Minority Rights Group
Championing inclusive societies Over the past six decades, the charity built the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, the leading resource providing informative profiles of minority and Indigenous communities worldwide. Entries are navigable by country, territory, and region. Minority Rights Group regularly reports on trends, shines a light on the plight of individuals and communities, and supports the work of activists and policymakers pushing to defend diversity and eradicate inequality.
They provide training and resources, offer grants, commission documentary films and much more. They have a huge amount of content relating to the breadth of their work which was located on three websites, which was becoming unwieldy, difficult to navigate and in need of a strategic rethink.
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An identity reflecting societies’ identities
We were commissioned to review Minority Rights Group’s brand identity, including a fresh look at its vast and complex websites. We worked alongside our sustainable digital partner hertech to work through the complex user experience dimensions and bring the new identity to life online bringing several sites into one.
As the charity champions inclusive societies, we gave them a refreshed identity that draws inspiration from the natural environment – home to many of those societies.
The green square of their former logos was retained, but given an update to an accessible colour and contemporary font and rationalised to one version from several. A crisp, contemporary typeface and accessible colour palette featuring natural earthy hues to embody the natural world, pairs well with Minority Rights Group’s images across digital and print.
The earthy colours are complemented with bursts of bright colour and mid-tones to allow accents and highlights. The logo’s square is carried forward as a simple and familiar graphic device across the website.
Many activists only have access to mobile phones so building a suite of universally recognisable icons ensured the identity met the digital-first requirements of the brief.
Sustainable and accessible
The website is fully accessible and to reflect Minority Rights Group’s environmental commitment contains very little moving image to minimise the site’s carbon impact. Yet it boasts incredibly fast-loading times thanks to carefully managed image control.
The user experience design process ensures content is thoughtfully organised and far easier to find through the use of AI search and comprehensive tagging.
Lisa Cromer, Brand Ethos’s design director, said that the project is a great example of collaboration and co-design. “By working closely with the team at MRG and delving deep into the charity’s purpose and audiences we grew to understand the vastly complex requirements of the identity and huge array of information and resource types it needed to support. We aimed to make the complex simple and, with the hertech team, the website engaging, intuitive and accessible for all. The outcome is, I think, a beautiful identity that superbly echoes MRG’s cause and allows information and images to shine.”
The Minority Rights Group website is here.
Banner image credit: Batwa community members performing a traditional dance in Kanungu, Uganda. Credit: Thomas Alboth
