The 6-week Identity Sprint that took the Brand Strategy Sprint’s recommendation and built the system that runs every surface Fieldnote will touch — wordmark, color, type, photography direction, packaging, retail, web, merch. Prepared by Roamad.
In six weeks, the Strategy Sprint’s recommendations became a working visual system. A single wordmark, a palette of one accent plus four seasonal rotations, a paired type family, a photography direction with three test shoots, packaging templates for every SKU in the line, and the retail and web shells that carry the brand into market.
Spectral Light, paper bone, sage accent, four seasonal swaps a year, three faces, never green-on-black, never two accents on one surface.
This Identity Sprint did not start from a blank brief — it started from the brand brief in §08 of the Strategy Sprint delivered May 22. The recommendations below were the design constraints. Each one was honored or, in two cases, evolved with founder approval logged in the appendix.
Spectral Light was chosen over the Strategy Sprint’s starting candidates (Fraunces, Tiempos, Söhne Schmal) for three reasons. One, Spectral was designed at Google Fonts as an editorial workhorse with strong humanist warmth — the letterforms hold up at the small sizes packaging requires. Two, Spectral’s italic is genuinely distinct, not a slope — it gives the system the option to carry voice without adding a second face. Three, it is open-source and freely embeddable across web, packaging vendors, and retail signage production without licensing friction. Fraunces is reserved as Roamad’s own; Tiempos and Söhne Schmal carry license cost.
Clearspace around the wordmark is one cap-height of the letter d on every side. The wordmark may not appear smaller than 18px on screen or 6mm in print — the descender of the f stops rendering cleanly below those thresholds.
The primary palette is three colors used in strict hierarchy: paper bone for surface, warm ink for type, sage for the single brand accent. The seasonal palette is four additional colors that rotate as the accent — replacing sage on drop materials only, never on the wordmark, never on compliance copy, never on more than one surface at a time. Two accents on one surface breaks the system.
Each quarter, one of the four seasonal accents replaces sage on drop-specific materials — the current-drop board in retail, the email subject line color, the web hero CTA. Sage remains the brand accent everywhere else, always.
One accent per surface. Always. Sage is the year-round accent; the seasonal color replaces it on drop materials but does not join it. Two accents on one surface breaks the system — pull the file.
Three substrate colors appear in production: kraft paper, glass, brushed metal. These are materials, not palette decisions — treated as background context for the brand colors, never as brand colors themselves. They do not count toward the “one accent per surface” rule.
Spectral carries the editorial voice — wordmark, headlines, italic accent, product names. Inter handles every paragraph of body and every line of UI. JetBrains Mono is reserved for technical metadata: batch codes, cure dates, dose lines, compliance pictogram captions. The discipline is that the type system never expands past these three faces, even when a designer wants to add a heading sans for variety. Adding a fourth face weakens every other face’s job.
The Strategy Sprint called for “documentary, available-light, place-specific” photography. The Identity Sprint translated that direction into three commissioned test shoots and a treatment document. The shoots happened in week 4. The results below are the framing rules a future photographer inherits; the test-shoot proofs ship as a separate PDF.
Wide rows of indoor flower under HPS lighting. No people. The room itself is the subject — the architecture, the lighting, the cured maturity. Treatment: warm shadows, slight grain, no color-grading away from the room’s actual light temperature.
The St. Paul door and the Minneapolis door, shot at three dayparts (morning open, midday, late afternoon). Floor staff in frame, customers out of frame. The pacing of the room is the subject — the staffed counter, the shelf, the paper bag handed across.
Detail shots of working hands — trimming, jarring, sealing, labeling — paired with environmental shots of the season currently in market. Reshot once per quarter to match the seasonal accent rotation. The single most repeated framing across the brand’s lifetime.
Five label templates ship from this Sprint, one per SKU format. Each template is delivered as a Figma file with locked layers, MN OCM compliance copy pre-placed, and a parameterized batch / strain / date / THC block that fills from a CSV at production time. Below is the label artwork for each format as it appears on the package itself.
