Jones Family Farm
Our new favorite cheesemakers wanted to step up their brand with a whole new everything. From the logo through to packaging, we had a blast working on it all.
Cheese? Yes Please!
Jones Family Farm has built a loyal customer base through their persistent and personal presence at regional markets, and maintained it by consistently delivering great products (seriously, lip-smacking delicious).
We began the project with a visit to the farm, in Herkimer, New York. We couldn’t have had a better October day to snap these photos.
Owners (and high school sweethearts) Suzie and Peter’s personal interactions with customers have been the key to their success for over a decade. However, as the business matures and scales, they want their products to sell themselves on the shelves. That’s where we came in.
Weeks 1 & 2
Discovery & Strategy Development
Our discovery process held extra weight for this project. Not only did we need to uncover and distill the essence of a company as usual, but we wanted to infuse the project with Suzie and Peter’s own personalities as human beings. This phase was fast but diverse: a farm visit, long conversations, competitive research, moodboards filled with modern brands, and getting nostalgic through old milk caps.
Several slow walks through local grocery stores helped us home in on our goals and direction. This discovery work culminated in a clear articulation of the Jones Family Farm personality: a balance between wholesome values and unique and joyful qualities, anchored by honesty and reliability.
Weeks 3 & 4
Visual Identity Development
There were some things we really liked about the original logo. We wanted to keep the curve/implied oval but free up the text. The prominence of “Jones” was also something we intended to preserve. We wanted “fun” but not “childish”. Funky but legit. We love the sense of humor that Suzie and Peter have (their url is anotherjonesfamilyfarm.com). After some heads-down time doing more visual research, sketches, and digital explorations, we presented a series of logo concepts.
We jumped right into color exploration, which helped reinforce the direction that the logo was heading. After a quick round of revisions to make original script undeniably legible, here’s where we landed.
The new Jones Family Farm logo is anchored by smooth, bold, somewhat “loose” cursive script with the focus on Jones, and the “family farm” holding it together in a little smile.
While the custom script we created for the logo was the perfect anchor for the new brand, we didn’t want to utilize a similar style for any other element. To fit as the subheading “Family Farm” we ended up creating a variable font from scratch called Dairyfarm. It features an adjustable width axis, which was worth every second spent making it.
We also needed something versatile for packaging and anything else that wasn’t a headline, but also maybe headlines. Chivo fit the description perfectly, in a variety of weights in upright and italic.
Weeks 5 – 7
Implementation & Production
Once we had the basics down, we moved on to expand the system. The first priority? Kuyahoora Cheese. Say what now? Exactly. Their flagship product had a hyperlocal name (their farm overlooks the Kuyahoora valley) that was hard to pronounce and spell, and which didn’t help qualify the cheese itself. We created and culled a list of potential names and landed on the simple “New York Crème Cheese”.
Consumer packaged goods is a wild landscape. We wanted the products to shine in their sector without feeling incredibly out of place. Our approach is clean and crisp, with nothing superfluous. We helped the Joneses source a printer, decide on the packaging structure (introducing a new paperboard sleeve element for display), and work through requirements as we iterated on the designs.
Crème Cheese Variations
From there we chose an accent color for each flavor varietal to pair with the common blue and white. The font Handsome Pro was added for a subtle human touch.
Have we mentioned that this cheese was delicious? Smooth and tangy… hence the phrase the Jones’ passed along to us from a customer: “Dang That Tang“.
We then used the Crème Cheese packaging as our touchstone as we wrote and designed promotional materials, conceptualized other packaging, and designed and built a website from the ground up.
While we initially thought a new landing page would suffice for the rebrand, we took inventory of the existing website and figured that we could design and implement a new one quickly. We migrated all of the content (Suzie is an amazing writer and has over 100 thoughtful posts) from Squarespace and built a WordPress theme from scratch.
As we create the real-life, practical deliverables of a project, we stress-test our system and solidify our conventions. In this case, we wound up developing a useful pattern, an expanded color palette, and updated logo variations in the process of putting together packaging for future products, print necessities, email newsletter design conventions. A single style from the massive typeface Fraunces was also introduced, finalizing the font options. We didn’t have to do anything for the Jones’ Instagram account because they’re rocking that like pros. Here’s a what we did…
Week 8
Brand Guide & Training
We took a step back and documented everything we built and learned along the way. This took the form of a digital brand guide that covers everything from brand framework to packaging examples, storytelling strategy to logo usage. We also provided clear website documentation in the form of a video tutorial so Suzie can keep the blog rolling!
Launch
Last, but obviously not least, we launched! 🚀 Following our clear launch plan, we supported the Joneses as they released their new look & feel into the world. We deployed the website, created an asset library in Canva (their design platform of choice), helped them write a few launch announcements, and finalized all of the new packaging orders.
