BMG
A new subsidiary under the Advanced Nutrients umbrella, BMG (BigMike’s Genetics) is the companies foray into the seeds and genetics market. For this project, I touched every nook and cranny of the brand’s visuals myself and put tremendous care into developing a brand that stands far apart and above the competition in the space. Inspired by 1800’s farming catalogs and vintage hand-made feel, the BMG branding conveys a very hands-on, well-loved hobby and career opportunity for those that really want to sink their fingers into the dirt.
SERVICES
• Art Direction
• Brand Identity
• Packaging Design
• Graphic Design
• Illustration
References
With the references gathered for specific elements and icons, I pulled together a mood board of more recent work that fits the old-world look and feel to use as a starting point.
Utilizing illustrations I found in my reference dig, coupled with more modern color palettes and arrangements, I built the foundation of the brand.
It was important to understand the canvas we would be primarily working with - a 3” square - and to use strategic references to ensure we met the middle ground between old-world hand-made charm, and modern utility and clarity.
Logo Process
Final Logo
Applications
To start most projects, I like to do as much research and digging as I can on both the competition and references. It turned out that there were no seed companies taking as much care and pride in their packaging as one might expect, which opened us up to really developing something special.
In my search, I came across an archive of farmers’ catalogs from the late 1800’s that were filled to the brim with excellent illustrations and styles to pull from. Having found these, I dug deeper into vintage High Times magazines, botany textbooks, and agricultural charts to find references and concepts for the BMG build out.
Mood Board
When beginning the actual design process, each logo starts as a sheet of typefaces and fonts. Seeing every possibility laid out next to each other allows for the eye to gravitate to the most favorable one that fits the bill.
When a couple of font choices are decided on to iterate with, we move into logo exploration. Nothing is off the table. I find it’s always better to go as far out as you can and pair back from there, as opposed to following restraints from the start.
In the case of BMG, the brand had actually already gone through a preliminary round of exploration about a year previous to this project. In that version, the look and feel was following a high-tech, science focused route. The initial idea was to try to carry some of that idea into the new direction by incorporating a DNA strand from the initial logo.
Ultimately these versions didn’t fit the new vision of the BMG brand and didn’t make the cut. Through our exploration, we landed on a seal that resembles a stamp or sticker to be not only the logo, but the dominant design element to work around in all BMG applications.
This logo, designed in the shape of a seed, features a simple lettering lockup, a seed within itself, 5 dots creating a crown above the “M” (for “Mike” to represent both the 5 points on a cannabis leaf and a 5-star product, and a stippled background that melds together to create the illusion of a solid gray at small scale - a technique used by stamp makers of old. We also wanted to incorporate cannabis leaves into the logo, but faced the challenge of the federal marketplace, so, as a solution, we placed them in an exaggerated fashion behind the seed as wings.
Iconography
Brand Guide
Packaging
Using the farmer men found in the 1800’s catalogs, we developed a way to communicate the literal hands-in-the-dirt nature of growing your own cannabis. Cannabis is a particularly involved plant to grow, so we wanted to communicate the care and engagement a grower has to have with their crop. These farmer illustrations show up as much as possible and establish a sort of human connection to the brand and the activity.
Following the same style, we developed a set of flavor note icons. On each seed pack, tucked in the upper corners, are illustrations of the different flavor notes a grower can expect out of their plant when it’s reached harvest and use time.
Abridged representation
The main star of the BMG show is the packaging. A soft-touch, zip-lock seal mylar pouch houses a small opaque tube of 10 seeds, preventing any light from possibly entering and spoiling the product.
The seed packs establish the primary visual language and art direction for the rest of the brand. Following the mood board, the packs communicate every ounce of necessary information while also holding an old-world, hand-made look and feel. Color coded for the type of seed — auto flower, traditional, and specialty — the packs stand out above the rest of the competition, and on the shelves of their distributors.
A primary challenge of such a small package is ensuring all legally required information can fit at a printable and legible size. Being a heavily restricted product, there’s a lot of information that has to be squeezed in. We were able to arrange the back of the packs with a chart for strain-specific information, and a space for the legally required content on the bottom half. We then hid the barcode on the bottom folding panel so it wouldn’t force the content to be uncomfortably or illegibly fit in an inappropriate space.
There were quite a large number of auxiliary treatments we had to create for the launch of BMG. Shirts for employees at trade shows, banners, gift cards, displays, email graphics, social media graphics, marketing materials, you name it. Everything was developed ahead of launch to retain the brand’s cohesion and to be available to hit the ground running.
