Among the world’s most important environmental resources, the HKH—Hindu Kush Himalayas—sits at the peak. The forces of climate change and globalization are wreaking havoc on this fragile asset, with implications felt across the globe. And ICIMOD is the Nepal-based research and development organization leading the global effort to protect it. They needed an entirely reimagined brand to get to the heart of what makes their vision—and the HKH— so transformational. The single defining idea we used to set the stage: the pulse of the planet.
After establishing the brand idea and design framework, we tackled the website. The challenge: how to deliver the brand amidst the need for a digital library of 400,000+ URLs, research papers, policy briefings, and myriad directories and subdomains. With such a vast library, the organization had thus far developed an incremental, muddled approach to architecture, resulting in a mishmash of UX, UI, code, and structure, and one that lacked a branded foundation. Ours was an uphill battle, literally and figuratively, but it was one we were all too eager to tackle.
