Gorilla Cheese from Hamilton will be stopping in to the Centro Garden Parking lot to pull some crowds and then the following week Peller Estates is hosting a massive food truckerama which will prove to be spectacular — especially since it’s combined with vino!

Loads of fun and can’t wait to go.

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Plan B Organic Farms

Simply put, Plan B is good for the soul. Not to mention the health and well being of our ecology, local economy and bodies.

Plan B Organic Farms in Copetown Ontario is a CSA that has been growing and distributing organic food to the local area since 1997 and is one of the areas founding and most influential share based organic farms.

Being that the philosophies and people behind CSA’s are so close to our heart, we’ve previously felt a little shaky and cautious while working on the Plan B brand, treating it as precious and consequently, quite honestly, choked with regard to the visual execution.

Recently, it came time time to refresh the look and better represent who this dynamic and ground breaking group of people were, as well as serve key information to existing and potential share partners (customers). A change for renewal for them and redemption for us!

We took a breath and sketched a series of illustrations that we could form and layer into a flexible brand fabric. The illustrations can be rearranged as a whole or in part or even isolated while still adding up to be visually unique and memorable for Plan B.

For the website we utilized a straight forward WordPress template rather than designing a custom style as we normally do. This allowed us to reduce production costs while focusing on other areas that would stretch the investment toward better communicating the product and ideas.

With the new site and CMS in place for Plan B, they can adjust their style of communication efforts to be more of the minute and relevant rather than reactionary — a start to assist in adjusting the perception of CSA farms from being behind the times or challenging to buy from, to being progressive and current.

Centro Garden
Live Outside Inside.

Centro Garden is the passion and brain child of local Burlington Ontario entrepreneur, Jason Pepetone. Jason grew up in gardening, following the footsteps of his father who established the family reputation of being among the largest and most progressive family of garden centre companies in North America.

Jason long felt that a change was needed in retail and in particular, within the garden centre business where he saw the passion for providing lifestyle and excitement in the lives of the customer was in danger of becoming a thing of the past, along with down to earth appreciation for craft, art and good design.

Consequently, Centro Garden was born as a reset — to bring simple enjoyment of the plant centric and craft inspired life, back to life.

Insite was asked to assist from scratch, to help boil down what the essence of the consumer experience could be as well as how to engage good design and craft in order to bring that outside world inside and offer it to the local community. Working together we developed a strategy for how the store would operate through philosophies of design and style to naming and graphics programs.

Centro Garden — Live Outside Inside was developed to envelope the ideals and communicate the simple concept of how exciting life can be when you blur the transition from inside the home to out on the patio and vice versa. The metaphor continues to further suggest that there is room in our lives for what’s become outside or fringe concepts of good design, art and craft. Lastly the brand hopes to communicate that there is room in your life for plant centric living. To restore our comfort for bringing the outside elements back into our homes and lives.

Centro Garden is a living design and style store that hopes to bring the real to life. Centro blends design and ideas with finished green centric goods. We’re a relaxed general store for design, art, and the indoor and outdoor garden.

We designed the modern rustic interior to be progressive and design oriented while focusing on creating a warm and down to earth appeal. All aspects of the environment had to be congruent with the brand essence since the whole is the offering and the brand.

To envelope these ideas, together we designed and hand built fixtures, shelves and cabinets utilizing reclaimed and vintage materials, much of which was recovered from the construction of our sustainable home. Trees that were cut down during construction were milled on site and stored that eventually became shelving and barn board fences became cladding for the checkout and bulkhead as well as chalk boards and shelves.

For the communication program, the store needed to have a flexible yet cohesive look that could be applied across many types of products and situations, inside and out. Casual stamps combined with an industrial machine tag metaphor were used throughout in various forms including pricing, information and hand produced business cards.

A flexible retail system was created for signage and information cards that accompany products on display. The simple board made from recycled mahogany is covered in a brand pattern application on the back and a branded info sheet is clipped to the front using a standard alligator clip. All info sheets are pre-printed blanks of various sizes that can then be imprinted by staff on site as required.

Interwoven with the store concept is their website which we created as a dialogue to tell Jason’s story while revealing the concepts and intent of the store’s philosophies. Currently still in blog format, the site will make a slow transition to more product centric story telling but in the interim, and perhaps permanently as a component of style and ideas, the blog will remain as the creative and inspiration outlet.

www.centrogarden.com

Ravine Sand & Gravel Wine

Ravine Vineyards, located in Niagara’s renowned St. David’s viticultural area near Niagara-on-the-lake, is steeped history.

Not only are the owners 5th generation farmers and descendants of loyalists that founded the area, but they are an embedded symbol of entrepreneurialism in the region as well. Their family has milled, farmed, canned fruit, mined gravel, made boats and industrial equipment as well as now run the winery estate with esteemed restaurant and event facilities.

With the success of their first launch of estate wines, there became a need to create a wine that added more depth and could round off the table. Ravine asked us to assist in creating a new brand that could express another part of their perspectives on winemaking — essentially as if it were from the newer generation that are co-running the winery today.

Ravine Sand and Gravel is the original moniker of the business that operated a few generations back and so it was natural to apply the full extended name to this release.

For the brand, we kept it simple, wishing to convey sophistication and attention to detail while being grainier, more elbows on table and boisterous than the parent line of wines. We relied on a bold type solution married to textures which were collected from the surface patina of the winery’s facility.

The logo was inspired by the original hand lettered door on the Ravine Sand & Gravel pickup. Hand painted signs have been a fixation of ours and so the opportunity to reflect this tradition was a pleasure.

The label is printed flexo using 4 colour process plus an underlay of spot grey on coated stock. We dulled the paper and added a rustic texture using multiple layers of matte varnish. The result is bright, rusty and in our minds cheerful.

http://www.ravinevineyards.com