Transparency International Brand Guidelines: Berlin and the Corruption Perceptions Index

A retired World Bank official and his allies.

Transparency International was set up in 1993. English Wikipedia dates its founding to 9 February 1993 in The Hague and its formal registration to 15 June 1993 in Berlin; its article on Peter Eigen says about 20 people signed a founding charter in the office of the Dutch development minister. The organisation’s own account is shorter: having seen corruption’s effects during his work in East Africa, the retired World Bank official Peter Eigen “and nine allies” set up a small organisation, with a secretariat in the capital of a recently reunified Germany.

Eigen spent more than two decades at the World Bank, Bangladesh’s Daily Star noted in April 2004. He told the paper that when the group started, “speaking about corruption was taboo,” and that the subject was ignored by NGOs and governments alike. Other founding members named by English Wikipedia include Laurence Cockcroft, Frank Vogl, Fritz Heimann and Jeremy Pope. It quotes the political scientist Ellen Gutterman crediting the rise of the group in Germany to the connections of Eigen, Hansjoerg Elshorst and Michael Wiehen.

The name has a legal form: Transparency International e.V., a German registered association. Its head office is called a secretariat rather than a headquarters, English Wikipedia explains, to mark the difference from the autonomous chapters.

A number that travelled.

In 1995 the group published the first Corruption Perceptions Index, which ranked 45 countries on perceived public-sector corruption. It says the index was quickly picked up by media around the world. The list reached 85 countries in 1998, by the group’s account, and 133 in the 2003 edition Eigen discussed with the Daily Star. German Wikipedia says the 2025 index covered 182 countries and territories on a scale from 0 to 100, and that it was compiled until 2008 by Johann Graf Lambsdorff, a professor at the University of Passau, and since then by the organisation itself.

The index has drawn criticism from the start. English Wikipedia records early complaints about methodology and unfair treatment of developing nations, and the objection that it measures perception, not reality. Le Monde, quoted there, argued that it overlooks corruption in the business world. Eigen addressed the point in 2004: the index, he said, reflects the views of decision-makers, and “it is not right to conclude” that the lowest-scoring country is the most corrupt, only that it is perceived to be.

The other products fill out the family. The Bribe Payers Index ran from 1999 to 2011, English Wikipedia says, closing for funding reasons. The Global Corruption Barometer surveys citizens about their own experience. The group says its secretariat became the official secretariat of the International Anti-Corruption Conference in 1997, and that it first gave its Integrity Award in 2000.

The organisation is also a network. It reports 26 national chapters by its third year, and the Daily Star cited 90 in 2004. It now says it has chapters in more than 100 countries. Its founder told the paper that chapters are not opened top-down from the secretariat. Not every chapter uses the name: Corruption Watch in South Africa does not, English Wikipedia notes.

Design and documentation.

A campaigning group has to be recognised in places a company rarely goes: on a banner at a protest, on the side of a boat, on a lapel, on the cover of a report about something grim. That pressure shapes how these organisations present themselves, and the published guidelines of two of them show how it is handled.

Greenpeace’s visual identity guidelines say its yellow campaign banners have been used in non-violent direct actions for more than 40 years, and they build a colour rule around them. Its display type, Zodiac Sans, was drawn from the shape of inflatable boats, according to the studio that made it. Ships are a medium in their own right: the guidelines keep the rainbow for Greenpeace vessels. Even the logo began, by the group’s own account, as a felt-tip word on a beer mat.

Amnesty International offers the matching case at a smaller scale. Its candle in barbed wire, which Wikipedia says was first drawn for a Christmas card, appears on a pin badge the group sells, and its 2015 toolkit sets a minimum height for the wordmark. The same toolkit asks for yellow to be used sparingly and keeps the logo out of cover photos on social media. The Nobel Prize’s record notes that the group’s findings are published in special reports, so the report cover is one of its everyday surfaces.

Field photography has rules of its own. Amnesty’s toolkit says images should never be sensationalist and should show people as individuals with their own stories, with the date, names and location in the caption. Greenpeace’s guidelines, for their part, cite a single picture from the whaling campaigns, a small inflatable between the harpoon and the whale, as an image that tells its story on sight.

A round emblem and a capitalised name.

The logo on the organisation’s website is a round blue emblem built from curved bands and a small disc, set beside the name in two lines of capitals, with the line “the global coalition against corruption” underneath in lower case. The site’s own description now uses a different phrase: “the global movement to end the injustice of corruption.”

Chapters are re-accredited every three years, and English Wikipedia records the removal of the Croatian chapter in November 2015 and of the US chapter in January 2017, over what the board called differences in philosophy, strategy and priorities; a new US chapter was created in 2020. The same article says it was reported in January 2015 that the group had taken project funding from the Siemens Integrity Initiative, set up after Siemens’s 2008 bribery penalties. That drew questions, and the group said it had applied to the initiative, not to the company.

Its own workplace came under scrutiny. In 2019 The Guardian published staff complaints about the Berlin secretariat. A review by the law firm Taylor Wessing and a separate panel followed; the group’s June 2020 statement said they found individual cases that might breach its code and one that might qualify as workplace harassment, but no proven systematic bullying or discrimination. Its managing director stood down in 2017 after a dispute with the board, and his successor left in 2020, English Wikipedia says. Maíra Martini became chief executive in February 2025.

Governments have acted against it as well. Russia listed the Russian chapter as a “foreign agent” in 2015, and on 6 March 2023 the Prosecutor-General’s Office declared Transparency International “undesirable,” The Moscow Times reported; the group said it would continue its work on Russia. In Brazil, a Supreme Court justice ordered an inquiry into the organisation in February 2024, the Wilson Center reported, over its advice to prosecutors on a leniency deal. English Wikipedia reports that the inquiry was closed in March 2026 at the request of the prosecutor-general.

For a design guide, Transparency International shows how an organisation can become known through a yearly index. Compare Human Rights Watch, another group known for an annual report, and ActionAid, another international campaigning organisation. For this guide we use a petrol, a glass teal and an amber on a paper tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Transparency International’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.