Recover Appalachia

The largest challenged that our design team faced was curating a logo that represented Recover Appalachia. The 4 adjectives that Recover Appalachia wanted to aim towards representing were “natural,” “hand-drawn,” “empowerment,” and “minimalistic.” Our first iteration was half a tree stump with more of a rainbow color palette. While we enjoyed the design, it did not quite fit what Recover Appalachia was going for. 

As we continued to make new iterations, we slowly started getting towards an end result, which is our final design. It represents the growth and journey of the members apart of Recover Appalachia.

The final design we landed on was an illustrated design and will be applied to Recover Appalachia’s merchandise and website.

We used digital illustration and hand lettering to create this organic design. The final bags will be printed and sewn by Rural Action, and distributed in OhioHealth cafeterias and food banks.

The design process started by figuring out our clients’ goals and inspiration for the future of Recover Appalachia. In the next stages we did iterations, found color palettes, and flipped through fonts to find ones that fit best. At the end of the process we came up with a logo pairing, brandmark, wordmark, and lettermark. These designs are seen in the images below. We agreed the final logos represented the adjectives of natural, empower, growth, and minimalism which was the goal to convey to the members of Recover Appalachia.

The images below show examples of early concepts and styles that were explored by the design team. After several rounds of redesigns based on client feedback, we were able to create a compelling design which incorporated a food-based elements into a free-flowing, nature inspired design.

The final step in the design process was making a brand guideline and testing mock-ups. When we made the mock-ups for the client, it really made their inspiration come to life. This allowed us to fully see the final design come to life and appreciate the hard work put into this semester to complete this project.