ACTA

The work runs in three chapters of equal weight. Each one was needed for the next: nothing visual could be decided before the strategy existed, and no content could be produced before the identity gave it parts to be built from.

Context

ACTA is a Berlin community association rebuilding the city's third spaces, the places beyond home and work where people meet, learn, and act together. It began in September 2025 as a table outside a Späti, where fifteen people pinned their favourite spots on an old map of Berlin, and grew into ACTA, Association for Community, Training, and Action. Today it is around thirty people working across four pillars: belonging, empowerment, civic engagement, and creative entrepreneurship.

Berlin is full of community organisations, and most of them communicate in the same crowded way. In a feed that gives a passing viewer three or four seconds, that noise blurs together and a young community is easy to miss. ACTA also had no shared system to work from: communication was made one post at a time, with no logic carrying from one to the next, so nothing accumulated into something recognisable. The gap was structural: not a lack of effort, but the absence of a system.

And the brand had a second job most communities do not. It had to stay warm and welcoming for the community, and structured and credible for the schools, NGOs, and funders it wants to run training and youth programmes with. Two registers, held in one system that stays coherent no matter who is making things.

To design for a community, I first had to understand it precisely. ACTA gave me fragments. So I built the strategic foundation myself, gathering everything they shared, researching the landscape they sit in, and expanding it into something exact: who ACTA is for, why it exists, what makes it different, and how it should sound.

The first document, the strategic foundation, holds the positioning, mission and vision, the brand story, the four pillars, three audience profiles (peers, youth, institutional partners), a competitor analysis of five adjacent Berlin organisations, the brand personality, and a map of every touchpoint with the job it has to do. The second, the brand essentials, is the operational layer: the verbal identity (tone of voice rules, vocabulary, the elevator pitches) and the behavioural identity (event rituals, how newcomers are welcomed, community guidelines). Together they mean the brand holds in words and in conduct, not only in images.

Where ACTA stands

Researching five adjacent organisations showed what ACTA could and could not claim. The peer-to-peer model is a category convention in Berlin, not a distinction. What nobody else organises around is the third-space frame, the integration of community, training and action encoded in the name, and inclusion-by-design for neurodivergence and social preference as a default in everyday community life. That became the defensible position, and the brief for everything after.

How ACTA sounds

The voice rests on four principles, and every piece of writing has to reflect at least three: plainspoken, specific over generic, matter-of-fact about meaningful work, inclusive by default. "24 onions, 24 potatoes" does the work that "an incredible amount of food" would fail at. The same principles flex across two registers, casual for the community and more careful for institutions, without ever becoming bureaucratic.

Every touchpoint has a job

The strategy maps the path an audience takes from discovery to contribution, and gives each touchpoint one primary goal. This is what turned design decisions into testable ones: the question for any piece stops being "does this look right" and becomes "does this do its job." It is also the bridge to the content chapter, because it told me what Instagram, Eventbrite and the website each had to achieve.

The finished strategy became more than my own brief. It is a document the ACTA team still returns to, to keep their communication and their actions aligned.

From strategy to system

Before deciding what ACTA should look like, I mapped the qualities the identity had to carry, the keywords that came out of the strategy. A small set of dominant ideas surfaced: quietly bold, warm, unpolished but precise, peer-to-peer, analog, and inclusive.

From that map, and from visual research, one direction held: a constrained kit of geometric parts that anyone can recombine into a coherent whole. The approach sits in a clear lineage: Italian rationalist design, Bauhaus geometry, Nordic system identities, and contemporary museum branding, all of which build a coherent visual world from a fixed set of parts.

Logo system

The whole system hangs on one move: reading the A as a doorway. Its interior triangle is a threshold, the gap between outside and in, which is ACTA's third-space idea made into a shape.

The letterforms are built on a construction grid, and the diagonal used everywhere else in the brand, photo cuts, colour splits, container edges, is the signature angle, taken from the slope of the A's leg. Every diagonal in the system traces back to the logo, which is what keeps a kit made for non-designers from drifting.

Primary

The main logo, used in all communication pieces.

Secondary

For institutional contexts like email signatures.

Brand Mark

When there isn't room for the full logo, like an Instagram profile picture.

ACTA Trainings

The lockup for ACTA's external training arm.

Future

A locality lockup, kept in case ACTA expands beyond Berlin.

The split between the lockups is the strategy made visible: the secondary logo and the ACTA Trainings lockup exist because the brand speaks in two registers, one warm for the community, one structured for the institutions it wants to run training with.

The angle does its most visible work on the event covers, where it cuts the photo from the colour field. One rule, taken from the letterform, decides the composition of every cover the team will ever make.

Colour palette

Colour carries meaning. In the identity, each of the four pillars owns one colour. In everyday content the same four colours become four categories a reader can grasp at a glance, three of them taken straight from the association's name: Community, Training, Action, and Topics we care about. Anything not tied to a category stays in warm near-black and cream.

