Spring 2020
Rooted Living
Rooted Living is a Boston-based snack company offering sustainable snacks for eco-conscious consumers. We created a brand and packaging, as well as a series of photo assets for use on social media!
The Team
Sam Marchesi
Project Lead
Phoebe Lasater
Designer
Josie Britt
Designer
Sam Steenstrup
Designer
Oliver Hu
Designer
Snacking With An Impact
Rooted Living is a Boston-based snack company offering sustainable snacks for eco-conscious consumers. The company’s founder, Rachel Domb, noticed that the health food space lacked truly sustainable snack options. Rachel started Rooted Living with the aim to empower consumers to snack without sacrificing their health or the health of the planet. All products are wrapped in compostable packaging and are free of any refined ingredients, assuring that both the consumer and the planet are happy.
Where We Came In
In advance of Rooted Living’s product launch, our client needed a full brand system that celebrated snacking with an impact. We came onboard to create Rooted Living’s brand identity, design packaging for their flagship product, and build out their social media presence by designing templates and assets. Scout’s newly-formed Production team partnered up with us to create photo, video, and motion graphics assets for our client. With all of our work, we aimed to highlight Rooted Living’s mission of environmental sustainability and education.
Considering our cross-team collaboration and the various types of deliverables we would have to produce, we needed to ensure that the brand was cohesive across all implementations. And keeping in mind the oversaturation of the health food market, it was important to our client that the brand felt recognizable and unconventional.
Discovering The Brand
We began our project by completing a series of exercises with our client to nail down their brand voice, audience groups, and goals. It was important that we frequently referred back to these exercises over the course of the semester, as they explained the “why” behind our visual design choices. We continued the Research & Discovery phase of the project by creating moodboards and compiling research about Rooted Living’s competitors.
Once we had a good idea of what our client was drawn to conceptually and visually, we were able to create four unique design strategies that would be presented. We began to explore possibilities for Rooted Living’s color palette, typographic system, photo treatment, and illustration style. Our client selected a strategy that she was most drawn to, and we revised it until she was totally happy.
"“Scout took my dream and made it a tangible, visible reality. My team took all the intricacies of my particular business, and created a unique and well thought out design. Through iteration, communication, and collaboration, Scout created a one-of-a-kind design that fits my company and its values beautifully.”"
-Rachel Domb, founder of Rooted Living
Polishing Our Design Strategy
We ended up going in a direction that felt hand drawn and organic, yet still refined. We veered off course for a short bit, as our client thought the direction might have felt too organic, but eventually came back to her original choice. She did not want Rooted Living to have a “crunchy granola” feeling, yet there was some merit behind the basic concept.
Our four design strategies pulled directly from the images on our moodboards.
Now that we had locked in our strategy, we were able to define our color palette and typography. We also chose a fifth element and developed an illustration style that felt in line with our chosen concept.
We created a grid-based illustration system. Initially the system felt much more rigid, until Oliver, a designer on our team, created the illusion of vine growth by curving the corners and adding leaves.
Packaging Design
Though our project did not involve any web components, we still considered the UX of our designs. We created a list of features and user stories that outlined who may be interacting with Rooted Living’s products, as well as how and why they might be doing so. This information was helpful as we began to layout the pouch designs for two flavors of Rooted Living granola. We started with paper sketches, and then moved to Figma where we spent multiple weeks tweaking and refining our designs based on feedback from our client, as well as current and former Scout members.
Collabing With Production
With our visual design system more or less set, we began our work with Scout Production. They came onboard and we started to talk with our client about how the talents of Production could be best utilized to meet her goals. We planned two photoshoots where we shot a bunch of different things like longform video and photos for stop motion animations. Our design team supported the Production team by creating any title cards or other graphics needed for the video content.
The pandemic made our photoshoots a bit difficult. We ended up doing one photoshoot virtually, where Bryce, our photographer, linked his camera to his computer. Our other photoshoot was at a beautiful studio space in Allston, with a maximum of seven people from our team attending at a time, wearing masks and socially distanced.
After the photoshoot, we began to talk about social media strategy with our client. We planned out a content release schedule and created templates for various types of Instagram posts. Our client aims to use social media as an educational tool, so the templates we made were centered around this goal.
The Brand Book
The last thing we did was create a brand book that outlines all of Rooted Living’s design elements and how they should be used. This serves as a helpful resource for our client or a designer that might work with her in the future.
How It Went
Many things made this project unique. We were working in the middle of a pandemic, communicating digitally and never meeting in-person as a team. This was also the first Studio project that did not require any web development, and the first project to involve Scout’s Production team. It came with a series of exciting new challenges and considerations, as we were taking a path that was very different from a typical Scout project.
Rooted Living has made a name for itself, taking home the Husky Startup Challenge top prize and gaining popularity through a series of online granola sales prior to their official launch. It was so exciting to have been a part of Rooted Living’s journey. I could not be more proud of the work we did, and it feels amazing knowing we built our client a design system that can change as the company grows.
Check out @rootedliving on Instagram!
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