New client: the Human Rights Foundation asks Buena to help crack North Korea’s information wall
North Koreans can’t see the outside world, and USB drives were a way in. The Human Rights Foundation asked us to get more of them over the border.
The only human rights group focused purely on tyranny needed a brand that looked like it.
- Client
- Human Rights Foundation
- Year
- 2019
- What we did
- Strategy, Branding
- Result
- When we rise, tyranny falls.
By the numbers
- 16%of Google image results for HRF's old logo were actually HRFSearch Google Images for HRF's old logo and only 16% of the results were HRF. The rest were other organizations' logos.
- 113page brand guidelinesThe rulebook for the new brand: logo, color, type, voice and how every program carries it.
- 15+programs brought into one systemHRF programs, from the Oslo Freedom Forum to Flash Drives for Freedom, that now share one family look.
The Human Rights Foundation frees prisoners, gets laws passed and puts dictators on notice, but its brand looked like every other NGO. With Five Four and New Balloon, we rebuilt it around one focus, tyranny, and a new line: When we rise, tyranny falls.
Even Google couldn't tell HRF's logo apart from its peers
The Human Rights Foundation frees prisoners, gets laws passed and stands up to dictators. But its brand looked like every other NGO. In a Google image search for its logo, only 16% of the results were actually HRF. Run the same search for Amnesty International and 100% are Amnesty.
Its blue matched Human Rights Watch, and Google read its flame as an icon for 'heat'. Eight years of web analytics told the same story: 23% of all visitors went to 'About us', the third most popular of 1,372 pages.
None of its programs, from the Oslo Freedom Forum to Flash Drives for Freedom, looked like they came from HRF. Every one had to build awareness on its own.
The only human rights group focused purely on tyranny
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the Red Cross and the UN all focus on all people. HRF focuses on one thing: authoritarianism, the root of human rights abuse. Since that word isn't understood at an eighth-grade reading level, we said it the way people do: tyranny.
We boiled the brand's personality down to three words: bold, sharp, human. They run through everything HRF writes and makes.
Then we wrote a line that informs and inspires at once, short enough to read in three seconds. When we rise, tyranny falls.
Bold
We stand up to tyrants and defend those they oppress.
Sharp
No vague, flowery language. When we can say it shorter, we do.
Human
We talk like normal people. No jargon.
A striped H, built on the golden ratio, that crosses out tyrants
The new mark is a wide, striped H. It puts 'human' at the center of the name, is proportioned to phi, and is drawn to a pixel grid so it stays as crisp at 15 pixels as it is at 15,000.
The color is HRF Magenta running into red, a rising gradient: magenta for strength, red for compassion. It gives HRF a color it can own, the way Amnesty owns yellow.
The H's lines do real work. They strike through tyrants' names and run across everything, from letterhead to a pencil that reads 'Tyrants hate me.'
A 113-page guide and 15 programs that finally look like family
We built the brand with Five Four, New Balloon and HRF's own team. It's written down in a 113-page guideline covering logo, color, Gilroy type, voice, photography and collateral.
The stripes made a family possible. The Oslo Freedom Forum, Flash Drives for Freedom, the Havel Prize, PutinCon and the rest of HRF's 15 programs now draw from the same lines, so each one adds to the awareness of all the others.
The line went with them. When we rise, tyranny falls became HRF's tagline, on its site and across its work.
When we rise, tyranny falls.
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