March 26, 2025
This month, I’m proud to share the first issue of the Crunchy Leaves Zine! This project has been such a fun challenge from start to finish alongside the brand development and event planning for Crunchy Leaves concurrently. So, if you’ve been wondering, what is Crunchy Leaves Sustainability Collaborative? you can find out more in the zine below!
I am a firm supporter of building the brand identity alongside the content and the audience, especially for new orgs and clients like Crunchy Leaves. It’s like fueling an airplane as it’s first ascending instead of keeping the pilot and passengers waiting before take off. When you’re small and nimble, you have more freedom to do this without sacrificing brand loyalty. Our priority is continuing the forward momentum my client has built so far on her own, and helping things along. She has aspirations of opening a brick-and-mortar business someday, and in that case, a more thorough brand standard would be necessary.
From a design perspective, our goal was to have a simple logo, lovable brand, and complete informational zine to distribute during events and meetups. For anyone curious about the SLC approach or if you struggle with perfectionism, I highly recommend giving this article a read:
https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/
Crunchy Leaves logo / iconography
Zines are meant to be a highly accessible medium and as a result, lean towards an imperfect, hand-crafted final product. We started the entire process with this in mind and looked for ways to encourage interactivity with the zine. You can see this in the early stages of planning, we wanted to create a flowchart/quiz look for the “getting involved” pages. For each call-to-action, there is a question for the reader to consider what they can do to contribute to our cause.
These little games sprinkled into a project stoked the fire of my creative process. I love designing games and puzzles, so drawing an informational flowchart as a call-to-action was the most fun I’ve had with text in a project like this.