Colour also carries the inclusion rule. All four colours hold body type on cream, so meaning is never left to colour alone, the inclusion-by-design principle made literal rather than stated.

Type system

Two typefaces split the work: Space Grotesk for identity moments and headlines, Atkinson Hyperlegible for body and information, chosen for legibility without looking like an accessibility font.

Visual kit

The visual kit is a constrained set of shapes, each named for what it does (Threshold, Space, Motion, Action, Gathering, Welcome, Window), with fixed rules for orientation and scale, so the outputs vary while the system stays consistent. Threshold and Window carry the doorway idea from the logo into the kit.

Threshold

Space

Motion

Action

Gathering

Welcome

Window

Those shapes recombine into a small number of set patterns: one for everyday posts, one reserved for Trainings, one for merchandise. The team places a ready-made pattern rather than designing a new one. The Trainings-only pattern is the two-register logic again, a structured signal for the institutional arm.

Pattern 1

Used on all posts except Trainings and merch.

Pattern 2 (Trainings)

Used only on ACTA Trainings posts.

Pattern 3 (Merch)

Used on merch and collateral only.

The first place the system had to work was the one touchpoint ACTA already had. Before any templates, I mapped what each kind of post is for and when in the life of an event it appears. Templates follow purpose, not the other way around, and the team fills a template rather than deciding a layout.

The name is the navigation

The association's name already says what it does: Community, Training, Action. So the content categories are those three words, each in its colour, plus Topics we care about in violet for the posts where ACTA takes a position on social and political issues, its quietly bold side. A reader who knows nothing about ACTA can tell from the colour of a post what kind of event it is. The same four categories become the story highlights at the top of the profile, so the archive is sorted the moment someone lands on it.

Community

Training

Action

Topics

An editorial system built on the life of an event

Most of ACTA's content comes from events, so the editorial system follows the arc of one: it is announced, it happens, it is remembered. Each stage has its own post type with its own job, and together they give the team a rhythm to publish to without deciding what to post from scratch each week.

At the end of each season, a reel gathers every event into one seasonal recap, the archive of what ACTA actually did rather than what it announced.

Outside the cycle

Three post types sit outside the event arc. This is ACTA is the pinned carousel, one clear place for a first-time visitor to start, replacing three separate "who we are" posts. Topics we care about is where ACTA speaks on the issues behind its work. ACTA Trainings carries the institutional register into the feed: information on Erasmus+ and other EU-funded projects, structured for the schools and NGOs who read it, on the Trainings-only pattern.

One more type was designed and shelved: Faces of ACTA, portraits and short stories of members in the spirit of Humans of New York. It stays in the system as an option for when the team has the capacity to run it.

Anatomy of an announcement

Each event post works like a book cover: one image, one headline, one colour on the first slide, then the detail for whoever swipes. In a feed that gives you three or four seconds, someone who knows nothing about the event can still grasp it at a glance. Inside the carousel the information follows a fixed order, so every announcement reads the same way, whoever made it: what and when, then why it matters, then the practical and sensory details the strategy asks ACTA to give upfront.

Action

Training

Read as a whole, the profile is built to hold together. Coloured covers signal events, photos in matching colours come from those events, and the rhythm makes the feed scannable at a glance. The profile before, and the system in place:

Before

After

Beyond the feed

The strategy's touchpoint map says most people move from Instagram to Eventbrite to their first event. So the same kit had to carry them the whole way, and into the room. Every piece below is composed from the same parts as the posts, which is why the team can keep them consistent without a designer.

The Eventbrite page is where curiosity turns into attendance, and where the strategy asks for practical and sensory information upfront. I set up the organiser page with branded banners and guest imagery, and built event collections for each category, Community, Trainings and Action, so the sorting logic from Instagram carries through to registration.

For events where something has to be presented, a slide deck template keeps the room on brand: the same typefaces, patterns and colour rules, so a Plenum or a partner meeting looks like the feed that brought people there.

Handoff

Everything above is handed to the team as Canva templates, one per post type, plus the flyer, the deck and the Eventbrite assets. To make sure they are used the way they were designed, I recorded short screen tutorials walking through each template step by step. The team has started publishing with the system on its own; this case will grow with the numbers as they come in.

Reflection

The hardest and most useful part was the strategy. ACTA handed me something vague, and turning it into a precise foundation forced me to understand the community before designing for it. Every visual and editorial decision after that had something firm to point back to, including the touchpoint map that told me what each piece of content was for.

The system is built on constraints, and that is the point. A fixed kit, one colour per category, set patterns, a post type for each stage of an event: limits that make the right choice the easy choice, so the brand stays recognisable as it grows and as different hands make things. For a community of non-designers, constraint is a form of generosity.

The content chapter changed how I think about identity work. A logo and a palette are not a brand until someone can publish with them on a Tuesday night without asking a designer. The templates, the editorial rhythm and the tutorials are where the identity actually lives.