Branding & identity design for a young non-profit supporting Ukrainian survivors of international crimes.

Overview

Ukraine Legal Network was established in November 2023 to provide holistic support to Ukrainian survivors of international crimes and grave human rights violations. Working from Amsterdam and initiated by The Nuhanovic Foundation, it connects survivors in the Netherlands with legal expertise, referral pathways and the justice mechanisms available to them.

Civic Spectrum was asked to build the organisation's identity from the ground up: a mark, a visual system and a set of communication assets capable of holding equal weight in a courtroom, a community meeting and a social feed.

Goals

1. Establish a distinctive identity for a young organisation working alongside established legal institutions
2. Signal Ukrainian identity without reducing the organisation to conflict imagery
3. Build a system that holds across legal, community and public-facing contexts
4. Support communication in both English and Ukrainian without compromising the design

Deliverables

• Brand strategy and positioning
• Wordmark, monogram and lockup system
• Colour palette and typography
• Reversed and single-colour variants
• Digital and print applications
• Social media templates and campaign assets
• Brand guidelines

Approach

We began with the audience rather than the aesthetic. ULN speaks to survivors, to lawyers and to institutions at the same time, and each expects something different from an organisation asking for their trust. The identity had to be credible to a legal audience without becoming cold to the people it exists to serve.

The mark resolves this in a single form. A wheat spike grows from the stem of the U in ULN, rendered in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. Wheat carries the country's agricultural identity and its association with sustenance and return, rather than the imagery of war that dominates coverage of Ukraine. Beneath the wordmark, a hand-drawn arc lifts at the centre — a horizon line, and a gesture of support. The result reads as institutional at a glance and as something warmer on closer reading.

The system was built for range from the outset. A full lockup for formal contexts, a monogram for constrained ones, reversed and single-colour variants for print and signage. The palette holds to two saturated colours against neutral grounds, which keeps the identity legible in a bilingual environment where Cyrillic and Latin text sit side by side and line lengths differ substantially.

Result

A clear and confident identity for an organisation in its first years. The system carried ULN through its website, its social channels, its podcast and its event communications, giving a new network the visual authority to work alongside established legal institutions while remaining recognisable to the community it serves.