Global Refugee Forum 2023
A Moment of Global Unity, creating a unified visual identity for the world’s largest international gathering on refugees
How I evolved the identity I created for the first Global Refugee Forum into a multilingual design system: producing more than 100 assets, from a walk-through Welcome House to digital screens.
Role
Lead designer: concept, design and production of all assets
Client
UNHCR
Working with the GRF project team and UNHCR Brand team.
Timeline
2 months
Scope
100+ assets in 6 UN languages
The brief
The Global Refugee Forum is the world’s largest international gathering on refugees. It’s held every four years, and governments, refugees, businesses and civil society attend to make pledges for refugees and the communities hosting them.
I designed the original GRF logo and its distinctive rings for the first Forum in 2019. For 2023, the brief was to evolve that identity into something more dynamic, and to bring in more of the UNHCR brand so the Forum was clearly part of the UNHCR family.
The challenges
Many formats, one look.
The identity had to work at every scale: large outdoor displays, a walk-through installation, exhibit panels, stage backdrops, digital screens and social media.
A moving message and a compressed timeline.
The tagline changed during development before it was agreed as Action. Unity. Impact. The project ran for two months, and many pieces were requested in the final weeks.
Limited, inconsistent photography. The available photos were few and varied in style. The design couldn’t rely on photos to hold it together.
Six languages, two reading directions.
Designs had to work in all six UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. That included versions of the logo itself, with right-to-left layouts for Arabic.
The approach
The rings as a common thread. I took the rings from the GRF logo and turned them into a continuous design line running through every product. The overlapping lines stand for the many connections needed to create a global moment of unity. This also solved the photography problem: the rings frame each image, so photos of different styles look like they belong together.
UNHCR blue and white. Using these colours strongly made the link to UNHCR immediate, even from across a room.
Built for change. Layouts left room for text in all six languages and for a tagline that kept changing. Because the system was modular, the late requests could be turned around quickly without losing consistency.
Centrepiece: the Welcome House
Every attendee walked through the Welcome House as they entered the Forum. I designed it to tell two stories at once: key moments in UNHCR’s history, and an introduction to refugees’ own stories. Six-language greetings sit on the roof, and the walls carry a sequence of photos, framed by the rings and joined by a blue band of welcome messages. It set the tone for the whole event.
Resuts
- 100+ assets delivered in three months, many of them in the final weeks
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6 UN languages across the signage, exhibits and posters, including right-to-left Arabic versions of the logo
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A consistent experience from the street to the plenary, with one visual language from the exterior backdrops to the social templates
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A design system built to last. The identity I created in 2019 was strong enough to evolve rather than be replaced
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The Forum brought together over 4,000 participants from 168 countries and produced more than 1,750 pledges for refugees and their host communities