Most brand guidelines are written to stop people from changing things. When the client is an international coalition of more than 170 water-rights groups across 90 countries, a network of 650 multi-faith congregations in California, or a room of young displaced people in London making perfume from memory, a rigid set of rules does not survive contact with reality. The design only works if people on the ground can adapt it and still recognise themselves inside it.
That question runs through the work of Sahar Zafar, a London-based Pakistani brand and identity designer with over a decade of experience across South Asia, Europe, North America and Southern Africa. A graduate of the MA in Strategic Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and an Atlas Corps alumna, Zafar describes her practice on her website as “curious about context, attentive to people, and interested in how identities live beyond the screen”. In late October 2026, the design anthropologist and former OCAD University dean of design Dr Dori Tunstall reviewed Zafar’s portfolio in her Substack publication Living Liberatory Joy, examining how her participatory research and physical materials align with cultural justice across three projects: End Water Poverty (2026), Essence of Tomorrow (2024) and PICO California (2020).
End Water Poverty and the Problem of a Global Voice
Established in 2007 and hosted by WaterAid, End Water Poverty is an international civil-society coalition campaigning for the human rights to safe water and sanitation. According to the coalition, its membership spans more than 170 organisations in 90 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe.
When Zafar took on the 2026 refresh as lead brand and identity designer, the challenge was scale and local ownership. “The brief was to refresh the coalition’s outdated identity and build it beyond the logo into a system that could carry across platforms, online and offline, in different languages and for different audiences,” she explains.
At the centre of the identity is an open white hand poised above a fluid drop of water, pairing collective action with the resource itself. Around that emblem, Zafar built primary, secondary and monochrome marks alongside water-line graphics, bold typography and documentary photography.
As the project developed, the decisive shift happened in the photographic direction. “What changed along the way was the imagery,” Zafar told us. “Alongside the languages, the imagery had to represent members’ own regions, across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, and I customised it so partners could make the identity their own.” In her review, Dr Dori Tunstall noted that Zafar’s art direction avoids the old charity-sector clichés of poverty campaigning, choosing photographs where Black and brown communities appear with joy, action, agency and dignity, while keeping the mark readable across English-dominant and multilingual layouts.
The system is now used across the coalition’s official website, member network sites and a newsletter reaching more than 350 member organisations, alongside booklets such as A Global Call to Action for Water Justice, co-branded fact sheets with partners like Coalition Eau, fundraising decks and events. Through the coalition’s work with Debt Justice, the identity was also included in the UK at the Labour Party conference and internationally at Stockholm World Water Week.
Essence of Tomorrow and Future-Making Through Scent in London
If End Water Poverty asked how a graphic system travels across continents, Essence of Tomorrow (2024) asked how an identity behaves inside a single room in London. Developed for Revoke – an independent London organisation based at Pelican House supporting young displaced people and care-leavers – the project combined brand design with a live perfume-making workshop.
Zafar served as lead designer of both the identity and the workshop itself. She describes Essence of Tomorrow as “an experiential identity for a perfume-making workshop exploring how memory, scent and imagination can help young displaced people picture a future of their own making”.
“Rather than asking participants to describe the future, the workshop invited them to make it, through a guided journey of remembering, imagining, smelling and making,” Zafar says. “Each participant created their own scent to explore their past, present and future, and left with a fragrance they had made.”
Translating smell into print required restraint. “The identity was designed to evoke scent rather than illustrate it, using soft gradients, blurred forms, warm golden-hour tones and a clear, gender-neutral serif typeface,” she explains. “The prompt cards were designed to open the imagination rather than direct it.”
Before the session with Revoke, Zafar prototyped and tested the workshop with other groups in London, including at UAL, “refining the prompts, pacing, scent-making process, materials and visual language until it felt clear, intuitive and accessible”. She is equally careful about where the camera stops: “To protect the consent and privacy of the young people taking part, the images are from the test workshops.” In one photograph from those test sessions, a participant holds a finished amber roll-on bottle over paper blotter strips pencilled with chamomile, neroli and wood notes; on the label, the maker has handwritten the name of their fragrance: Peace.
PICO California and a Bilingual Toolkit for the 2020 Census
The third project goes back to 2020, when Zafar served as Design Lead for PICO California, a statewide network of faith-based community organisations. According to California Complete Count reporting, roughly 92 per cent of the network’s member congregations sat in or near census tracts classified as hard to count.
“The brief was to build a visual language that could reach communities across California and make taking part in the Census feel relevant, human and worth acting on,” Zafar recalls. “The audiences included multi-faith congregations, immigrant families, first-time participants and communities considered hard to count, so everything was designed in English and Spanish. The campaign ran across 12 federations and around 650 congregations.”
Rather than speaking in the voice of a public agency, the campaign put local organisers at the front. “Faith leaders and community organisers became the faces and voices of the campaign,” Zafar notes. “I worked with local illustrator Celeste Byers, and brought in Stef Wong for the portrait quote series, with quotes taken from a video campaign featuring local community and religious leaders. Together with my photography of community actions, these became toolkits and a visual archive for campaigning online and offline, designed to move through congregations, neighbourhood groups and social media without losing the campaign identity.”
When COVID-19 shut down in-person services in spring 2020, the system adapted overnight. “When COVID-19 moved the outreach online, Faith Votes grew out of the same campaign,” Zafar says. “The work was used across posters, factsheets, pledge cards, social graphics, videos, merchandise and billboards, and the campaign reached more than 600,000 people through digital outreach.”
Across the bilingual Count Me In postcards and Faith Votes graphics in California, the scent trays and prompt cards of Essence of Tomorrow in London, and the modular publications of End Water Poverty, Zafar treats graphic design not as a closed surface, but as a working kit for the people inside the story.
More of Sahar Zafar’s work can be seen at saharzafar.uk, with case studies for End Water Poverty, Essence of Tomorrow and PICO California. Images are courtesy of Sahar Zafar, with photography and illustration credits as noted in the captions.
