Client and the challenge

The Centre on Armed Groups works to reduce violence and end armed conflict through a network of over 100 specialists across the globe, providing research, dialogue, and advice. When journalists at The Economist or The New York Times need to understand what's happening in Myanmar or Sudan, they call on the Centre's experts.

The Centre started in 2020 inside ODI, a London-based think tank, and became independent in Geneva in 2022. The expert network is the organisation's reason to exist, it came first, and the research output followed. After a few years of building the body of work, they had grown out of their DIY website. Now we could design a system for what they had produced and build a foundation on which it would grow.

How the project grew

The Centre came to us for a website, but in early conversations, it became clear the project needed to start further back. We could help with how the Centre presents itself visually, and how its growing body of research should be organised and discovered. The scope expanded to include creative direction and information architecture.

Creative direction

I follow military and conflict research closely. I'm from Ukraine, and just before the Russian invasion I was reading technical argumentation from researchers trying to assess whether it would happen. That's how I discovered the underlying world of conflict research, and platforms like War on the Rocks, which hosts some of the best specialist writing in this field.

So when the Centre came to us, I already understood where they sat. They occupy a position between the specialised platforms where insiders talk without mediation, and mainstream media where information has to be made broadly accessible. We wanted the site to read like an editorial publication, something closer to a foreign affairs journal than a university department page.

This set the art direction. For photography, we established principles for selecting and treating images: documentary in tone, restrained in colour, as well as the collage styles. For typography, we developed the composition of Antique Legacy and Untitled Serif as a paired system before applying it to any layouts. Antique Legacy, a Swiss sans serif from Optimo Type Foundry in heavier-weight sets the headlines. It creates a sense of urgency, gives a bit more character without drawing attention to itself, and it pulls away from a purely academic register toward something more editorial.

Untitled Serif by Klim Type Foundry handles the body text. It evolved from the typeface used in the Financial Times, and it reads beautifully at length, which was critical for a site where visitors work through dense summaries of research reports.