RESOLVE, solving stuck problems since 1977, steps into the divide with a new brand

RESOLVE helped create the field of environmental conflict resolution in 1977, and it has spent the years since walking into the problems other groups avoid.¹ Today it launches a new brand narrative, a refreshed identity and a new website, resolve.ngo, which we wrote, designed and built around a single idea. Between every problem and its solution there is a divide. RESOLVE’s job is to step into it.

A pioneer that was hard to explain in one sentence

Few organizations have a résumé like RESOLVE’s. Its National Wetlands Policy Forum produced the consensus that became America’s “no net loss” wetlands policy. It has worked on safe drinking water, committed to building the first conflict-free mineral supply chains out of Central Africa, and helped launch the Global Safety Net for biodiversity and ReGrow West Africa after Ebola.¹

Today its programs run from TrailGuard AI, a camera that warns rangers about poachers, to Salmon Gold, HealthGrid’s solar-powered clinics in Sierra Leone and the Peace Diamonds initiative. Its partners range from Apple and Tiffany & Co. to the Environmental Defense Fund.²

That range is RESOLVE’s strength. It also made RESOLVE hard to explain to a funder, a partner or a new hire. The old brand listed the work but didn’t say what tied it together, or why RESOLVE is the group you call when an issue is stuck.

We wrote three stories, and one of them fit everything

We started where every brand should: with what the organization actually does. Then we wrote three different narratives, each a short manifesto that could carry the whole organization on its own.

• The Divide

  From mediation to mission: RESOLVE closes the gap between a problem and its solution.

• The Hard Problems

  The toughest global challenges, the ones nobody else wants to touch.

• Not Just Thinking, Doing

  Solutions designed to pay for themselves, through RESOLVE’s enterprises.

The Divide won because it came straight out of RESOLVE’s own history. Mediation is the work of bringing two opposing sides together. We widened that into a way of seeing every program. The distance between a problem and a solution can feel infinite. That gap is where conflicts start and global issues get stuck, and it is easier to stand on one side or the other. RESOLVE steps into it.

Go where others fear to solve.

The narrative closes on that line, and it became the brand’s promise. The identity carries it too. We redrew the O in the RESOLVE wordmark as two halves that meet to form one letter, two sides closing a gap. It is a mark that does what the organization does.

A website that splits every image in two

Then we made the divide something you can see. Every home-page hero on resolve.ngo takes one photograph, splits it down the middle and sets a word on each side: use and reuse, rare and earth, wildlife and refuge, people and power. A plastic-waste mountain meets green hills. An open-pit mine meets a waterfall. Above them all runs one line: We close the divide between.

On a phone, the words arrive one after another, so the sentence builds as you scroll. Behind the heroes we designed templates for people solutions, planet solutions, work sites and news, so each of RESOLVE’s programs gets a page that fits the same system, and the next program won’t break the story.

The idea holds up because RESOLVE’s work really is made of pairs. A minerals effort with Apple also restores salmon habitat. Tiffany & Co. backs community-led restoration of old mine sites in Sierra Leone. Mejuri sources gold alongside habitat restoration, and the Environmental Defense Fund works with RESOLVE on getting lead out of drinking water.² Business and nature, mining and repair: each program is a divide someone decided to close.

Forest, rust and cream: a 1977 institution with an editorial voice

A new identity needed a new voice on screen. We gave RESOLVE a palette of deep forest green, a near-black green, rust red, a bright orange accent and a warm cream. Headlines are set in Editorial New, a serif with the confidence of a good magazine. Body copy is in Satoshi, clean and modern.

The orange does the work of a call to action. The greens and cream carry the calm of an organization that has been doing this for nearly 50 years.

Together they let the photography lead. Each split image sits on cream, and the type speaks quietly beside it.

How it came together

The site was made by one team: Doug Burnett, Connor Fleming, Lucia Vaughan, Jon Wyville and Chris von Ende on design, art direction and development, with Dave Loew, a writer and creative director who has worked alongside RESOLVE for more than a decade.

The new resolve.ngo leads with a plain promise, We solve for people and the planet, and its story runs on the narrative we wrote.² It also gives TrailGuard AI, one of RESOLVE’s best-known programs, a place to grow from. That program is already growing into a company of its own, Nightjar.