Oslo Freedom Forum: brand for Human Rights Foundation

A new identity for the world's leading gathering of dissidents standing up to tyranny.

Client: Human Rights Foundation
Year: 2019
What we did: Strategy, Branding
Result: One system for OFF, CFF and every city edition

By the numbers

26K+attendees since 2009
100+countries represented
$332Mearned media value

The Oslo Freedom Forum brings activists, journalists and artists from under dictatorships to one stage every year. Alongside HRF's master rebrand, we gave OFF and its College Freedom Forum a flexible identity built on lines that redact and reveal.

The Oslo Freedom Forum didn't look like it came from HRF

The Oslo Freedom Forum has brought activists, journalists and artists who stand up to dictators to one stage every year since 2009. It is the Human Rights Foundation's best-known program, but like most of HRF's programs, it didn't look like it came from HRF.

The brand also had to stretch. Beyond the flagship event in Oslo there were satellite forums in other cities, and a College Freedom Forum running on campuses.

So alongside HRF's master rebrand, we brought OFF and its College Freedom Forum into the family. The goal was to make the forum unmistakably HRF without losing what made it its own.

A dictator mid-speech in black and white, the signature lines laid across his eyes

HRF's signature lines, used as redaction bars

OFF inherits HRF's voice: bold, sharp and human. A widely spaced wordmark in Gilroy sits over HRF's signature lines, in the magenta-to-red HRF gradient.

Those lines do a second job as redaction bars. Laid across a dictator's eyes or struck through his name, they turn censorship back on the censor; laid across an activist's eyes, they show what tyranny tries to erase.

It is a simple device, and that is the point. It works at any size, from a street banner in Oslo to a stairwell, a badge or a cup.

City lockups as a series: OSLO, NYC, MEX, TAIPEI, JOBURG

One identity for Oslo, New York, Mexico City, Taipei and Johannesburg

We built city lockups for Oslo, New York, Mexico City, Taipei and Johannesburg, and College Freedom Forum lockups for each campus. Every edition reads as part of one family.

The guidelines, version 2.0 in April 2019, cover banners, stage, stairwells, badges, cups and hoodies. Gilroy carries headlines and Noto Serif carries text, so the forum can speak in many languages.

For OFF 2019 we also proposed a theme, Unite. Attendees' spoken pledges would be embedded into the designs, so the forum's look would carry its guests' own voices.

OFF 2019 venue design proposal: pillar wraps and banners in the forum's magenta

26,000+ attendees from 100+ countries since 2009

The Oslo Freedom Forum has now welcomed more than 26,000 attendees from over 100 countries. By its own count, it has earned $332 million in media value.

Those numbers belong to the forum and the people on its stage, not to a logo. What the identity does is make every edition, in every city, recognizably part of the same fight.

A dissident speaking in Taipei and a student organizing on a US campus now share one visual language with HRF itself. That consistency lets a small foundation's programs read as one movement.