Sunrise Farms has been using regenerative practices to grow produce in southern Minnesota since the 1990s. They sell their produce and eggs at farmers' markets and a few local grocery stores. Over time, they began to see that their consumers were interested in visiting the farm and seemed to crave a connection to where their food was coming from.

Sunrise Farms has since expanded to offer farm-to-table meals featuring local chefs, on-site retreats, and events such as yoga, landscape painting classes, and school group visits. They were doing all of this on a hyper-local scale and needed help getting their message out to a wider audience.

But with this came a new challenge. They had always met their customers and potential customers in person, building relationships and answering questions. How could they replicate these face-to-face sales interactions virtually? On top of that, grocery sales were stagnant.

At Outside Minds, our expertise is in solving this exact problem. Humans are visual creatures, and our brains make subconscious decisions about what we see before we have a chance to process it. By tapping into this subconscious, we can draw people to a brand. We can stop someone mid-scroll so they actually read a post and feel compelled to visit the website. It’s all about visual communication.

We first spent some time reviewing Sunrise Farms’ current branding. We listened to their goals and dreams, their values, and their mission. It came down to four things:

Connecting people to the source of their food
Educating more people about what regenerative agriculture is and what it means to individual consumers
Building a community that values quality food grown in ethical and regenerative ways
Generating consumer demand for regeneratively grown products to support and encourage more farmers to adopt regenerative practices.

We developed a system of visual elements that come together to express Sunrise Farms’ personality and vision. They’re a group of friendly folks who care about the health of people and the planet. They want to share their love and appreciation of nature with the world. All of our branding projects start with brand strategy. We look at competitor brands in the stores, at the markets, and those offering similar events. We find the gap in this competitive landscape that we can fill. For Sunrise Farms, their commitment to regenerative practices and mission to build connections was unique to them.

From there, we crafted the visual expression of this strategy. The sunrise stood out to us as a symbol of their mission. We came up with the tagline “We all live under the same sun.” The sun is a life-giving force necessary for life to exist, and it unites us. It serves as a symbol of our connection to the land and the food we eat. From these ideas, we developed the iconography and built a logo inspired by the classic farmers' market signs and typography that we’re all familiar with. We created an identity that feels welcoming, fresh, and original by ensuring that every creative decision related back to the brand mission. The fonts and sunrise-inspired color palette help reflect the high-quality nature of the produce and the experiences offered at Sunrise Farms.

The photography style is minimally staged and always aims to tell the story by getting up close to the subject matter and capturing natural sunlight. It perfectly captures those “life on the farm” vibes. The way elements are combined is also an important aspect of brand identity design. We incorporated hand-drawn icons with sun motifs to ensure flexibility and build recognition. If our designs look similar to others, our work will not stand out. It becomes devoid of personality. We avoid this by challenging our creativity and thinking outside the box.

Colors that have balance and contrast are crucial for legibility both in print and online. We also developed a type palette that not only includes aesthetic fonts but also has a clear hierarchy so people can quickly understand what you’re about. This is more important than ever in our increasingly digital world where we have more and more options every day. Design choices are more than making something look amazing. It has to function.

We never leave our clients with just a logo and some colors. We strive to think beyond the obvious and ensure that clients have all the tools to present themselves with confidence. Our clients can go out into the world knowing that their mission will come across and attract more consumers.

At the end of the day, our clients all want the same thing: to generate more revenue. Investing in your brand design is a crucial step in accomplishing your business goals. Design can help your brand stand out, be highly visible, become recognizable, showcase your value to consumers, and generate a loyal following of repeat customers—all of which equate to making more money. Investing in this work may be the best investment you make in your business because the ROI potential is massive.

Here are some stats from a recent project that show the power of creative design