DRY Coop Identity and Website
The Challenge
Development of Regenerative Yields Cooperative (DRY CO-OP) came to me at the moment of the cooperative’s formation, needing a visual identity that arrived alongside the organization itself. DRY CO-OP serves a broad agricultural audience: producers, chefs, consumers, ranchers, and educators.
I needed to build an identity open across that range and specific enough to find its audience. Their educational mission supports agency and ecologically minded decision-making, and the brief was to design something that did the same work.
I approached the project from one operative question: what does a sustainable brand look like, beyond matte packaging and atavistic type?
The Solution
I started from first principles, grounded in DRY’s ecological thought. I first looked for inspiration in the materials in their everyday discourse (soil, leaves, smoke, clouds, hay, adobe, charcoal). These became the chromatic and textural ground. Second, as I often do, I dug in the archives.
While researching cooperative business models in agriculture, I encountered a visual culture that developed around those models in the mid-century. I built the brand on three layers of inheritance: a mark and palette from cooperative print history, a chromatic system grounded in the raw materials of the work, and a website built as infrastructure which exposes itself as such. The site is hand-coded and ranks in the top 0.1% of websites for low carbon emissions.
The History
DRY belongs to a specific historical lineage: agricultural cooperatives, commune movements, mid-century mutual-aid organizations. I researched that lineage and trawled online archives for printed ephemera from those organizations, mostly from the 1950s through the 1970s. From that material I pulled the operative attributes for the mark, the typography, and the layout: stamp-like, iconic and weighty, circular, industrial-but-handmade for the mark; archival agricultural ephemera setting the typographic register; period print logic in the layout. The result looks digitally native and contemporary. The structural and chromatic decisions come from real period sources, not invented vintage cues.
Material Grounding
The colors come from two sources. First, the historic ephemera of cooperative print culture: I pulled colors from period ink-on-paper, sampled out of scanned 1950s-70s material. Second, the raw materials DRY engages with every day: soil, leaves, smoke, clouds, hay, adobe, charcoal. I built color from those materials. The two sources hold together because both belong to the same agricultural and cooperative world. Neither is a contemporary “vintage palette” preset.
A Website IS Infrastructure
Websites are, in fact, infrastructure and they do, in fact, have materiality and consume resources.
I hand-coded the website in HTML and CSS, with no framework, no tracking scripts, and no asset bloat. I didn’t even leave comments in the code to keep it from bloating.
The site evaluates in the top 0.1% of websites for low carbon emissions. In my opinion, a brand arguing for sustainability needs infrastructure that holds up the argument rather than imagery and copy that only gesture toward it emptily. The decision to hand-code shaped everything downstream: lightweight and limited image use, php native forms, simple typesetting that runs without javascript.
