A BRAND BUILT LIKE THE SPACES IT REPRESENTS - PRACTICAL, IMPERFECT AND MADE TO GROW.

Graft Union operates at a local, ground-level — transforming overlooked urban spaces into places for growing food, sharing knowledge, and building community.

It’s not positioned as a polished lifestyle brand, but as something more practical and participatory. The visual identity reflects this: part toolkit, part marker of presence. It’s designed for people who are actively involved — planting, building, and shaping their environments in real, tangible ways.

Many brands in the sustainability and urban farming space lean heavily into either soft, idealised aesthetics or overly corporate systems. Both approaches create distance — either romanticising the work or stripping it of its human, hands-on nature.

The challenge was to create an identity that felt credible and functional, while still capturing the energy and immediacy of people working directly with their environment. It needed to feel usable, not just visual.

The act of growing in urban spaces is inherently imperfect — its adaptive, resourceful, and shaped by constraints.

That led to a key idea: the identity should behave in the same way. Instead of aiming for refinement, it should feel assembled, flexible, and slightly rough around the edges — like something built over time, not perfectly planned from the start.

The visual identity combines a utilitarian foundation with a graffiti-led layer of expression.

Typography is built on bold, functional forms to ensure clarity and usability, but is disrupted through graffiti-inspired treatments — hand-rendered marks, tagging styles, and irregular overlays that introduce movement and personality. This creates a tension between structure and spontaneity.

Graphic elements draw directly from urban mark-making — tags, symbols, and layered visuals that feel like they’ve been added over time. These aren’t decorative; they act as signals of presence, ownership, and participation within a space.

Texture plays a key role in grounding the identity, adding a sense of wear and physicality that reflects real environments rather than polished digital outputs. The result is a system that feels active, expressive, and embedded within the spaces it represents.

The identity is designed as a flexible system where structure and graffiti-style expression work together, not against each other.

At its core is a clear, functional framework — grids, typographic hierarchy, and layout rules that ensure consistency and legibility across applications. Layered on top is a more fluid, graffiti-inspired system of tags, markings, and interventions that can be applied with variation.

This allows each touchpoint to feel slightly different, as if it’s been shaped by its environment, while still remaining recognisably part of the same brand. The graffiti layer introduces adaptability and personality, while the underlying structure keeps everything cohesive.

Rather than feeling static or overly controlled, the system behaves like something in progress — evolving, accumulating, and responding to the spaces it lives in.

This project pushed me to move beyond tightly controlled, highly polished systems and explore something more instinctive and grounded.

It required a shift in mindset — designing not just for visual impact, but for real-world use and alignment with the brand’s purpose. I had to let go of perfection in the traditional sense, and instead focus on creating something that felt honest, functional, and true to the environment it exists in.

At the same time, it reinforced that even the most raw and expressive work relies on strong design principles. The balance between structure and imperfection became the most important part of the process — and something I’ll continue to carry forward in my work.