The 6-week Identity Sprint that took the Brand Strategy Sprint’s recommendation for Hadley Farms → Halfmoon and built the system that runs every surface the farm will touch — wordmark, color, type, photography direction, packaging, farmstand signage, web, staff workwear. Prepared by Roamad.
In six weeks, the Strategy Sprint’s recommendations for Halfmoon became a working visual system. A single heritage wordmark, a palette of one accent plus four harvest-season rotations, a paired type family rooted in 1970s California design, a photography direction with three commissioned shoots, packaging templates for every product format the farm ships, and the farmstand and web surfaces that carry the brand into market in time for the fall 2026 harvest.
Bevan heritage serif, cream paper, dusty-terracotta accent, four harvest swaps a year, three faces, no green, no pastiche.
This Identity Sprint did not start from a blank brief — it started from the brand brief in §08 of the Strategy Sprint delivered June 14. The recommendations below were the design constraints. Each one was honored or evolved with founder approval logged in the appendix.
Bevan was chosen over the Strategy Sprint’s starting candidates for three reasons. One, Bevan is the closest Google Fonts equivalent to Cooper Black — the heavy-stroke heritage serif that anchored every 1970s California heritage brand worth looking at, including the original Ridge Vineyards wordmark. Two, Bevan is open-source and embeddable across web, print, packaging vendors, and farmstand signage production without licensing friction. Three, Bevan’s single-weight constraint forces discipline: the wordmark cannot be over-treated. The brand never has the option of a “lighter” version, which is exactly the right posture for a brand whose whole point is conviction.
The primary palette is three colors in strict hierarchy: cream paper for surface, faded chocolate for type, dusty terracotta for the single brand accent. The harvest-rotation palette is four additional colors that rotate with the agricultural calendar — replacing terracotta on harvest-specific 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 season of the year, one of the four harvest accents replaces the dusty terracotta on harvest-specific materials — the current-harvest board at the farmstand, the seasonal email accent, the web hero CTA, the limited-release packaging stripe. Terracotta remains the brand accent everywhere else, always.
Fall harvest accent and brand accent are the same dusty terracotta. By design. Fall is when the farm ships, when the brand is most visible, when the harvest letter goes out. The accent doesn’t change because the brand is at its strongest moment of the year — the brand color and the moment’s color are the same color.
Four substrate colors appear in production. These are materials, not palette colors — treated as background context for the brand colors, never as brand colors themselves. They do not count against the one-accent rule.
Bevan carries the heritage voice — wordmark, headlines, product names, harvest letters. Inter handles every paragraph of body and every line of UI. Courier Prime is reserved for typewritten metadata: batch codes, cure dates, dose lines, farmstand signage. The discipline is that the type system never expands past these three faces, even when a designer wants to add a script font “for warmth.” The warmth comes from the cream paper, the chocolate ink, and the photography — not from extra typefaces.
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 interior view of the Mendocino cure room. Wooden drying racks built into the barn, rows of cured cannabis branches hanging upside down, two open glass jars in the foreground. Late afternoon golden-hour light through the west-facing window. The room itself is the subject.
Exterior of the Mendocino farmstand at late afternoon — faded cream paint, dark green shingled roof, hanging wooden sign reading halfmoon. Coastal hills behind in soft golden-hour light. Reshot quarterly to track season change in landscape behind. No customers in frame.
Detail shots of Earl, Margaret, and Jesse’s hands at work — trimming, jarring, sealing, labeling. Faces never in frame; the hands are the subject. Reshot quarterly to match the harvest rotation. The single most repeated framing across the brand’s lifetime.
Four label templates ship from this Sprint, one per format the farm produces. Each template is delivered as a Figma file with locked layers, CA OCM compliance copy pre-placed, and a parameterized batch / strain / harvest / THC block that fills from a CSV at production time. Halfmoon does not produce vapes or edibles in v1 — the strategic position is concentrated on flower, pre-rolls, and a small concentrate line.
Every label hits CA OCM compliance without crowding it into a corner. The THC% sits in the same Courier Prime as the cure date. Safety language reads as part of the design, not patched on top of it.
