ARMADA

THE BEFORE

Armada is a narrative and digital organising backbone for the European food movement. It's an infrastructure for thinkers and policy makers working to change the way the movement is built — a resource hub for new frameworks that decentre the white presence in favour of BIPOC actors who, until now, have been sidelined and treated as passive participants rather than the decision-makers they should be. The building of Europe's food future is a design problem, not just a diversity problem: diasporic knowledge gets ignored in policy, in programming, and in the design of those futures.

Armada is at its beginning stage, and it is not one thing. It's a movement, a framework, a shared space for thinking and action. From a design perspective, this creates a different starting point: not "we do this thing," but a brand ready to hold many realities, projects and actions inside it. For that reason, it needed an identity able to shape itself around a living, moving movement — but still defined enough to not be dispersive.

THE PROBLEM

With Armada, the strategic problem was clear: how do we design an identity strong enough to be impactful, for something taking its first steps, whose whole point is to be a hub of changing ideas, relationships and solutions?

Look around the NGO space and it's clear the whole ecosystem of brands revolves around the same principles, aesthetics and language. They generally sound submissive, polite, hope-driven. Armada needed to step out of those paradigms. If your reason to exist is to not ask permission to sit at the table, but to reclaim your space in the conversation, the language can't be submissive and soft.

Armada is not an NGO, it's a movement. For exactly that reason, it had to feel and speak differently.

But there was a tension to hold: be outspoken and loud, without scaring off the funders, supporters and people who actually need to be inside it to make change happen.

THE DECISION

An organisation that refuses to look and speak like an NGO is a genuine risk. It can be read as aggressive, off-putting to funders, too much, not polite enough to be taken seriously as an organisation.

The decision was to lean into Armada's positionality and speak in an unapologetic way. Its mission is specific and different enough that it cannot afford to look and feel like the NGOs that end up siloed and without real impact. Armada is built to take up space, so the brand has to work the same way.

THE WORLD

Armada lives in a European context that, at the level of policy and decision-making, is still predominantly white. The world we built had to be able to speak to institutions without looking like a governmental organisation from Brussels. The involvement of BIPOC people, ideas and leadership is fundamental to the project, and what we created needed to express that.

The language Armada speaks is bold — a punch in the teeth. It runs on strong statements that steal from the editorial world, refusing the soft wording the NGO world usually relies on.

The texture is rough but precise verbally, and handmade visually, to communicate an anti-institutional position.

The imagery is evocative, visually strong, unpolished and varied — communicating through power, knowledge and positionality.

The world built for Armada runs on one fundamental principle: every choice is not just aesthetic, it's political (isn't every decision a political one?).

THE SYMBOL / THE CORE IDEA

It was important for Armada to be represented by a symbol strong enough to carry the whole complex, broad idea it is building. Research brought my attention to a fruit that converges different shades, angles and perspectives on the same topic: the pomegranate.

It's a fruit that represents revolution and resistance — in Armenian culture as much as across the SWANA region, a symbol reclaimed by activists for the creative spread of new ideas and the strength found in solidarity. It also represents the whole made by the multitude, marrying perfectly with the collective-impact bone of Armada. And while it was important for Armada to avoid violent, warlike language, it ironically contains the word "granate" — giving it a whole different meaning in the context it's used.

The pomegranate quickly became not just the logo, but the one strong idea able to govern and shape the whole brand system. It is applied to the colour scheme. It lives through the typography — the letter counters of the chosen brand font are shaped almost as single pomegranate seeds. An idea that permeates every layer of the identity. The pomegranate does not describe the principles of Armada; it's built on the same principle.

WHAT WAS BUILT / THE SYSTEM

At this early stage of Armada's journey, the deliverables needed were the key ones — built as a system more than a series of single parts. We developed an identity, the typography and the colour scheme, followed by a website hero page deliberately holding just enough key information to support a first round of networking and presenting the project to possible partners and funders.

THE IMPACT

It's certainly early to define the impact of this work, but Armada has already cut through the noise and proved it has what's needed to make a difference. It has been selected for the Rhizoma EU project to develop over the next year.

We can already say the seed we planted has let this deliberately borderless movement be seen as something solid enough to be taken seriously — and to start making a difference.

THE TAKEAWAY

Sometimes the work design needs to do is not to be the centre, but to be a solid structure that lets the content rise and grow where it needs to go.