brand identity that shifts the perception of Law and Justice from courtrooms to open fields and from lawyers to people and community
A “few” kind words…😉
“We, at the 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 tagline. 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, the Stoodio Iterati team are spot-on professionals who respect timelines, promptly follow up on decisions made and execute them efficiently. They have strategically guided us at every step of the website branding to access a broader engagement with our target audience.
We are grateful for our partnership with Stoodio Iterati. They stand out for their design empathy and professionalism throughout the process of ideation, 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, as we use digital technology to strengthen access to justice.”
–
Miriam Chinnappa,
Executive Director and Co-founder, CLTC
Website
Credits
Brand strategy, design direction, illustrations & copy:
Deepak Pakhare
Leave a Reply