Armada is the backbone infrastructure for Europe's food movement, built to centre the BIPOC and diaspora communities who sustain the food system but are left out of its leadership. It's not a campaign, nor a product. It's a movement meant to be a varierty of things. How do you give a strong identity to something deliberately unfinished and in progress?

The Problem

Armada is at its earliest stage, and it isn't one thing, It's a movement. A framework. A shared space for thinking and action. That's a different starting point than most branding briefs: it needed an identity able to shape itself around something living and moving, without becoming dispersive.

Looking around the NGO space it's clear the whole ecosystem runs on the same aesthetics and language: submissive, polite, hope-driven. Armada exists to not ask permission to sit at the table, so it couldn't sound like it was asking. On the other hand, it needed to not scare off the funders and supporters it actually needs to make change happen.

The pomegranate

The decision was to lean into that positionality. Armada is built to take up space, so the brand had to work the same way. Every choice became political. Isn't every decision a political one, after all?

The symbol that could carry all of it turned out to be the pomegranate. A fruit read as revolution and resistance across Armenian and SWANA cultures, a whole made of many seeds. The same principle Armada itself runs on. It also happens to contain the word "granate," a small irony given how carefully the brand avoided anything warlike. The pomegranate became more than a logo, it shaped the colour system and even the typography, whose letter counters echo single seeds.

The System

At this early stage, the deliverables stayed deliberately lean: an identity, typography, colour system, and a website hero page built to carry just enough into a first round of conversations with partners and funders.

Armada has been selected for the Rhizome Fellowship, a nine-month narrative-led systems change programme, to develop over the next year.

Sometimes the work design needs to do isn't to be the centre, it's to be a structure solid enough to let the content rise and grow where it needs to go.