Responses by Robin Howie, creative director, Fieldwork Facility
Background: Mark Spencer is an internationally respected botanist, who, prior to starting up his own independent venture, was a curator of botany at London’s Natural History Museum. We were asked to create an identity that could speak to both his divergent worlds of work—as both a private consulting forensic botanist and a public speaking and television personality field botanist. Getting the balance right and appealing to those audiences was tricky.
Reasoning: Our approach to the logo was to draw a skeletonized leaf that resembles an observing eye, which fit in with Mark’s forensics work, his field botany work and his public television work.
Challenges: Drawing Mark’s logo was a challenge. We had print processes in mind where it was necessary for the logo to be vectorized—every single tiny vein of the logo’s leaf had to be drawn individually. It took a long, long time.
Favorite details: We are really proud of the logo, but actually equally as proud of the “Plants Hold Secrets/Plants Tell Stories” framework. We would love to see Mark use this to its full extent.
Anything new: Getting to know about a forensic botanist’s field of work was really interesting. One of the many things that really struck me is that Mark could be told by the police that they expect there’s a body in that field and Mark would be able to use his knowledge of the landscape to identity the location of said body.
Visual influences: The natural world. We prefer to go a bit “method” to inform our approach. In our interviews with Mark, we were really struck with the lack of tools in forensic botany, and how it’s more about observation. Throughout the project, we went on several walks through the countryside to tune into Mark’s mindset, and the logo and the approaches to the copy and photography came from those walks.
Time constraints: Mark was very generous with time to let us explore it and fully craft his identity. In fact, originally, we explored making it together, and were interested in seeing if we could manipulate a leaf’s decay process to create the logo. Essentially, deadlines were put on ice until we where happy we delivered the best job possible.