Stop wasting time on strain art.
In the cannabis industry, strain-specific art and illustrations have the advantage of creating variety and interest, and establishing micro brands based around each strain. But creating unique illustrations for each strain can be time consuming and expensive.
SERVICES: Brand Strategy, Brand Identity, Packaging Design
THE ASK
The challenge for The Fifth Age was to develop a system that could be highly flexible for a wide variety of strains, accommodate many different collaborator brands, AND be easy and fast to add additional strains and collabs in the future.
THE SOLUTION
Owner Josh Mayo’s vision for The Fifth Age brand was futuristic, gritty and exciting, utilizing lots of gradients and hyper-realistic style imagery.
We wanted to keep the vibrant and chaotic feel of Josh’s cyberpunk moodboard, but reign it into a system that created strong brand unity and recognition.
The wordmark and logo for The Fifth Age are clean and bold, and can be used as stencils, creating different fill effects. The wordmark uses the Beni typeface, and the numeral logo mark was created to match in visual weight and scale.
Next up was CREATING A strain art SYSTEM WE COULD BUILD ON.
Creating custom illustrations and graphics for each strain can be time consuming and expensive. Customers might be drawn to one style or illustration but not another. Strains can come and go quickly. How could we streamline the process?
First, we selected a stock photo that matched one of the characteristics of the strain. Then, we created a gritty, high contrast Photoshop filter to stylize the image.
Next, the color gradient: Lots of brands use gradients, but we knew this one had to stand out. Instead of using the standard gradient tools, we created layouts using basic shapes and processed them with a custom filter.
Finally, we automated the entire process by creating a set of Photoshop and Illustrator actions the team can use on all future strains, allowing The Fifth Age to release new strains quickly and efficiently.
Bringing it all together.
Now we needed to create a packaging suite to show off the strain art as well as the cultivator collab.
We added a foil authenticity seal that represents the 3 qualities The Fifth Age values most - color, flavor, and terpene content. The cubes in the seal also function as a classification system, with one, two, or three boxes representing each of the 3 qualities.
The packaging suite includes a box and matching wrap for a black glass jar.
