Cultivating a Buzzworthy Brand Identity

DC Natives is a DC-based grassroots organization that partners with residents to grow native pollinator gardens for free. These spaces build community, support local wildlife, and address climate impact one garden at a time.

They needed a brand identity and web presence to match their ambition: establishing a clear voice, expanding awareness, and giving their mission the visual foundation to grow.

We cultivated an illustrative brand identity system rooted in the ecology of neighborhood—where community and nature are part of the same living system.

The primary mark is a butterfly whose shape echoes the DC monogram. Its four wings map to the four quadrants of the city, a simple image that holds both the beauty of DC Natives’ work and the dual communities they serve: the city and its hard-working pollinators.

We extended the brand’s language into a suite of illustrations that includes flowers, flourishy stems and leaves, and bees, birds, and butterflies—whose flight paths depict the movement and buzzy action of these ecosystems, bringing to life the thriving, interconnected world DC Natives’ resident gardens make possible.