Every label hits MN OCM compliance without crowding it into a corner. The THC% sits at the same hierarchy as the wordmark. Safety language reads as part of the design, not patched on top of it.
Two signage systems ship: a wayfinding panel that holds the floor categorically (always-up), and a current-drop board that updates each season with the rotation in the new accent color. Both install in time for the door 3 opening in Q1 2027.
The drop board re-renders four times a year. Production note: the panel itself is permanent powder-coated steel; only the seasonal accent strip and the printed slip-in card change. Lower production cost, cleaner switch.
Two templates ship: a Next.js + Tailwind component library covering homepage hero, ecommerce grid, product page, and about; and a Postmark-compatible email shell for the seasonal drop note. The web build itself is a separate engagement (Engineering pillar, Q4) — this Sprint delivers the design system the build inherits.
A Minnesota cannabis company. Grown in Brooklyn Park. Sold through two retail doors in the Twin Cities and a third opening in St. Cloud this spring. The current drop is summer.
See the summer dropThe summer drop is live this morning. Six products, the smallest run we’ve done so far — the Brooklyn Park room held just under three hundred pounds of cured flower this quarter, and we wanted everything we cured to ship in season.
Boundary OG is back, in both the eighth and the gram. Mendocino Sun is back as a single 1g pre-roll and a 0.5g vape with live rosin. A new 100mg chocolate bar — 70% cacao, milled in St. Paul, dosed at five milligrams per square. And the first run of dry-sift hash we’ve been ready to ship publicly.
Available at both doors and online. The St. Cloud door opens for the autumn drop.
Four pieces in the merch starter: a paper-bone heavyweight tee, a kraft canvas apron for the back of house, a small enamel pin for the floor staff, and a natural canvas tote that customers carry their order out in (and that the brand pays for, not the customer). Public-facing merch — tees and totes for sale — ships in v2, after the brand has been in market for two seasons.
The full brand guidelines ship as a 60-page PDF that covers every rule, every clearspace value, every misuse example. Below is the snapshot — the rules a designer, vendor, or new hire needs to know before opening the file.
| Topic | The rule |
|---|---|
| Wordmark | Spectral Light, all lowercase, −10/1000em tracking. No symbol mark in v1. Minimum size 18px / 6mm. |
| Clearspace | One cap-height of the letter d on every side of the wordmark. |
| Color — primary | Paper bone #F4EFE4, ink #16201A, sage #7A8C5C. Used in that hierarchy. No exceptions. |
| Color — seasonal | Winter pine, spring bud, summer wheat, autumn ember — rotate as the accent on drop materials only. Replace sage, never join it. |
| One accent rule | One accent per surface. Always. Two accents = pull the file. |
| Type pair | Spectral (display + italic), Inter (body + UI), JetBrains Mono (utility). Three faces, no exceptions. |
| Photography | Documentary, available-light, place-specific. No strobe. No product-on-white. Customer faces stay out of frame. |
| Italic accent | One italic accent phrase per heading, maximum. Italic sage on light surfaces, italic spring on summer drop, etc. |
| Voice bans | No exclamation marks. No “premium / ultimate / journey / elevate / unlock / disrupt / best-in-class.” |
| Compliance | THC% sits at wordmark hierarchy. Safety pictograms always paired with plain-language captions. MN OCM-compliant on every consumer-facing surface. |
| Symbol mark | None in v1. Revisit at 18-month mark. |
| Substrate vocabulary | Kraft, glass, brushed metal, matte black film (limited). Materials, not palette colors — do not count against the one-accent rule. |
| Print-first | All assets designed for print first, pixel second. The shelf is the first audience. |
This Identity Sprint hands directly to three engagements: a Packaging System build, a Web + Ecommerce build (Roamad Engineering), and a Retail Install for the St. Cloud opening. Each one inherits the design system shipped in this document.
A 6-week Visual Identity Sprint, run in three two-week phases. Phase 1 (W1–2): wordmark exploration, color and type lock. Phase 2 (W3–4): photography test shoots, packaging label development, retail and web template design. Phase 3 (W5–6): brand guidelines drafting, founder approval, handoff prep.