For any of this to work, CCLI has to be trusted. A director weighing a call on capital or risk needs guidance she can act on and defend to her board, and there are very few places to find it. CCLI’s work is grounded in serious legal scholarship and it is independent by design, but neither quality helps if the people who need CCLI don’t know it exists. The brand had to show up where directors and trustees already are, and say plainly what CCLI offers: this is a credible, non-partisan source that turns complex law into clear direction for the people making the decisions.

The existing brand fell short of these ideals. The identity had been made as a standalone graphic with no system around it, stretched long and thin to hold two official languages, to the point that partners had taken to cropping it. CCLI also shares its acronym with the Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative and gets mistaken for the Canadian Climate Institute. An organization asking to be trusted on precision had a mark that could not hold its own name.

To figure out where CCLI fits in the wider world of climate and governance work, we examined a dozen peer and adjacent organizations for how they establish authority, how they prompt action without inducing dread, and how they communicate their impact. The gap was clear: almost no one in the field was working to reassure a fiduciary, which is precisely where CCLI had an opportunity to stake a claim.

In the messaging, staking that claim meant replacing soft reassurance with decision-grade clarity, and alarm with urgency and composure. It also meant setting firm boundaries and holding to them consistently, because independence is what makes CCLI trustworthy to a regulator and a resource company alike: this is an organization that advances credible climate governance without campaigning, litigating or lobbying.

The visual identity combines elements of rigour and precision with visible and necessary change. The result is Living Geometry, a precisely crafted system of geometric shapes creating an instantly recognizable symbol of the things CCLI seeks to protect: a leaf, built entirely out of squares. Its four colours shift like a Canadian deciduous leaf through a season, from green through gold and orange to red. The turning leaf represents change in plain sight, an annual event the Canadian audience immediately connects with. On the website colours shift as you move down the page, so the brand evolves the way its subject does. The mark works at favicon size, which the old one never did, and three lockups, English, French and bilingual, ended the stretching problem for good.

The website brings the brand promise to life. We rebuilt the architecture around what people arrive to do, with separate pathways for directors and for climate professionals, each ending in a real next step. Research moved into a searchable library. Experts are introduced with the context that explains why you would want to speak to them. And the brand system saturates the interface: uploaded photography is tinted automatically, brand shapes are applied in the editor, so the design system holds as the organisation publishes new content.

We timed the launch to coincide with CCLI’s annual report and a major partner report, so the new brand and site reached the organization’s largest audience of the year together, as one coordinated moment rather than a rebrand trailing behind the news.

The decisions being made in Canada’s boardrooms will shape the net-zero transition for all of us. CCLI gives the people making them expert, independent support they can rely on. Our job was to make that support easy to find and easy to trust.