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Uwazi Design

A new identity for Uwazi, the open-source database Huridocs builds for human rights documentation.

The Uwazi brand board: the colon mark in seal red and carbon blue, four tiles of ink splatter, and the wordmark in layered greys.
The brand board: the colon mark, the ink, the wordmark.

The brief

Uwazi’s users range from large legal teams to two-person archives, many working in hard conditions, and the content is often evidence of the worst things people do to each other. The brand had to stay calm and survive being applied by a small open-source team without me in the room. The idea: the materials of the people who do the work of memory, paper, ink, the impression of a letterpress.

The mark

A colon separates a property from its value, the smallest unit of a database. The mark is that colon: seal above, like the wax that certifies a document; carbon below, like the copy beneath.

witness
: Maria Elena Quispe
date
: 14 March 2019
location
: Ayacucho, Peru
status
: verified
The Uwazi app icon: the colon, a seal red block above a carbon blue one, on black.
A record as the guidelines write it, each colon the mark. The app icon beside it.

The wordmark

Custom and geometric, each letter built from shapes in layered opacity. It goes on every ground in the palette, and the colon can stand alone.

Six of the colourways in the guidelines.
The Uwazi wordmark as black ink blots on blue-speckled noise, the colon in red and blue.
The wordmark as artwork.

Colour

Six inks, named for the press. Most of a page is Parchment and Paper, with Ink for the type; Seal and Carbon are held back for marks, links and values.

Type

Inter for headlines, Merriweather for running text, Syne Mono for metadata. The four verbs are the brand pillars.

Inter, headlines
Where information finds purpose.
Merriweather, running text
Uwazi helps human rights groups gather, organize and use information to create positive change. Built by Huridocs, it is a flexible database for collections of evidence, law and research, with rich metadata, relationships and multilingual support.
Syne Mono, metadata
COLLECT. MANAGE. ANALYZE. PUBLISH.

Art direction

Grain, ink and halftone, and documentary images from the archive floor. The feature illustrations go the other way: diagrams in greys and indigo.

A burst of red and blue halftone dots on black.
A cube dissolving into blue and red particles on charcoal.
Two figures with a typewriter and folders, printed in red and blue duotone.
Stacks of paper records with flat blue and red blocks laid over them.
Generated with Midjourney and art-directed for the brand.

picture The feature icons, on ink and through halftone.

The feature icons on deep blue, connected by dotted lines, with pixel clusters in red and blue.
The same feature icons on a pale halftone ground.
The feature icons, on ink and through halftone.
Search: a diagram of fields feeding the Uwazi wordmark and out to records.
Manage: a diagram of records linked by arrows.
Solution: a diagram of a template framework.
Open source: a diagram of circles linked to boxes.
Feature illustrations: search, manage, solution, open source.

In use

The website and the platform carry the same system; the work also fed the platform UI redesign.

The website home: "Where information finds purpose." over a line-drawn globe with seal and carbon blocks.
The website features: four cards with diagram illustrations between seal, ink and carbon bands.
The website use cases: six organizations, each card marked with the colon.
The website footer: link columns over the large wordmark and the seal, ink and carbon bands.
The website in the new brand: the home, the features, the use cases, the footer.
A court judgment open in the Uwazi platform: the PDF beside its metadata, with the description, the file, the country and the dates.A court judgment open in the Uwazi platform: the PDF beside its metadata, with the description, the file, the country and the dates.
A document in the platform, the page as the main object.

picture A record and everything filed with it.

A case record in the Uwazi platform: its metadata on the left, its files on the right (a PDF, an audio recording, a video).
A record and everything filed with it.

Where it stands

Live as Uwazi’s brand, with guidelines for the team that builds it and a launch video made in Remotion.