Uwazi Design

Brand and design system consulting for Uwazi v2, the open-source human rights documentation platform by Huridocs, used by 150+ organizations worldwide. Engaged November 2025 to January 2026 for the brand; back since March 2026 across four tracks at once: the platform UI redesign, a new AI agent panel inside it, a rebuild of the marketing site, and a full rebrand with the launch video to announce it.

A tribute to the people who do the work of memory: archivists, researchers, and the materials they've worked with for centuries. Paper, ink, the impression of a letterpress. Calm and editorial by default, color held back for where it counts.

Uwazi is one codebase serving 150+ organizations, from large legal teams to two-person archives, many of them non-technical and working in hard conditions. A loud brand would have fought the content, which is often evidence of the worst things people do to each other.

So the system gets out of the way. Editorial by default, monospace for the record, color held back for the few places it has to mean something. The letterpress idea gave it a reason to be quiet without being cold.

The harder constraint was that it had to survive being implemented by other people. It ships as tokens and patterns a small open-source team can hold in their heads and apply without me in the room.

The logo is the wordmark above. These are the marks that stand in for it when the wordmark cannot.

Named for the press. Three for ink and stamp, three for paper stock.

Roboto Mono carries the wordmark, a quiet nod to monospaced records. Inter does the day-to-day reading.

The rebrand extends past the logo into a full art-directed visual language, an homage to print, ink, and paper.

The brand carried through to the surface people actually use.

Live as the brand and design system for Uwazi v2. In daily use across 150+ organizations documenting human rights work worldwide. The public website at uwazi.io came out of the same system, designed and built in Framer.

The work picked back up in March 2026 and has since grown into four tracks running together, August 2026.

The platform UI. A redesign of Uwazi itself: library, entity view, relationships, settings, import. Shipped as a Figma design system and an interactive prototype running a real 4,400-entity corpus, with a migration kit staged to hand the components, tokens, and accessibility patterns back to the Huridocs production repo.

Ask Bert. A new AI agent panel inside the platform, designed as part of the same prototype. The newest surface in the product and the one with the least precedent to lean on.

The marketing site. A rebuild of the currently published uwazi.io in Astro and React, the full page set plus a WebGL globe. A rebuild of the live design rather than a redesign of it, which is a different and stricter brief.

The rebrand. A new visual language for the whole organization, and a 38 second announcement video to launch it: ten scenes from the brand marks through to the closing lockup.