Revolution Agriculture

Richard Brion didn’t set off to try and change the agricultural landscape of America, but when he found himself burning hundreds of acres of rich fields of poppy plants in Afghanistan, he thought there had to be a better way. What he saw was an onslaught of shortsighted practices, ill-advised systems, and destructive caretaking when it came to how we cultivated earths land.

Richard wants to tackle the issues of depleted soil, food deserts, climate change, low quality, and exploitative labor, through soil-based, self-contained systems called “farmlets”. When we began talking about his vision and mission for Revolution Agriculture, we jumped at the chance to help in anyway we could.

Goals

Our initial goals were to understand where RevoAg was in terms of development, testing and data, messaging and marketing, as well as investors and funding opportunities. After understanding where things stood, we wanted to help improve the overall brand design and messaging, overall design improvements and uniformity, update pitch decks and other investor communications, work on a strategy for future engagements for funding.

Visit:

Website

Project Type:

VENTURE STUDIO

Status:

ONgoing

Project Scope:

Funding insights

REBRANDING

Market Strategy

Landing Page

Original Logo

Brand Update

The original mark is confluence of many ideas and concepts — using a mix of styles, influences, and intentions into a singular idenity. The more is more approach to identity solutions. The primary palette of blue and green represent earth and water, reflecting the requirements of all farming. While the typeface shows fun and light-heartedness, with a personal and handwritten look. The logo mark uses a plant icon/illustration — a combination of a tree and a leaf, to show that the farmlets can yield produce beyond just leafy greens (showing from small to big types of yields), and the brackets around the tree/leaf are meant to represent the earth, or world, as farmlets are a global effort.

Without an experienced eye for simplicity, clarity, and unity, the brand achieves the common amateur mistake of equating purpose with concept, resulting in many parts but no whole. All of the concepts and idea above are valid and purposeful, and ought to remain a theme or inspiration for the revisions.

Concepts

General exploration of ideas

Final Options

Using a fun but formal typeface, which has flourish and whimsy, as well as stability and tradition. This approach is visually bold, less plain and generic, which can be limiting in expanding and evolving the brand in the future.

As a baseline starting point, this approach is both simple, clean, and neutral, allowing for a wider canvas on which to build and evolve the brand.

This approach is a combination of simplicity and whimsy, softened with rounded edges, easy readability, and fun.

Color Palette

We retained the blue and green color choices from the original, and expanded it to provide more options for variety and engagement as we developed other platforms for communicating the brand. We tweaked the colors to be more lively and eye-catching colors to gain attention, and reinforce the idea of energy, viability, warmth, and accessibility. A positive spin on an issue that can get very dour, dire, and dark.

Final Brand

Our goal was to create a “transitional” brand for Revolution Agriculture. We wanted refine and simplify the original, echoing the overall purpose and inspiration with more clarity, yet remain somewhat basic and familiar.

Logotype

The original brand used fun and personal typefaces, while attempting to look warm and inviting and natural, managed to look dated and somewhat sloppy. The accompanying typeface for “AGRICULTURE” did not properly anchor or associate with the dominate type form, and felt more like an afterthought, pulling away your focus from the whole. Neither typeface worked as a solid basis to build a brand system for robust usage on multiple situations and platforms.

We used a mix clean and simple sans-serif, to increase readablity and clarity, while having access to variable font weights, and still contained some fun and whimsy. We finally decided on using Neutrface for the logotype.

Logomark

The tree reversed out of the leaf was a good execution in concept, but too subtle to be clearly seen and interpreted —which had to do with it’s relative size and placement, as well as the overall competition with the other elements. The brackets were visually overwhelming, drawing attention away over the more important icon (leaf/tree), while simultaneously confining and minimizing the primary mark. It also fails to quickly and clearly reprsent a globe, appearing more like an “O” or animal horns.

Typography

Aside from finalizing a logo, we want to find accompanying typography that matched and echoed the overall intent and messaging of the typeface used in that final brand. As with any digital endeavour, finding universally accessible typefaces is necessary for branding consistency. For all body copy and major areas of content we picked Open Sans, an easy to read and robust typeface, while headlines and call-out areas would use Josefin Slab (which mirrored the usage of Neutraface in the logo) for some whimsy and variety.

Brand Messaging

The components of a great story existed, not only in the origin of the company, but also the mission. What we wanted to do was more succinctly and clearly identify the problems and how RevoAg is going to solve them. This simplification was useful for not only how Richard could talk about the company to potential investors, but also in subsequent communication through numerous social channels and other platforms.

Pitch Deck

The idea of taking the traditional concept of a farm and placing inside a shipping container wasn’t difficult to understand, but much less simple to execute. We needed to convey the mobility and immediacy of the farmlet, as well as the clearly identified issues everyone is facing with the cultivating and distribution of modern produce. The pitch deck also allowed for exploration and implement of the revised and updated visual system.

Visual Iconography

Using simple and available icons helped expedite and unify the visual language without using unnecessary effort and time around unique visual solutions for this stage of the product. The goal was communication not customization.

Landing Page

Taking the same language used on the updated pitch deck served as a great guide for creating a more information and engaging landing page. We started with basic wireframing to understand the placement and flow of content, which revolved into final concepts and the eventual coding and build of the final landing page.