When my friend Wolfgang told me about a potential graphic design project for a lo-fi upstart rooftop farming project in Brooklyn, I was all about it. Two months ago, Wolf’s friend Ben Flanner quit his day job and teamed up with movie-producer/green-roof-designer Chris Goode to develop a 6,000 square foot organic vegetable farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

As they’re just getting started and have virtually no budget for branding, they asked me to help come up with a business card and some basic branding materials on the cheap. So, in true DIY style, I designed a rubber stamp for them..

I’m happy with the result, from both a practical and stylistic standpoint. The stamp only cost around $20 to produce, and Ben can use it to print business cards on an as-needed basis, in any quantity and on any virtually any material. For me, it was an interesting design challenge to create an information-rich yet aesthetically appealing card while only using one color, and now I know not to use bold fonts or thick lines for a stamp design, as the ink has a tendency to bleed, causing letterforms and lines to be fatter than they appear in the original design.

For more info on rooftop farming and Brooklyn’s epicurian DIY movement, check out these links..

• RooftopFarms.org
• Goode Green
• Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun (NY Times)
• Brooklyn’s New Culinary Movement (NY Times)
• A Rooftop Farm for the Future

Tags: architecture, diy, farming, food, green, ny, stamp