Built to Be Shared: The League of Growers Brand System
Client: League of Growers (LOG) / From The Ground (FTG)
Location: Keweenaw Peninsula, Upper Peninsula, Michigan
Services: Cohesive branding project: logo & wordmark design, brand guide, template system, social media templates, and print collateral
In July 2026, From The Ground League of Growers was awarded $42,500 through MDARD's Regenerative Agriculture Program — part of a $500,000 statewide investment to build 12 farmer-led regenerative networks across Michigan. It was a significant win for the Keweenaw, and it came with a real responsibility: show up professionally, build community trust, and demonstrate to funders that this coalition was organized, credible, and ready to grow.
Read more about the “Regenerative Farmer Network Awards and Grants”
That's where we came in. Goose Collective stepped in as the creative and marketing team behind this grant cycle, and one of our first priorities was giving League of Growers something it didn't yet have: a brand.
The Challenge
League of Growers (LOG) is a grower coalition operating under From The Ground, a regional food systems organization. With the MDARD grant now funded and a hard November deadline for deliverables, LOG needed its own visual identity fast — one that could sit within the existing From The Ground brand hierarchy while standing independently as a mark that farmers would be proud to put on their products, their posts, and their presence at the Keweenaw Farm Tour.
MDARD's program is one of the first of its kind embedded within a state agriculture agency, which meant LOG's materials would be subject to a mandatory two-week MDARD review before anything went public. Every asset needed to be polished, on-brand, and compliant before the September Farm Tour.
The deeper complication: this brand wasn't just for one designer or one team. It had to work for multiple farmers and collaborators, many of whom don't have a design background. Consistency couldn't depend on a single gatekeeper. The brand had to be built to be shared.
The Logo
From the first conversation, the direction was clear: this needed to feel hand-crafted and rooted, not corporate. The inspiration was the Real Organic Project seal and traditional wood cookie design — an emblem-style badge that reads as a mark of quality and belonging. Think the kind of thing you'd find stitched on a canvas bag or stamped on a farmers market sign.
We developed a wordmark and badge system for LOG that aligns with FTG's established color palette and typography while giving the coalition its own distinct visual voice. The emblem style was also a strategic choice: as LOG grows toward a paid membership model, this logo can function as a visible seal of participation and trust, the way USDA Organic or Real Organic Project seals do in the wider food movement.
LOG Logo and Wordmark Set: Made by Goose Collective
From Brand Guide to Canva Reality
A logo alone doesn't create cohesion. What makes a brand actually work at the ground level is giving people the tools to use it correctly without having to think too hard about it.
After finalizing the LOG logo and color palette, we built out the brand system directly inside From The Ground's existing Canva account. This meant every farmer or partner with access to an FTG Canva seat could open a template, swap in their own information, and publish something that looked like it belonged to the same family as everything else.
The templates we delivered include:
Instagram growth and collaboration post templates locked to the LOG color palette and typography
Keweenaw Farm Tour poster templates in both 8.5x11 and 11x17 formats, with placeholder zones for each farm's specific details and MDARD-required language
A farm map template for the September Farm Tour
A carousel template and story template for ongoing social content
Every template was built to be self-populating. Farmers could take their seat in the Canva account, open the Farm Tour poster, fill in their name and details, and have something print-ready without needing a design call or a revision round.
What Cohesion Actually Looks Like
Cohesive branding across a coalition of independent farms is genuinely hard. Everyone has their own aesthetic instincts. Everyone is busy. And no one wants to be the person who emails a designer every time they need to post something.
What we built for LOG is a system that makes the right thing the easy thing. The color palette is baked in. The fonts are set. The logo placement is locked where it needs to be. The only decisions a farmer has to make are about their own content. The result is a suite of materials that feel like they came from one place, even when they're being made by five different farms on five different days.
The Bigger Picture
This project sits inside a larger body of work we're doing with From The Ground in 2026, including a 14-video social media campaign featuring farm profiles and vox pop-style content leading into a Giving Tuesday fundraiser. The LOG brand is the visual foundation that ties all of it together.
For us, this is what regional food systems work looks like in practice: not just pretty assets, but tools that help a community tell its own story.
What This Means for Your Brand
You don't have to be a grower coalition to face the same problem LOG did. Any organization with multiple team members, locations, or collaborators runs into the same wall: you have a logo, but the second someone else starts making content, things start drifting. Different fonts show up. The colors are close but not quite right. One person's Instagram post looks nothing like another's.
Here are a few things we learned from this project that apply to almost any brand trying to stay consistent at scale.
Design for the person who isn't a designer. The farmers using LOG's Canva templates are not graphic designers, and they shouldn't have to be. When you're building a brand system, ask yourself: could someone with no design background open this and make something on-brand in under ten minutes? If the answer is no, the system isn't finished yet. Lock your colors, set your fonts, build your templates so the only variable left is the content itself.
Think about where your brand actually lives. A PDF brand guide is better than nothing, but most people won't open it more than once. For LOG, we put the brand inside the tool they were already using: Canva. Meet your team where they work. If they're in Google Slides, build the templates there. If they're in Canva, build them there. The best brand guide is one that's impossible to ignore because it's built into the workflow.
Give your logo a job. The LOG badge wasn't just designed to look good. It was designed to function as a seal, something farmers could put on their materials to signal membership and quality, the same way you'd trust a product carrying the USDA Organic mark. Before you finalize a logo, ask what work it's going to do in the world. A logo that has a clear purpose gets used more consistently than one that's purely aesthetic.
Build your brand hierarchy before you build the sub-brand. LOG sits under From The Ground, and that relationship shaped every decision we made. The colors, the fonts, the overall feel had to feel related without being identical. If your organization has multiple programs, product lines, or campaigns, figure out the parent brand first. Everything else should be a coherent extension of it, not a reinvention.
Cohesion is a system problem, not a talent problem. When branding goes sideways inside an organization, it's rarely because people don't care. It's because the tools and guardrails weren't in place. A well-built template system removes the guesswork and makes it easy to do the right thing, even for the person who's posting at 9pm from their phone.
Goose Collective is a small creative agency based in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We work with organizations, small businesses, and community initiatives across the region and beyond.
