Resolve

RESOLVE has worked on stuck problems since 1977, when it helped create the field of environmental conflict resolution. Today its programs run from TrailGuard AI and Salmon Gold to HealthGrid clinics in Sierra Leone and the Peace Diamonds initiative.

Its partners range from Apple and Tiffany & Co. to the Environmental Defense Fund. That breadth is the organization's strength, but it made RESOLVE hard to explain in a sentence, to a funder, a partner or a new hire.

The brand didn't say what all of that work had in common, or why RESOLVE is the group to call when an issue is stuck. It needed one idea big enough to hold every program, from wildlife protection to rural health clinics.

We explored three brand narratives: The Divide, The Hard Problems, and Not Just Thinking, Doing, each written out as a short manifesto. The Divide won because it grew straight out of RESOLVE's roots in mediation, where the job is bringing two opposing sides together.

Then we widened it. The distance between a problem and a solution can feel infinite, and that gap is where conflicts arise and global issues get stuck. It's easier to stand on one side or the other. RESOLVE steps into it.

The O in the wordmark is two halves forming one letter, two sides closing a gap, a mark that does what the organization does. The narrative ends on the line that became the brand's promise: Go where others fear to solve.

The site makes the divide visible. Each home-page hero splits one image into two words with a gap between them: use and reuse, rare and earth, wildlife and refuge, people and power. On mobile the words arrive in sequence: We close the divide between, then use, then reuse.

A new palette of forest green, rust, orange and cream, set in Editorial New and Satoshi, gives a 1977 institution an editorial voice. The same split runs through concept frames like between life and the dead of night.

Behind the heroes, we designed templates for people solutions, planet solutions, work sites and news. Every program gets a page that fits the same system, so adding the next one doesn't break the story.

The live site leads with We solve for people and the planet. Its story still runs on our narrative: it's easier to stand outside of the divide, but at RESOLVE, we step into it. Those sentences come straight from the brand narrative we wrote.

It closes the same way the narrative did: for the health of people and the planet, we work to close the divide. The site now lists 17 programs, five for people and twelve for the planet, under that one idea.

The brand also seeded Nightjar, the RESOLVE spinout that later hired Buena for its own brand and site. Two organizations, one starting point: a stuck problem, and someone willing to step into it.