Slow Food USA’s Plant a Seed 2019 Campaign

Role: Designer + Photographer

Website banner - Plant a Seed 2019 Digital

Designing the Plant a Seed 2019 campaign was an incredible experience for me. I was able to explore passions in terms of color, design, and photography in order to create a campaign that would share a message of sustainability, action and diversity.

I began by doing research on current products and campaigns that resonated with the theme of this year’s campaign Where Tradition Meets Innovation. I researched color scheme ideas, design/layout inspiration and debated over going in the illustrative route (like Plant a Seed 2018) or on a new route; photography. My boss, Communications Director Anna Mulé, told me that they had never used photography before for this campaign. That made me really excited and inspired. This was my initial visual research.

After doing this visual research, I concluded that I wanted to use earthy, yet still bright colors. I kept the Slow Food Red as part of the color scheme in order to maintain brand presence, even in the new campaign. After discussing with Slow Food’s Communication’s Director, we were able to make a decision about the following color palette. We also decided to use photography for the first time, of both vegetables and seeds.

After much debate, this was the final and revised color scheme. Although there were many pinks in the initial visual research, these tones ended up not making the color scheme feel completely on brand or in tune with the campaign theme. We decided that these colors, along with the beautiful vegetables and seed imagery would make a very refreshing statement.

Since Slow Food USA partnered with Row 7 Seed Company, they let us use their amazing imagery of their own vegetables. The seeds (Long Island Cheese Squash and Laxton’s Progress #9 Pea) were photographed by me.

Then, I started designing the poster, brochure, stickers, banners and social media posts needed for the campaign.