A new look for a new era: our vision for the RightsCon rebrand

This year, we’ll convene the 12th edition of RightsCon and our first-ever hybrid event. When we began to envision this new inflection point for our summit model, starting with RightsCon Costa Rica (June 5-8, 2023), one of our first questions was: what does a hybrid RightsCon look and feel like? For us, this moment of reflection and redesign for RightsCon was the opportune time to reimagine our visual identity, while still embodying many of our tried-and-true approaches to gathering.

Introducing the new RightsCon logo

Our new logo is, simply put, RightsCon. While the familiar globe of our past logo cemented our first decade of convening, our new approach reflects what we’ve built together: RightsCon as the central convening space for the digital rights movement. Our new identity has been shaped by three pillars of RightsCon: movement, connection, and bold representation.

Movement

We live in an ever changing world and nothing has demonstrated our community’s ability to adapt better than three years of online convening. While the continuity of RightsCon is important, movement is at the core of our work in more ways than one. It is how and where we choose to bring people together in different places, whether in Costa Rica, Tunisia, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, the USA, the Philippines, or online. It is also the ultimate goal of the community-built program we host: driving outcomes to move the needle for our human rights in the digital age. From now on, elements of our RightsCon identity – through colors, photos, and work with local artists – will shift to reflect our host city, meaning our identity is not static, it moves and changes with us.

Connection

RightsCon exists to bring people who might otherwise not meet together. We emphasize connection across borders and stakeholder lines because the outcomes we’re moving toward require active participation from everyone, including human rights advocates, government officials, the private sector, philanthropic institutions, foundations, and artists. We see RightsCon as an anchor in the eye of the storm, a trusted space for all perspectives to connect. Occasionally, our new identity will leverage an overlapping set of triangles, a stable but highly dynamic shape, to illustrate the points of connection that make our network stronger.

Representation

As a civil-society-owned space, representation has always been central to RightsCon. Wherever we can, we work to reduce barriers and support participation for those who are traditionally excluded from global convening spaces. For us, representation doesn’t stop there: it’s about digging deeper to elevate the voices and issues under the surface that might not be in the news cycle yet. The RightsCon program is ambitious and bold, it represents the work being done on every corner of the globe. We want both our new identity and our new homepage (hop on over and check it out!) to be bold, too, and showcase the power of what happens when we come together.

We can’t wait to continue to shape and evolve RightsCon with all of you. As a first step: make sure you’re registered to join us this June 5-8, 2023 in San José, Costa Rica or online. You’re not going to want to miss our first hybrid event.