Responses by Tom Munckton, executive creative director, Fold7Design.
Background: Ahead of celebrating its 20th anniversary next year, London-based nonprofit Stop the Traffik wanted a new brand identity system to bring the charity into the spotlight, grab attention and reflect its primary activities of prevention and intelligence gathering. As it focuses on ending human trafficking, the nonprofit has multiple audiences and needed an identity that could flex, from bold and impactful cultural comms that drive awareness of the scale of the problem to data vis used when collaborating with cutting-edge tech partners on services to identify and disrupt the routes of trafficking.
Design thinking: Our approach was to find a new, unabashedly striking branding device that we could position at the system’s heart, iconic enough to be a universal symbol of the organization’s core mission—to prevent trafficking before it happens. It also needed to be an adaptive device that could underpin the nonprofit’s many projects, partners, campaigns and products. We created the “Stop Arrow,” which acts to represent the importance of prevention and strays from the common upward- or forward-direction arrows used in branding by pointing backwards. This provides a memorable distinction to a common visual trope by focusing on the “before,” not the “after.”
Challenges: The subject matter. The many forms of human trafficking make it an incredibly sensitive area for brand communication, especially with an organization that wanted to be bolder and more in the spotlight. Our approach to illustration was one way to overcome this. We created a human-centered collage style that could layer the themes without being too “literal.”
Favorite details: The brand system represents a huge leap forward for Stop the Traffik and aligns it with the big businesses they work with globally. We’re particularly proud of the motion identity, which supports the backward directional nature of the idea but also provides new avenues for the brand to talk about its work.
New lessons: We enter every project with a “novice mindset” rather than bringing any preconceived or subjective ideas into the mix. Stop the Traffik had some huge data around trafficking that was truly mind-blowing to our team. If global human trafficking was a company, it would be one of the biggest, with revenue of more than $500 billion for the traffickers and exploiters.
Visual influences: We looked less at the charity and nonprofit space and more at the big modern tech world, since it is Stop the Traffik’s core audience and potential partners in disrupting human traffickers, their abilities and their routes. The result is a brand language that feels part-tech, part-cause—but wholly distinctive.
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