For over a decade The Urban Planting School only existed in seed form in Stef Liston's mind. It was only in 2022 that the programme and practicalities of the school began to take shape and I was approached later that year to create the visual brand for this exciting new initiative.
The premise of the school was very specific: to equip and strengthen people looking to be proactively missional in an urban setting over two years against the backdrop of live planting scenarios.
A simple description of any urban environment is that it is a combination of 'people' and 'structure' - the organic existing within the organisational. This led me to explore coats of arms, traditional and rigid frameworks, a proactive display of identity, and contrasted that with road systems - sometimes starting as ancient pathways, affected by geographical features and journey preferences, changing and updating over time and use.
This led to a combination shield-roadway; the roadway loosely based on the Hebrew characters of 'UP'. I then expanded the shorthand 'roads' into a whole city grid system for use as backgrounds.
