About the organization

Who is behind this project?

Safetag is a professional audit framework that adapts traditional penetration testing and risk assessment methodologies to be relevant to smaller non-profit organizations based or operating in the developing world.

Internews, the non-profit organization in charge of fueling the safetag project, partnered with us to create a brand that could bring together a growing community of practitioners and non-profits organizations working on security challenges for grassroots groups around the world.

This project presented some unique challenges. Apart from creating the brand itself, which was a significant undertaking to materialize an abstract concept like an audit framework in a simplified manner, we also needed to present the style guide and brand book in a way that engaged the growing Safetag's practitioner community to learn and share with a visual culture that supports the main concepts and values that the Safetag project aims to broadcast.

Role:

Creative director

Category:

Branding, Strategic design, design systems.

Collaborators:

Ramsés Lecurtois, Ashley Fowler.

Project info

The abstraction of the safetag concept

Visual translation of the community values

Branding

Defining the brand identity was the foundation of the visual system.

Through different facilitated workshops about brand values and personality traits, we established the creative criteria for the brand identity:

Simplicity
Openness
Solidity / Security
Human
Community-oriented

With these values in mind, we designed the visual language using the two simplest geometrical shapes, the circle and the square. By putting people at the forefront, we created a person-like brand that conveyed the security aspect of the brand as well as its commitment to open initiatives.

Expanding safetag's visual language

Visual translation of the community values

Design
Systems

Design Systems

Design
Systems

The second stage of this project was to start making the brand applications useful to the practitioner community.

The internews team needed the safetag brand to be community-oriented, which means that folks close to the project should be able to work with the different brand applications, not only to mention the safetag brand but interacting with the brand materials to create reports and documentation specific to their conditions.

We expanded the color palette, and designed an icon set for the different methods used under the safetag audit playbook.

Then, we enabled everything to be accessible to the community via a figma online document that served as container of the safetag visual system.

I collaborated closely with the engineering team to implement a myriad of features aimed at simplifying the experience and providing transparent financial management for the collectives hosted on the platform.

From ideation and discovery through to the handoff to production, the process involved multiple feedback rounds with users and stakeholders.

Each feature required a deep understanding of the problem, achieved through documentation, facilitated workshops, user discovery calls, team data analysis, and extensive asynchronous collaborative work.