Halfmoon operates a single retail surface: the Mendocino farmstand. The signage system is therefore narrower than a multi-door dispensary brand — just two panels: a hand-painted exterior sign that the customer sees from the gravel pull-off, and an interior current-harvest board that updates with each seasonal drop. Both built by a local sign-shop in Fort Bragg using the brand specs from this Sprint.
The current-harvest board refreshes four times a year — spring, summer, fall, winter — with the harvest accent color and the strain lineup. Production note: the wooden panel is permanent; only the printed slip-in card behind glass changes per season. Lower production cost, cleaner swap.
Two templates ship: a Next.js + Tailwind component library covering homepage hero, harvest list, about, and a small order-online section (allocation only); and a Postmark-compatible email shell for the quarterly harvest letter from Earl. The web build itself is a separate engagement (Engineering pillar, Q1 2027) — this Sprint delivers the design system the build inherits.
A heritage California cannabis farm on the Mendocino coast. Three generations of one family. Same land, same way of growing it, since the year the lease was signed.
See the fall harvestHello,
The fall harvest finished last Saturday. About 720 pounds of trimmed flower came in — smaller than last year, but the cure on what came out of the back ridge is the best we’ve had in maybe four seasons. Margaret and Jesse have it all hung now. The first jars open around Thanksgiving.
Six things will be on the farmstand and in the two California stores that carry us, starting December 1. The list is on the harvest page if you’d like to see it ahead of time. Allocation is open for our long-time customers through the website.
Thanks for sticking with us another year. The farm is still here. The cure room is still small. The family is still doing the work.
Halfmoon does not sell public merch. The brand’s only apparel exists for the people doing the work — the trim crew during harvest, the farmstand staff on weekends, and the carry-out tote the farmstand hands the customer at the door. Public merch was explored and explicitly rejected by Margaret in week 5: “If we sell a t-shirt we’re running a t-shirt brand, not a farm.” Revisit at the 18-month mark.
The full brand guidelines ship as a 52-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 | Bevan Regular, all lowercase, −5/1000em tracking. No symbol mark in v1. Minimum size 22px / 8mm (Bevan’s heavy strokes don’t survive smaller). |
| Clearspace | One cap-height of the letter h on every side of the wordmark. |
| Color — primary | Cream #F2EAD3, faded chocolate #5C3A21, dusty terracotta #B96343. Used in that hierarchy. No exceptions. |
| Color — harvest | Spring planting, summer growth, fall harvest, winter cure — rotate as the accent on seasonal materials only. Replace terracotta, never join it. Fall ≡ brand accent (intentional overlap). |
| One accent rule | One accent per surface. Always. Two accents = pull the file. |
| Type pair | Bevan (display), Inter (body + UI), Courier Prime (utility). Fraunces Italic as paired contrast face for italic emphasis only. Four faces maximum. |
| Photography | Documentary, available-light, place-specific. No strobe. No product-on-white. Customer faces never in frame. |
| Italic accent | One italic accent phrase per heading, maximum. Italic in Fraunces, never in Bevan (Bevan doesn’t ship an italic). |
| Voice bans | No exclamation marks. No “legacy / legendary / premium / artisanal / journey / disrupt / best-in-class / elevate.” |
| Compliance | THC% sits at the same Courier Prime hierarchy as the cure date. Safety pictograms always paired with plain-language captions. CA OCM-compliant on every consumer-facing surface. |
| Symbol mark | None in v1. Revisit at 18-month mark. |
| Substrate vocabulary | Kraft, vintage glass, brushed metal, dark farmstand wood. Materials, not palette colors — do not count against the one-accent rule. |
| Print-first | All assets designed for print first, pixel second. The farmstand shelf is the first audience. |
| Public merch | None in v1. Staff workwear only. Revisit at 18-month mark. |
This Identity Sprint hands directly to three engagements: a Packaging System build, a Website + Allocation build (Roamad Engineering), and a Farmstand Refresh for the fall 2026 harvest. 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 on-site at the Mendocino farm, packaging label development, signage and web template design. Phase 3 (W5–6): brand guidelines drafting, family approval, handoff preparation.