Bringing New York's Planting Fields to Life

Wiedemann Lampe’s recent rebranding project for Planting Fields aimed to elevate the visitor experience while perennially honouring the site's rich cultural history. Alex Lampe, Co-Founder and Strategy & Innovation Director, and Ryan Jones, Executive Design Director, share key insights from the strategic approach that informed the rebranding process.

AL: Planting Fields’ purpose is to preserve and nurture the landscape for everybody to enjoy as a publicly accessible park - positioning the site as not just as a place that exists for the local community but also, as the largest extant residential commission of the Olmsted Brothers, as a destination of national and even international significance and cultural value.

AL: We needed to articulate what the foundation ultimately stands for, focusing on visitor experience. We distilled the foundation’s mission into three incredibly simple pillars around which everything in the brand orbits: ‘For Nature. For History. For Life.’

RJ: Certainly not the biggest challenge, but one very practical obstacle was the fact that the United States still works in inches. I had to keep visualising our designs using a 12-inch record as my mental reference. 

RJ: I am really proud of the whole concept for the signage - building something that had the flexibility to take so many different forms. I love that we were able to deliver a system of signs that is diverse but still feels united as one.

AL: Another feature I love is the distinctive use of colour edging for different districts - whilst a detail, this use of colour was fairly radical in the context of New York State Parks guidelines, and makes a transformative difference to the experience of the branding and signage.
 

Both: Easy - we all stand proud with what we created. We wouldn’t change a thing!

Read the full article here.