Graft Union

STRATEGIC AIM:

Graft Union is a grassroots urban agriculture collective reclaiming forgotten city spaces—rooftops, roadside strips, alleyways—for food, community, and change. It’s not a polished lifestyle brand. It’s functional, creative, and built from the streets up. I was brought in to create a brand identity that blends gritty utility with raw, expressive energy—a system that feels equally at home on a seed packet, a city wall, or a stencil-covered clipboard.

Design a brand that reflects urban agriculture as a creative act of reclamation. The identity needed to feel hands-on and honest—not curated, but constructed. Something that nods to shared work, shared land, and shared tools—with just enough edge to feel real.

CLIENT:

Graft union

CATEGORY:

Urban Agriculture

Conceptual Client

This identity was built around three strategic pillars:

Graffiti meets blueprint: Raw textures, layered typography, and utilitarian layouts echoing street signage and zoning plans.

Make it modular: Assets designed to be reused, remixed, and easily applied—stickers, stencils, stamps, patches.

Tough beauty: Combining practical, everyday elements with bursts of expressive type and colour—because growing food in a city is both gritty and poetic.

This brand was about meeting people where they are—literally in alleyways and laneways, rooftops and parking lots. I wanted the identity to feel like something you could slap on a wall, hand out at a workshop, or stencil onto a planter box. It had to be tactile and adaptable, not precious.

Designing the custom stencil font was a highlight—it let me shape something expressive but totally usable. The brand became a toolkit in itself: open-source, gritty, and quietly radical in how it gave people design they could use, not just admire.

Logo

A sturdy, all-caps word-mark with distressed stencil cuts and intentional imperfections—designed to look just as good hand-painted on a corrugated fence as it does printed on a toolkit or tee. Alternate mark features the letters “GU” arranged like an urban plot grid.

Typography

Primary: Script-style graffiti tag used sparingly to inject personality

Secondary: Narrow sans-serif for footnotes, tags, and plant info

Accent: Custom stencil typeface—industrial but unexpected

Colour Palette

Concrete Dust: Matte, muted grey

Dark Dusty Blue: Vivid, punchy, unmistakably alive

Bright Yellow: Bright, high contrast, energetic

Off-White + Asphalt Black: High contrast, highly legible

Texture & Style

Spray paint halos, marker scribbles, masking tape labels

Blueprint overlays (grids, lot lines, planting diagrams)