With a new organisational strategy in place, we partnered with the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) to reinvigorate its identity and digital platform. 

How we govern our natural resources plays a key role in sustainable development, democratic accountability and climate action. It determines the wellbeing of people in resource-rich countries, and of the planet. 

Enter the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI). It exists to support informed, inclusive decision-making about natural resources and the energy transition. 

With major global developments driving a transformation in NRGI’s strategy, approaches and partnerships, they approached us to create a new visual identity and website that better reflects who they are today.

We anchored the identity in the idea ‘the energy for change’. It speaks to NRGI’s commitment to a better world, alongside the awareness of – and willingness to carry out – the work that is needed to get there, in partnership with change agents equipped to pursue reform.

The symbol captures a moment of motion; a forward progression with a point of impact that spreads exponentially. It nods to the contours found in landscapes. And it hints at a fingerprint, representing not only the unique contributions that NRGI make – and enable its partners to make – but the fact that this work impacts people.

Emanating patterns influenced by strata, landscapes and flows provide impactful branded backgrounds. They directly connect to the visual language of the symbol and are used in the core colours, where the bright ‘hydro’ is applied as a gradient to lift the deep ‘ocean teal’.

The colour palette is inspired by minerals and renewables. The two lead colours, core and ocean, reference NRGI’s previous palette, reflecting its evolution. Grounding colours of granite and chalk, with the use of clean space, help to strike the right balance. A secondary palette provides greater variety for data visualisations.

Transforming the NRGI website was about more than a visual redesign. We needed to create a digital platform that could become a global hub for natural resource governance. It was important to present NRGI as an organisation at the forefront of the sector and surface its knowledge and experience in a way that would extend reach, accessibility and impact.

We worked closely with the NRGI team to develop a site that would be a home to its rich and varied content: from analysis and data tools to commentary from its experts and partners.  This meant creating a site that could serve a range of content types and building a navigational structure that encouraged exploration and ease of use.

The new website features extensive use of our Page to PDF functionality – a time-saving tool that automatically generates typeset PDFs from HTML-formatted content in the CMS. As with the rest of the website, Page to PDF needed to work with content in a range of different languages, including right-to-left Arabic script.

The result is an accessible and forward-looking digital and visual system. One that reintroduces NRGI as an organisation at the leading edge of resource governance for a new era. See it for yourself.